Paige Rense - Personal Life

Personal Life

Adopted as an infant by Lloyd R. Pashong (1895–1988), a public-school custodian, and his wife, the former Margaret May Smith (1890–1983), she was originally known as Patty L. Pashong and took the name Paige as a teenager. In the early 1940s she and her parents moved from Iowa, to Los Angeles, California, where, after running away from home at age 15, she worked as an usherette in movie theaters.

Rense has been married five times. Her first husband was Richard Gardner, a Los Angeles advertising executive. She met her second husband, David Thomas, while they were both working for the US Armed Forces Radio Service in Tokyo, Japan in the early 1950s. Her third and fourth husbands was Arthur F. Rense (1916–1990), a sports journalist for the Los Angeles Daily News and the director of public relations for Howard R. Hughes's Summa Corporation. By this marriage she had three stepsons. The couple were married twice, from 1957 until March 1974 and from 22 December 1987 until Arthur Rense's death. In 1998, Rense established the triennial Arthur Rense Prize in poetry in the honor of her late husband, an amateur poet; it is given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her fifth husband was Color Field painter Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), whom she married in 1994. By this marriage she has four stepchildren.