Chairman of Fairchild Publications started his career as a pressman.
Edgar W. B. Fairchild (1905-1988)
Fund established by his son, Robert F. Fairchild.
Edgar William Boyd Fairchild learned the publishing business on the job, climbing the corporate ladder from the pressroom to the board room.
In 1890, Edgar’s uncle Edmund Fairchild, a yeast and soap salesman, acquired the struggling Chicago Herald Gazette, a trade paper focused on the business of men’s fashion. A short time later, Edgar’s father, Louis E. Fairchild, joined the venture, and they began publishing and distributing the Daily Trade Record (later renamed the Daily News Record) at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It was so successful, they continued printing the paper after the fair and moved Fairchild Publications to New York, the heart of America’s fashion industry.
In May 1910, the two Fairchild brothers launched Women’s Wear, a feature in the Saturday edition of Daily Trade Record. A few months later, they started publishing it as a separate daily broadsheet. Price: one cent. (The named was officially changed to Women’s Wear Daily in 1927 and WWD in 1960.)
Edgar was born on November 20, 1905. His first job, at age 16, was as a pressman at Doubleday Page & Company, which later published Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell books. Two years later, he joined the family business, and as Fairchild Publications grew, so did his role and responsibilities. He started in the advertising and circulation departments and gradually rose to vice president, president, and chairman of the board.
Edgar married Lois Marie French in Manhattan in 1939. Their son, Robert, was born in 1942.
At its peak, the company published more than 25 trade and special-interest newspapers and magazines, including Women’s Wear Daily, W, and Electronic Age. By 1967, the total circulation for all Fairchild Publications was 430,000. In 1968, the year Edgar was named chairman, the family sold the business to Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation for about $37 million. Edgar retired in 1970.
Though Edgar never attended college, he believed in the importance of education and was a trustee of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, from 1972 to 1976. According to the college’s Donor Relations Department, Edgar had friends who studied there, and his granddaughter was a Colgate graduate. In 1973, he founded the Fairchild Chair of Literature at Colgate, and in 1983, he received an honorary degree in letters. He also was a founder of the Naval War College Foundation; the college, based in Newport, Rhode Island, educates and trains U.S. Navy leaders.
Edgar and Lois had a home in Center Moriches, Long Island, and an apartment in Manhattan. He died from complications of pneumonia on June 25, 1988. He was 82.
The Edgar W. B. Fairchild Fund in The New York Community Trust was established by his son, Robert, a University of Pennsylvania graduate. As a college student, Robert joined the family business as a summer intern at Menswear, a monthly trade magazine. From 1966 to 1968, he worked as a correspondent for Menswear in the Paris bureau and then as a radio broadcaster for Capital Cities.
According to a story in WWD, Robert was regaling the Menswear staff with wine advice at lunch when the magazine’s editor observed: “If you knew as much about publishing as you do about wine, we’d be much better off.”
Two days later, Robert bought a 50 percent stake in The House of Burgundy, a New York wine importer, where he served as president and chief executive officer. He founded the Maison des Grand Cru in Santenay, France, in 1994 to market Maison Prosper Maufoux wines globally. In 1987, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre du Mérite Agricole by the French Parliament in recognition of his efforts on behalf of French wines.
Robert French Fairchild died of a heart attack on February 16, 2009. He was 66.
The fund he set up in The Trust to honor his father is unrestricted.