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Ava Gardner: North Carolina
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Ava Gardner was born Lucy Johnson on a tobacco farm in Grabtown, North Carolina December 24, 1922. She was the youngest of seven children. Ava grew up to be one of the world's most beautiful women ever.
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The trajectory of Ava Gardner's career would be impossible today. She was a product of the old studio star system that flourished from the teens of the 20th century to the early 60's. She had spent a poor though happy childhood in rural North Carolina; her reserved but beloved father, an unsuccessful tobacco farmer, died when she was a teenager. Her schooling was not very effective. She was a tomboy, even as she became heart-stoppingly gorgeous by the time she was 13, and preferred to go barefoot throughout her life.
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At age nine, Ava Gardner went to the Howell Theater in Smithfield, North Carolina, with her mother Mollie to see her mother's favorite movie star Clark Gable starring as a safari leader in Africa with Jean Harlow in Red Dust. Twenty years later Ava would find herself in Jean Harlow's role in a remake of that story Mogambo, with none other than Clark Gable.
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When Ava was thirteen years old, the family decided to try their luck in a bigger town, Newport News, Virginia, where Molly Gardner found work managing a boardinghouse for the city's many shipworkers. That job did not last long, and the family moved to the Rock Ridge suburb of Wilson, North Carolina, where Molly Gardner ran another boarding house. Gardner's father died of bronchitis in 1935. Ava and some of her siblings attended high school in Rock Ridge and she graduated from there in 1939. She then attended secretarial classes at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson for about a year.
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Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, the seventh and last child of a cotton and tobacco farmer, Jonas, and his wife, Molly. The farming kept food on the table, but Gardner said she had only one dress. She was happy and free... usually going barefoot and playing all day with her two brothers and four sisters. While the children were still young, the Gardners lost their property, forcing Jonas Gardner to work at a sawmill and Molly to begin working as a cook and housekeeper at a dormitory for teachers at the nearby Brodgen School.
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Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922 in North Carolina. Ava was born into a simple life, growing up barefoot on a tobacco farm. Ava was the youngest child of a large family of seven children. Being a Hollywood starlet was the furthest thing from Ava’s mind while she was growing up; she had plans of becoming a secretary and settling down to the peaceful life of a southern lady.
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