A Look Back:

Newport Beach once hosted a raucous parade of woman in bathing suits each June in the 1920s.

The parade, which began in 1921 and ran through 1926, drew tens of thousands annually to the Balboa Peninsula and featured as many as 50 women in elaborate bathing suits who rode in shiny new sports cars down Main Street, Bay Avenue and Alvarado Street before marching down the oceanfront boardwalk and diving into the surf.

The 1921 parade drew a crowd of 30,000, who came to watch 40 women dressed in the latest swimwear fashions parade down the streets of the peninsula.

The 1921 festivities also included a diving exhibition, vaudeville dancing at the Balboa Pavilion and swimming races for small girls in Newport Harbor.

Spectators began flocking the night before the parade in 1924, and Main Street had to be roped off to contain the eager parade-goers in 1924.

Prizes were awarded for the best bathing suit at the parade — $25 cash was the grand prize in 1921, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“None but the judges can adequately express the tortures of mind they suffered as they endeavored to single out from the assorted visions of beauty the snappiest seagoing raiment,” the Los Angeles Times reported of the 1923 parade. “All the colors of the rainbow were in evidence, some of the girls even leading a biblical air to the occasion by bearing costumes that would have shamed Jacob’s coat of many colors.”

The Newport Harbor Chamber of Commerce ruled in 1927 to do away with the parade of bathing beauties, replacing it with a contest for the “best dressed beach girl,” according to a Los Angeles Times article from the time.

Instead of lining up contestants to be judged, Chamber of Commerce officials were to roam the sands of a stretch of beach while contestants basked in the sun in the best beach attire. The incognito judges were then to choose the woman they thought most appropriately dressed for the beach.