Frances Paget was born July 23, 1879, the youngest child of multi-talented school teacher/cooper/and wealthy farmer, Silas Padgett, in Owego, New York, a village on the Pennsylvania boarder, 70 miles north of Scranton. In 1928 she became a nationally syndicated fashion expert not because she was born to it, but by taking many small steps.
Paget trained to become a teacher, attending little Elmira College, the closest teacher’s college to Owego. She was hired as one of the first French teachers at the first high school in the Bronx, Morris High School. Some of her famous students may have included, Armand Hammer, industrialist; Meyer Weisgal, Polish-American journalist and playwright; Max Lieber, Polish-American literary agent; Arthur Murray, ballroom dancer; Alex Osburn, advertising executive and man who coined the term Brainstorming; and even Mae Questel, the actress who voiced Betty Boop and Olive Oil; and late in her teaching, Milton Berle, although as an established child star who claimed that his higher education came from ”Clown College”, he probably was not her best student.
She enjoyed her life as an unmarried teacher. With summers off, she traveled to Europe several times. Eventually she attended French universities in Paris and Grenoble. Paget also attended conferences and extensively read her favorite classics. In November 1916, she delivered a lecture titled “Special Points in Classroom Technics” to the 8th annual conference of the Modern Language Association held in New York. She must have caught the attention of the chairman of that conference, William R Price, the Modern Language Specialist of the New York State Department of Education in Albany and one of the founders of the MLA.
The next February, Price resigned his position and became the Chair of Modern Languages at Girl’s High School in Brooklyn. There might have been a love connection that explains that, but Price doesn’t divorce his wife of 22 years, Kate, until five years later, after his youngest graduates from high school and enters Columbia on scholarship, and for his commute to Brooklyn he chose to move far from the Bronx to the end of the trolly line in Freeport.
Eventually, however, Price does marry Paget August 7, 1922, and the couple continue their European vacations. William wrote and edited several books and since they both die within the next 18 years, that could have been enough.
Winnifred J Ovitte, the longtime fashion editor of Women's Wear magazine began writing these articles to be distributed by United Press in June of 1928, She soon decided to find someone else to take over, but why Frances Paget? One possible connection is that in 1915, as she’d separated from her husband, Attorney Albert Ovitte, that the “Wesley Price” she is listed as the wife of in the New York State Census was actually “William Raleigh Price” Frances’s future husband.
Whether that was true, or they simply met each other aboard a transatlantic crossing, or shared a coffee at a French café, or, if the “Frances Paget” who wrote the articles between 1928 and 1931 was merely someone’s pseudonym, the articles were never terribly popular selected to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Merely dozens with only a handful carrying the feature through its entire run. I suspect that as opposed to fashion articles explaining ways to update last year’s dress, or how to sew your own on a budget, articles explaining how the clothes ladies were currently wearing were out of style, and must be made with exotic materials, probably didn’t excite female readers after the market crashed and banks were closing.
To close, as all of the best stories have a local connection, this one does, too. After she retired from Women’s Wear Magazine, Winnifred Jones Ovitte, moved first to San Diego, and then up to 1255 Eucalyptus Ave. in Vista. She died August 3, 1953, and was cremated over at Eternal Hills.
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