Good night, sweet Paige

Saying goodbye to the legendary Paige Palmer

By: Mitch Allen
Date: 12/10/2009
During the early hours of Saturday, November 21, television pioneer Paige Palmer died in her sleep in an Akron-area nursing facility. She was 93.

Most of us remember Paige for her fitness and exercise program that aired on WEWS for 25 years—from 1948 to 1973. Or more likely, we watched as our mothers scissor-kicked and scooted across the floor to Paige’s commands in front of a black and white television set.

But her show was about much more than exercise. She talked about varicose veins and the importance of an annual Pap test at a time when many women’s health topics were not discussed in polite society. Paige was active in the “women’s liberation movement” well before Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

“I knew Betty and Gloria,” Paige once told me. “I was with them right up until they started burning their bras. I just wouldn’t do that.”

Paige started her own dance studio at age 16 without her parents’ knowledge. She wrote for a travel magazine and was honored as “the most traveled woman in the world.” She visited virtually every country on the globe, as well as the north and south poles. She collected art, fashions, and automobiles. Her husband raced cars with Paul Newman. She interviewed the Dali Lama and the King of Spain. She was a frequent guest on the Merv Griffin Show and a guest on Aristotle Onassis’ famed yacht. I asked her if it were true that the bar stools on that yacht were made of tanned elephant scrotum. “Yes,” she replied matter-of-factly, adding coyly, “You know, Onassis wanted to date me, but I turned him down. He looked like a toad.”

In the early days Paige did television commercials live. Once while doing a spot for a cigarette sponsor, she spoke the name of a competing brand instead. “It was live TV,” Paige said. “There’s nothing you can do. You make your apologies and move on.” Later in life Paige deeply regretted doing cigarette commercials and became a big supporter of the American Cancer Society.

Just months before her death, Paige still lived in her summer home in Bath, Ohio. A couple of years ago she complained to me about various critters getting into her garbage, so I built her a large wooden box with a screened wire lid that would hold her two trash cans. When she saw it, she said, “This is without a doubt one of the finest examples of craftsmanship I have ever seen.”

That’s the way it was with Paige. She could charm your socks off one moment, then a moment later—slice you to ribbons. My wife and I met Paige just a few years ago when she was already in her late 80s. So I knew Paige only as an old woman who had little patience for people who did not take care of themselves. And she was fiercely judgmental, a trait that undoubtedly drove the perfectionist nature that made her successful.

Mimi Vanderhaven and my wife and I took Paige to dinner to celebrate her 90th birthday three years ago. After she blew out the candle on her cake I asked her what she had wished for. She patted my knee softly and said, “I wished that I would make it to 100.”

That same evening, as Paige Palmer stood to leave, the beautiful curves of her waist and hips that had helped propel her to so much success failed her. With nothing to hang on to, her designer skirt slipped off and landed in a soft heap on the floor of the Bath restaurant Lanning’s. “Oh, dear,” Paige laughed loudly and warmly. “I seem to have lost my skirt.” I held up my overcoat like a screen while Mimi and my wife assisted her. “When you get to be my age,” Paige continued, “losing your skirt is the least of your problems.”

Up until her final days, Paige would regularly go out with friends to dinner, the theater and non-profit benefits. It took her hours to get ready. But despite aches and pains, swollen ankles, and a stubborn hearing aid, there she would be at the appointed hour, dressed in a fashionable hat, a stunning, low-cut designer gown—and a cane.

Nothing could stop Paige. Her “just do it” attitude preceded the Nike slogan by a half century. In every possible way, she was ahead of her time.

And I miss her already.

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