Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl

Chapter 1. Beginnings (1919–1935)

CHAPTER 1 11 It is not to psychoanalyze Carole to point out that she came from a family without a father. Carole was not the first in her line to have problems living with a man. Carole’s mother was born Clara Sentek on May 11, 1894, on a family farm in Fairchild, Wisconsin, third of the eight children, two boys and six girls, of Louis/Ludwick and Frances/Franciska Sentek, both born in 1867. (At least six different spellings of the family name are found on official documents.) Fairchild, a small village in Eau Claire County in west-central Wisconsin (2000 population, 564), was, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, “a big railroad town . . . [that] served as a regional transfer center for lumber, cattle, grain, and potatoes. . . . In all, thirty trains a day passed through Fairchild.” Although both Clara’s parents were of Polish stock, they had emigrated from Germany to the United States, presumably together, in 1888. In the 1900 census, Ludwick declared that he had been naturalized in Alabama and gave his profession as a “shingle sawyer.” In the 1910 census, Ludwick was a “section hand” on the railroad, and Frances was a farmer Beginnings ( 1919–1935) on their “home farm.” The couple must have prospered, for they were listed as renting their home in 1900 but owning it in 1910. The Senteks remained on their farm in Fairchild into old age. Their children and grandchildren settled mostly in the upper Midwest, in Minnesota and in Wisconsin, where the bulk of their descendants live to this day. To judge from the letters she wrote later, Clara’s education must have been quite limited. She was a woman of some daring; in the last family photograph I have seen of her, which probably dates from 1964 and is certainly not earlier, septuagenarian Clara is taking a ride on a snowmobile. She was also not without daring in her marital life. Marrying Alfred Ridste, whom she later characterized as “restless,” at the age of seventeen was only the first of her conjugal adventures. Clara died in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-two, on August 9, 1976. Carole’s father, Alfred Ridste, was born on October 10, 1891, in Dawson, a small town in Lac Qui Parle County, Minnesota, about 150 miles due west of Minneapolis. He was the fifth of eight children of John Ridste and Gurine Herreid, the eldest of four sons but with four older sisters . The elder Ridste had come to the United States from Norway in 1889, one year after Clara’s parents; his wife, Gurine, also of Norwegian ancestry, was born in Calmer, Iowa. John’s original name was Andersen, but because there were so many other Andersens in his part of Minnesota he took the name of Ridste, presumably from his birthplace in Norway. In 1900, John lists his occupation as “carpenter.” Although the family owned their own home, they could not have been very well off; their eldest daughter, Gina, seventeen years old, gives her occupation as “servant.” They also had marriage difficulties. In 1910, there are no census records of John and Gurine, but in 1920, Gurine is listed as divorced and still living in Dawson with three of her children. She and her daughter list no occupation ; two sons are listed as laborers engaged in “silo building.” Meanwhile, in 1910, eighteen-year-old Alfred was lodging at 1518 Charles Avenue, Saint Paul, giving his occupation as “joiner, refrigerator fitting,” presumably referring to railroad refrigerator cars. His two fellow lodgers 12 BEGINNINGS (1919–1935) were in the same trade, and most of the men living on his street, about half a mile from the railroad yards, worked on the railroad. It was probably Fairchild’s importance as a railroad center that brought Alfred there; he most likely met Clara through her father, who was working at the time as a “section hand.” Alfred’s wanderlust probably struck a chord in Clara, giving her an opportunity to escape her home town. Shortly after their wedding in Fairchild on June 19, 1911, the couple set off for Minnesota, where their eldest son, Lawrence, was born in Minneapolis on March 26, 1912, nine months and a week into their marriage, and thence to Denton, a small farming community (2000 population, 301) in Fergus County in central Montana, where they lived in an unincorporated area a mile...