More than 60 years after her great-grandmother reigned as the first

Orange Bowl queen, 11-year-old Brittany Barnard of Fayetteville gets to be a

little princess in the annual Miami parade.

Jane Burge Epperson, 82, of Fayetteville was the first "Palm

Festival" queen back in 1935. She says her memories of most of that day are

very clear, when she in her white dress and her pastel-clad court opened the

football game between the University of Miami and Duquesne University.

Jane Epperson particularly remembers the "cellophane football" used

to "present" her on the field.

"It was a very hot December," said Epperson's daughter, Jane E.

Barnard, "and Mother said she nearly fainted inside that clear football."

Epperson was a 17-year-old sophomore at the University of Miami,

where sororities provided the beauties for the first of the super-games leading to

the building of the "Orange Bowl," first known as Rodney Burdine Stadium.

Because of the Eppersons' and Barnards'

continued contact with the Orange Bowl festivities, Brittany Barnard

will ride on the parade's "theme float,"

the Citrus Float, on New Year's Eve. Brittany is a sixth-grader at

Landmark Christian School and the daughter of Bob, a local builder-developer,

and Cindy Barnard. Brittany is a ballet dancer and piano player who is also

an honor roll student.

Jane Epperson said that Ernie Fowler, who coordinated the

festivities at the first game, was famous for "revealing" the queen at

halftime shows, "and the queen always had to come out of some kind of

container. But there was no air inside the

cellophane that I was in; it was miserable."

Those 1935 sorority sisters furnished their own gowns, Epperson

said, a far cry from today's major productions. Brittany and

grandmother Barnard had to leave for Miami well in advance of the event, for

costume fittings, the annual prayer breakfast, and other events.

"It's a very lovely thing," Epperson said, "thinking about my

great-granddaughter and being able to watch her on television. It gives me cold

chills, knowing that the public will get to see that 1935 picture for the first

time ever."

She said that Orange Bowl queens often have led famous lives

singer Dean Martin married one of them but she concentrated on family. She

moved to Fayetteville in 1991 after living 61 years in Miami, because two of her

four children, four of her five grandchildren, and six of her great-grandchildren

all live in the area.

The ties are deep in Fayetteville: Cindy Barnard's

great-grandmother owned the Burks Hotel on the

Courthouse Square. Just the local television audience for Brittany's parade

debut will be quite large, she said. She also mentioned that Jane Epperson's

mother was an only daughter, as were Epperson and her daughter Jane Barnard,

then "only boys were in my husband's generation, and now Brittany is

my only daughter. I thought that was kind of unusual."

Epperson said wistfully that because she was so very young when she

was the Orange Bowl queen, "there are very few of my peers left, but I have

very fond memories."

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