Reflections from the creator of the Golden Girl
Prof. Emeritus Al G. Wright talks about 50 years of tradition

"You can't create a tradition, it just happens," says Al Wright, the band director who convinced an outstanding Colorado twirler to come to Purdue in 1954 and, by doing so, created a golden legacy for Purdue University, the Purdue "All-American" Marching Band - and himself.

It was the pizzazz of a great twirler, with a great personality, that Wright wanted to put in front of Purdue fans that fall - and Juanita Carpenter was picture perfect in that role.

Mid way through the first season she got a nickname - Golden Girl - and by the time she graduated two years later, the notion of putting an outstanding, charismatic twirler dressed in Purdue gold in front of the band had marched directly into the annals of Purdue tradition.

That the Golden Girl became a tradition so quickly may have been due to the era as much as Carpenter's talents. In the 1950s men liked to put women on pedestals, and in 1954 there were eight to nine boys to every girl on the Purdue campus. A pretty blond in sequins exuding charm got a lot of attention.

When the band paraded to Ross-Ade "fraternity boys laid down on the street in front of her so she had to step over them. And they threw roses at her," recalls Gladys Wright, Al's wife.

Wearing gold sequins, wasn't something Wright planned, it was simply prudent. Carpenter had a skirted twirling outfit in gold sequins with a matching hat from her high school performing days, and Wright asked her to wear it for the halftime shows.

"What I used to do was put her in the colors of the opposing school - like green for Notre Dame - for the pregame show. It was satin day-glo material and everything had a skirt," Wright says.

Three or four games into the season, Gladys Wright told her husband he ought to refer to Juanita Carpenter as the "Golden Girl." After all, the football team's star quarterback that year, Lenny Dawson, was being referred to by everyone as the "Golden Boy" and with Carpenter turning heads in gold sequins it seemed only natural.

So Al did, and "it just caught on. They forgot her name but they'd ask if the Golden Girl was coming back," he recalls. Wright didn't hesitate to make "Golden Girl" a movable crown. "It was a great idea. When you get something going you keep it going."

Golden Girl No. 3, Addie Darling, somewhat inadvertently brought national attention to the position. The atmosphere at the 1958 Notre Dame football game in South Bend was already hyped when the famous "wiggle" incident happened. Young men "were climbing trees to catch a glimpse of Addie like she was a rock star," Gladys Wright says. And the men in Purdue's flag corps had to lower their long, spear-tipped poles to a horizontal position to form a barricade as the band marched into the stadium to keep the guys from getting to her.

At halftime, Wright executed his plan to lay a piece of plywood on top of an old bass drum on the field. "I told Addie: 'You get on the drum so I know where you are'," he recalls, admitting that he never gave much thought about what kind of performance she could do in such a confined space.

With the band playing "Hawaiian War Chant," "she kept her feet together and moved everything else," Wright says. The resulting "wiggle" caught the eye of TV cameramen and created a media sensation. Most people loved it, but those who didn't aired their opinions in the press. All of a sudden tongues were wagging throughout the country and headlines were blaring: "Twirls vs. Wiggles," "Golden Girl Wiggle has Campus Buzzing," and "Hip Hip Hooray."

"The Associated Press picked it up and it hit the sky. There was a big spread in Look magazine," Wright says.

He admits he milked the situation by putting studious eye glasses on Addie and having a photo shot of her reading a book. He sent that picture to the wire services asking if this was the face of a girl who wiggled too much. She was an academic-minded college student, he said. Papers all over the USA ran the new picture of Addie in the classroom - right next to the file picture of her wiggling.

Aside from the press hoopla, the tradition was bolstered professionally by the United States Twirling Association who selected the Purdue band to make the recordings it distributed to twirlers. "If you participated in the USTA, you had to use that recording (which had the Golden Girl's picture on the front) and that gave us a lot of publicity among twirlers," Wright says.

All these things built the Golden Girl's status as a Purdue icon which found its reflection in popular culture. For years, the Indiana maps handed out at Shell gas stations had a Golden Girl icon denoting Purdue's location.

The veteran band director also promoted the blossoming tradition by spreading the gold around. "What a lot of people don't know is that there were several Golden Girls at any one time," he says. The Purdue band got tons of parade requests and sending the entire band to each was unfeasible. So many times he sent out the Big Bass Drum in the back of its pick-up truck with a Golden Girl marching and twirling in front.

"If the parade was in Rossville and we had a girl from Rossville (on the twirling line) she did the parade. We had lots of gold suits and it made everyone happy, particularly the people in that town," Wright adds.

People didn't mind because the honor of wearing the gold sequins, and walking in the footsteps of Purdue tradition for a few hours, surpassed everything else.

Those one-afternoon Golden Girls are not listed on the official roster of 24 being saluted at Homecoming. To make the official roster, a twirler had to go through a selection process and serve as least one complete year in the role. Despite that icon status of the Golden Girl, the position has always been dominated by individual personalities.

"We always demanded our girls were gracious and cooperative and they all came in that way. They were all great, but they all had different personalities," Wright says.

His Golden Girl stories are endless - about the time June Ciampa did an orange juice commercial with OJ Simpson, or when Wright took Selita Sue Smith with him when he appeared the hit TV game shows "What's My Line" and "To Tell the Truth." Or the time they had to hustle Ciampa into a car in Columbia to get her away from admirers only to have so many men physically pile onto the car that it couldn't move.

"Valerie Brown could outrun every boy on campus and frequently had too," he recalls with a smile. "Linda Hughes could throw her baton, spin, and bounce the baton up off her hip to catch it."

Thinking about a rhinestone suit he had specially sewn out of narrow bands of rhinestones for Sandra Hutchison, Golden Girl No. 2, makes him laugh. "She could hardly stand up it was so heavy, and then it didn't glitter in the sunlight," he says.

Not everything a tradition generates is pleasant. Wright recalls more than one run-in with a parent determined to get their daughter into the position. An oil millionaire from Texas was ready to outfit his daughter entirely in gold, from gold suitcases to a gold Cadillac if only Wright would give her the position. "He even offered me a blank check. I gave it back right away," Wright says. Then there was the time a mother entered his office, looked him in the eye, dramatically threw her cape off her shoulders and told him she'd "do anything" to secure the position for her daughter. "I think she meant it. I always kept my hand on the buzzer for my secretary."

Throughout the Wright era every Golden Girl had blond hair. Ask Wright how many of his Golden Girls were natural blonds and he answers: "I don't know. When we saw them for the first time they were blond. We never said you have to dye your hair, we just said we only auditioned blonds."

Since Wright retired in 1981, directors have not been as adamant about hair color but blonds still proliferate in the position. In those two plus decades, only two- Dawn Vardaman and Erin Ansfield - have twirled as brunettes.

For most of the 24 women who've twirled as Golden Girl, including Purdue's current Golden Girl Christy Jayne Stallings, the position literally represents the culmination of a little girl's dream.

Making those dreams come true is one things Wright is most proud of as the 50th celebration of Golden Girl tradition nears.

"First of all I'm proud that my efforts created another icon for Purdue University, nationally, and later internationally, and that we also gave very talented and attractive girls the opportunity to perform before hundreds of thousands of people. And that all the girls were all good students," he says.

Reflections from Al G. Wright | Golden Girl Bios | Alumni Memories