When Lorraine E. Paddor met her husband, Harold, both were shopping downtown at Marshall Field’s, an encounter that may have foreshadowed their future together. . She had an eye for design and was able to “interject some fashion and style into the business,” her husband said of her influence on Paddor’s, a women’s retail clothing chain run for more than 60 years by his family. Mrs. Paddor, 77, died of complications after surgery Wednesday, Jan. 28, in Evanston Hospital. Born in Chicago, she graduated from Sullivan High School in 1944. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–the first person in her family to go to college–and received a degree in psychology in 1948. The Paddors married that year, several years after their chance meeting. After living in Chicago for several years, the family moved to the Evanston-Skokie area, then to Northbrook in 1981. Mrs. Paddor frequently traveled to New York on business trips with her husband, attending fashion shows and offering advice. The family business, started in the late 1920s, closed in 1990. In recent years Mrs. Paddor was on Northbrook’s fine arts council. Other survivors include daughters Susan Varick, Kathy Paddor-Rotholz and Amy Zerman; sisters Phyllis Krause-Braun and Judie Lyon; and six grandchildren. Services have been held.
