Some 65 years ago, under the professional name Andrea Todd, a beautiful girl from Milford was crowned Miss Connecticut USA 1954. Today, visiting with 86-year old Joan Sapitowicz Altieri, aka Andrea Todd, one can’t help but think of the words of Audrey Hepburn: “The beauty of a woman, with passing years, only grows.”
Born in Milford, young Joan spent her first decade on Long Island. “But I always spent summers with my grandmother in Milford at Myrtle Beach or Walnut Beach,” she recalls. With deep roots in Milford, Joan’s family eventually returned (her father worked for F.H. Woodruff & Sons seed company) and she attended Central Grammar School and Milford High School. “My family owned on the other side of the Post Road and they must have had, gosh I don’t know how many acres in there, because they had peach trees, apple trees, they had everything. They had horses, they had grape vines. I think the only thing my grandmother ever had to buy was salt.”
“I spent a lot of time on the beach,” she says, basking in the vivid recollections of those days. “My grandfather owned quite a few cottages on Walnut Beach, and my other grandfather owned what was called Tinkham’s Corner. Then it became Primroses’ Corner. It was an everything store, from bathing suits to ice cream cones. St. Gabriel’s church was right down on the other corner and Jerry Malefonte’s grocery store was on the opposite corner.”
Joan Sapitowicz took the professional name Andrea Todd when she began her modeling career. “I graduated from the Mademoiselle School of Modeling in Bridgeport and started modeling—runway and photography. I really wasn’t tall enough to do fashion. I’d be referred to as a ‘pony’ because I was short. You had to be 5’7” in your socks to be tall enough for fashion and I was 5’4”. Besides, I like to eat,” she says.
It was Joan’s manager who suggested she enter the Miss Connecticut USA pageant. The system worked differently in those days and you didn’t have to win a local competition to participate. There was also no talent portion in those days. The 50 or so contestants were judged on “beauty of face, form, and figure, poise and personality, as well as a bathing suit and conversation.”
She remembers the evening at the Klein Auditorium in Hartford. “I was happy when I won,” she says. “My boyfriend at the time became so excited his watch stopped.” The title included a chance to compete in the Miss USA pageant in Long Beach, CA with, possibly, a shot at the Miss Universe title. But before that, she laughs, “you opened a lot of supermarkets and stuff like that.”
After placing in the top 20 at the pageant, Joan returned to Milford and her modelling career. She was working when she met Ralph T. Altieri, who would become her husband for 62 years until his death this past February. “He was working the lights for his cousin who owned Lenny’s Wagon Wheel in Bridgeport, which was a place where they had a lot of fashion shows. And he said to his cousin Joey, ‘You see that brunette girl out on the runway now? I’m going to marry her.’ Joey said, ‘Well don’t you think it was good idea if you met her first.’”
Ralph worked for the Philip Morris tobacco company for more than 40 years, many of those at the side of his brother Albert, more famously known as Little Johnny Morris, Jr., the “Call for Philip Morris” living advertisement in the bellhop uniform—one of the era’s most ubiquitous commercial images. “You couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful brother in law,” says Joan. “He was fabulous. My husband travelled all over the world with him.”
As a wife and mother Joan continued to work, although modeling in those days was nothing like the business it is today. The “glamorous” lifestyle meant “getting up at four or five o’clock in the morning to be ready to get on the eight-something train so that you could be ready to walk off and get on the runway.” Andrea Todd the model had no beauty support team. “You had to be ready. You had to do your own hair and makeup and most of the time the clothes I was photographed in were my own.”
But of course, the clothes were important. “They weren’t anything like they are today, but they were not inexpensive,” says Joan. She bought many of her gowns in New York City. “A lot of them were washable believe it or not.”
“When I was made Queen of the Danbury Fair [for three straight years in 1954, 1955, 1956], it’s a nine-day fair, and I had nine white gowns! You had to have a fresh gown each day because walking around those grounds…boy you got really crummy.” On one occasion she recalls, “This very small elderly woman came up with white hair and she was commenting on my dress and I thanked her. And she said, ‘You know dear, you’re much prettier than the girl they had here last year.’ I have never, ever forgotten that. It was hysterical.”
After 27 years of presenting her portfolio to potential clients, “Andrea Todd” retired from modeling. She happily settled into her home in Easton and a life of gardening, sewing, quilting, painting, and lots of time with her husband and daughter and later, her grandchildren and great grandchild.
On her years as a model, the still beautiful Joan Sapitowicz Altieri says the work was hard, but “it was never boring. It changed all the time. It had a lot of versatility to it and I liked that.” As for her brief stint as a beauty queen, her memories are fond. “It was such a wonderful experience with all of those girls.”
