Plane Crash Victim's Daughter Enters Pageant to Continue Father's Legacy

For Mahwah resident Paige Lippe, winning the title of Mrs. New Jersey United States – an upcoming beauty pageant for married women across the state – isn’t about the ball gown or the tiara. It’s about her dad.

Lippe’s father, longtime Mahwah resident Dr. Michael Lippe, was killed in a plane crash in 2010. According to reports published at the time, he was a longtime Mahwah resident and an experienced flyer who was commuting from the Essex County Caldwell Field Airport to a hospital in the Finger Lakes where he was working on the night that he crashed.

At the time, examiners said the weather played a role in killing the emergency room doctor, who authorities said was thrown from the plane after it clipped trees, lost a wing, and crashed into a wooded area in an upstate New York town south of Rochester.

Nearly three-and-a-half years later, his wife and three daughters are working to keep his memory, and the work he did during his lifetime, alive. That’s where Paige Lippe says the Mrs. New Jersey and Mrs. United States pageants come in.

Lippe’s mother has formed the Dr. Michael S. Lippe Memorial Project. During his lifetime, Lippe was a big supporter of EMS and pre-hospital patient care, so the Memorial Project puts on fundraisers to benefit the Hudson Valley Paramedics Association, and provides scholarships to local EMS college students, as well as Mahwah High School students.

When looking for a way to spread the word about the charity work her family is operating in her father’s name, Lippe came across the pageant, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

“This is my first pageant ever, so I am still learning the ropes,” she told Patch. But, what attracted her to the pageant was its emphasis on contestants’ platforms.

“What it important about this level is the platform each contestant publicizes, and I am very serious about my platform as a way to continue my father's legacy and help my mother…spread the word since it is a relatively new project,” Lippe said.

So, in a pageant on May 17, Lippe will don a sash that reads Mrs. Mahwah Township, and compete for the title of Mrs. New Jersey. If she wins, she’ll go on to compete in the national Mrs. United States pageant in Las Vegas.

According to pageant organizers, married women from across the state are set to compete in the upcoming pageant, each representing different Garden State towns.

“The pageant provides New Jersey’s married women the opportunity to celebrate their intelligence, femininity and unique beauty through embracing their roles as wives, professionals, mothers, community champions, and modern women of the 21st century,” organizers said in a release about the event.

Lippe, a a board certified behavior analyst who works with developmentally delayed children and adults, said she hopes the pageant will give her, her husband, and her 14-month-old daughter the opportunity to spread her father’s legacy throughout the state and country, and in the place that her dad called home.

“I would like to be involved with as many community events as possible,” she said.