Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [117]
Oprah as Student Body Vice President, East High School, Nashville, Tennessee. Left to right: Gary Holt, Student Body President; Oprah. (photo credit i1.6)
Oprah wearing peace symbol earrings in her graduation picture for the yearbook, Class of 1971, East Nashville High School. (photo credit i1.7)
The contestants for Miss Black Nashville in June 1972. Left to right: Maude Mobley; unknown; Patrice Patton-Price; and the winner Oprah Winfrey, who became Miss Black Tennessee and competed for Miss Black America. “The girl from California won because she stripped,” said Oprah, although The New York Times made no mention of the beautiful California singer who won as having performed a striptease. (photo credit i1.8)
On Oprah’s application for Miss Black Nashville, she signed herself as Oprah Gail Winfrey and stated that she had “never conceived a child,” although she had given birth to a little boy she named Vincent Miquelle Lee on February 8, 1969. The baby died March 16, 1969.
Oprah’s father, Vernon Winfrey, seventy-five, standing in front of his barbershop, in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 22, 2008. (photo credit i1.9)
Oprah returns to Kosciusko on June 4, 1988, for Oprah Winfrey Day. “This is a real homecoming,” she told the 300 people standing on a small portion of dirt road that had been named in her honor. “It is a deeply humbling experience to come back to the place where it all started.” (photo credit i1.10)
Oprah’s mother, Vernita Lee, fifty-three, as she appeared on Oprah Winfrey Day in Kosciusko, Mississippi, where she and Oprah were born in Vernita’s parents’ home outside the county line. Vernita, who moved to Milwaukee in 1958 during the Great Black Migration, had three children but never married. (photo credit i1.11)
Following a bet made with Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show on January 29, 1985, to lose fifteen pounds in six weeks, Oprah has her “last food fling” with her lover at the time, Randolph Cook. (photo credit i1.12)
Oprah standing at the top of Mt. Cuchama in 1980 at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. She began visiting spas at crucial points in her life to get her weight under control. She was at the Heartland Health and Fitness retreat in Gilman, Illinois, in 1985 when she got the call that she had been chosen for the role of Sophia in The Color Purple. “If you lose a pound, you’ll lose the role,” said the casting director. Oprah left immediately. (photo credit i1.13)
Roger King (left), chairman of the board of King World, and Joseph Ahern (right), former general manager of WLS-TV, join Oprah at a news conference in Chicago on July 24, 1985, to announce the nationwide syndication of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah received a $1 million signing bonus and immediately called her father to announce, “Daddy, I’m a millionaire.” (photo credit i1.14)
THE GREAT LOVES OF OPRAH’S LIFE
Radio disc jockey Tim Watts and Oprah in Baltimore in 2007, thirty years after their tumultuous love affair. “He was her first real love,” said Oprah’s sister, Patricia, in 1990. (photo credit i1.15)
Photocopy of Stedman S. Graham, Jr., from the Fort Worth, Texas, police department. He started as a police academy trainee on January 6, 1975, and graduated three months later as a police officer. He later worked in the Bureau of Prisons. (photo credit i1.16)
Stedman S. Graham with President George H.W. Bush at a GOP fund raiser in Chicago, on September 26, 1990. Bush is holding a football he signed for the charitable organization Graham founded, Athletes Against Drugs: “A.A.D. Thanks and Best Wishes.” (photo credit i1.17)
Oprah with her best friend, Gayle King. The two met in Baltimore at WJZ-TV during the 1970s. Oprah is godmother to both of King’s children. (photo credit i1.18)
ONCE OPRAH became a millionaire, she announced that she was going to become “the richest black woman in the world.” At the time, she publicly