When Shelley Hansley was helping build a dressing room out of barbed wire for Miss Universe pageant contestants in Africa, she knew she had seen it all.
From safaris in Africa to parades in Ecuador, trips to Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Egypt and Israel — all the while traveling with some of the most beautiful women in the world — that’s the life of a pageant supervisor.
Hansley, who grew up in Wichita and attended Kansas State University, got her start in pageants at a Miss USA competition in El Paso, Texas in 1988. While living in El Paso, she attended a party where she met pageant supervisors who, then called her in for an interview. In the 1980s, the pageants were produced with the help of local volunteers. For the 1988 pageant, Hansley lived in the hotel with the contestants and supervised.
“Back then, we were the first line of security to the girls,” Hansley said. “Now security is the largest part of our budget.”
From that one pageant, doors opened for Hansley. When the next year’s pageant came around, she was called in to help again. The rest is pageant history.
“I’ve been doing every pageant since,” she said. “Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe. Three pageants a year.”
For three months out of the year, Hansley, who moved to Emporia with her husband John five years ago, devotes her time to the Trump Organization and the nationally known pageants. It’s become her only job. In fact, she said she hasn’t had a full-time since she began her work in pageants.
Hansley was lucky, she says. At the time she started with the organization, they were just starting to change from using local volunteers for every pageant to having a veteran staff that traveled to the pageant’s locations every year. There are 13 supervisors for the national pageants. The Miss Universe pageant requires 25.
“It takes 200 people to put on a pageant for live TV,” she said. “But as far as supervising the girls goes, it’s just a few of us. And it takes a lot of work.”
The job makes for long travel, sometimes up to 30 hours, and long days once on location, but Hansley likes it. From the very start she loved it and she was good at it. She knew this was a great opportunity for her.
“If you love this like I do, the long days don’t matter,” Hansley said.
Hansley said for each pageant she will be assigned a random grouping of girls. It’s her job to get them where they need to be for the weeks leading up to the pageant. Whether it’s dance practice, photo shoots, community appearances, dress fittings or interviews, she coordinates their everyday schedules. It may sound easy enough, but Hansley said if the girls she’s assigned to speak only Russian it can be a bit challenging.
“Is it fun?” Hansley said. “Yes. But is it easy? No.”
Hansley also helps with the live production of the pageants, which she said are scheduled for live braodcast in the United States, no matter where the pageant is being held. Because of the time differences in other countries, she said, they’ve been known to hold a pageant at 1 a.m. so it would be live in prime time in the United States.
“Sometimes we’re up for 18 hours in a day,” she said. “There’s no normal time schedule when you’re preparing for a pageant. I don’t know how the girls do it.”
The friendships she’s made with her fellow supervisors are what Hansley said have made her job worthwhile.
“It’s really enhanced my life,” Hansley said. “Like every job, sometimes you wonder why you’re doing this, but for me its the friendships.”
Friendships have been made with more than just her co-workers. Hansley said along the way she’s also made some long-lasting friendships with the girls she’s supervised.
“I feel like I’ve been to every country in the world because of these girls,” she said. “And I try to keep up on them. I see some on TV every now and then and some of them send me Mother’s Day cards. I think it’s sweet they think of me that way.”
Add those friendships to the list of her travels and experiences and Hansley has a job many people envy. Hansley has stories that would impress just about anyone. Her most recent one involves the dress made by a ‘Project Runway’ contestant for this year’s Miss USA, Tara Conner, for the Miss Universe pageant.
“I had to hide the dress in the back of my closet for Tara,” Hansley said. “We had to keep it a secret until that episode of Project Runway aired. Boy that was an experience.
“We had just a few days to get her fitted into the dress. That was definitely something new for me, but it worked. The ratings were great. It got a lot of publicity.”
She’s met celebrities like Clint Black, Dick Clark, the members of N’ Sync and Daniel Baldwin, to name a few. Designers, music artists, athletes— any one “young and hot” and of course her boss, Donald Trump, who she lovingly called “The Trumpster,”
“All the time people ask me how I got this job or how they could do something like this,” she said. “I’m just lucky.”
Another reason she feels so lucky is because of her family. Hansley said her husband, John Hansley, who is controller at Hopkins Manufacturing, has been nothing but supportive of her job. He understands when she’s gone sometimes six weeks at a time for pageants. She returns the favor by being flexible enough to move anywhere. Her two children, now grown, have gotten to meet celebrities and beauty-pageant winners, thanks to her.
“Without my family’s support, I wouldn’t have been able to do this,” said Hansley. “There were times when the kids ate hot dogs for a month at a time, but as they got older they started to think their mom had a cool job. When I was on MTV, that’s when they knew their mom was cool.”