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About the previous 45 a long time, while she was in and out of films and tv, in and out of Hollywood and New York, and in and out of two marriages, Ms. Dennison wrote portions of her autobiography. She eventually printed it herself in September. She called it “Finding My Little Purple Hat” — due to the fact, as an itinerant boy or girl, she had worn a crimson felt hat for braveness when she went to a new school and faced still yet another classroom of strangers.
“There was a definite Dickensian aspect to her story,” her son claimed, but her everyday living, even the hardscrabble early decades, “was absolutely crammed with superb characters.”
Jo-Carroll Dennison was born on Dec. 16, 1923, in a men’s condition jail in Arizona.
At the time, her mom and dad owned and ran a traveling medicine demonstrate in Texas. When her mother, Elizabeth (Brownd) Dennison, was about to give birth, her father, Harry Arthur Dennison, made a decision he wished his baby born in California, which he viewed as additional glamorous than Texas. So they started out driving west. By Arizona, her mother was in labor, and they stopped in the small city of Florence. The only assist they could obtain was the jail medical doctor, who delivered Jo-Carroll in the prison infirmary.
They carried on to California in what Ms. Dennison identified as their house automobile, a Model T Ford with the flat mattress of a truck. She immediately became component of the medicine clearly show, in which her parents lured men and women in with amusement and then sought to sell them elixirs. As a toddler, Jo-Carroll sang, tap-danced and executed in sketches.
When she was 7, her father remaining, which shattered her.
Soon after Depression-period gigs with a circus and carnival — she rode trick ponies and roped steers — she and her mom moved again to Texas, initially to the small city of Hale Center and then to Waco, where they signed on with another drugs demonstrate. In her autobiography, Ms. Dennison wrote that when she was 12, the snake-oil salesman who ran the exhibit sexually assaulted her.
She and her mom moved back again to Hale Centre, where Jo-Carroll graduated from substantial college in 1940. She afterwards moved in with an aunt in Tyler, in East Texas. She had enrolled in company university to grow to be a secretary when the banker asked her to enter the magnificence contest. She had no curiosity in parading before the general public once again, but he persisted — and supplied her a free of charge bathing match.
