In the 1950s and 1960s, the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel and Casino featured
glamorous showgirls. For a few years, the Houston Chronicle sponsored a contest that
added the Texas Copa Girls to the line. In 1958, one of the winners was 17-year-old
Judith Lee Johnson. For the "wild" but "naive" Judy, the experience was a period of funfilled
freedom, followed by relentless encouragement of others to attend college, which
she reluctantly did. To her surprise, she embraced the college life, took her studies