Early Life
Mary Lillian Ellison was born in 1923 in Tookiedoo, Kershaw County, South Carolina, and grew up in Tookiedoo, twelve miles from Columbia. The youngest of thirteen children, Ellison was the only daughter of a part Cherokee father and an Irish mother. Her parents owned a farm, a grocery store, and a service station.
When her mother died of cancer aged forty, eight-year-old Ellison went to live with her paternal grandmother and worked on her cousin's cotton farm to make money. At age ten, Ellison was still deeply distraught over her mother’s death; to cheer her up, her father took her to the local wrestling matches. Ellison liked the matches, but it was not until she saw Women's Champion Mildred Burke wrestle that "they began to mean much more to me."
Ellison returned to the Columbia home of her father and brothers. She graduated Columbia High School, but at age fourteen married 21-year-old Walter Carroll. They soon became parents to a daughter. A few months after the birth of her daughter, she divorced Carroll. Still only fifteen, she left her daughter with a friend and set out on a wrestling career of her own.
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