Edith Faye Dodson was born 6 September 1916 in the Deerfield Township, Fulton County, Illinois. She was the second and youngest child of Forrest Dodson and Flora Kettenring.
Edith grew up on the family farm. Her mother was a first-generation American whose parents were well-to-do German immigrants. Her father was from a long line of prosperous Illinois-native farmers. Edith graduated from Canton High School, however, at the height of the Great Depression.
During the Depression she worked the counter at her uncle’s bakery. It may have been here where she met her first husband, James Sereno.
Edith married Jimmy in 1939. As newlyweds, they resided with Jimmy’s Italian immigrant parents in St. David Valley, Buckheart Township where both her husband and father-in-law worked as coal miners in a strip mine.[1]
During World War II, James served in the US Navy’s Construction Battalion or “Navy Seabees”. Edith found herself living alone in California and working for who would become her second spouse. The glamour and climate of Southern California, plus the attentions of a stylish man seemingly with some wealth and connections were no doubt powerfully seductive to a Depression-era wife of a coal miner from a small town in Illinois.
Edith began an affair with her boss. She filed for divorce from James in December 1945, claiming mental abuse. The divorce was granted on 15 January 1946, the exact same day she married Max Lipman in Reno, Nevada.
With Max she had two children.
They lived in Carlsbad, San Diego County, California where Edith was active as President of the Oceanside-Carlsbad Soroptimist Club.[2]
After the birth of her first child, Edith’s parents moved to California to be closer to their grandson. But in 1954, Edith lost both parents.
Her marriage to Max began to fall apart by 1960 and she began an affair with the man who would be her paramour for the next three decades, Chris Frandsen.
Edith eventually divorced Max in 1963.
As a single mother in a time when that situation was very frowned upon, Edith kept her family together by moving into an apartment in Carlsbad and making ends meet by working in a bakery owned by a friend.
Edith would spend most of her remaining years in Carlsbad as she preferred best - living alone - even after both of her children moved across country to Pennsylvania and had families of their own. A once a year visit was more than enough family time for Edith, who spent a good deal of those visits playing solitaire while chain smoking and drinking bourbon.
In 2001, she realized her health was declining and she needed to be near her family. That summer, she moved to Pennsylvania so her daughter could care for her.
Edith’s health continued to decline for the next seven years. She died 13 July 2008 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.
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