From July 1940: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who have 20 acres in fruit trees near Hollywood, are going into ranching in a big way. They returned from Prescott, Ariz., carrying a 30-day option on a tract of 48,000 acres, which Mr. Gable this week said he would purchase. If so he will stock it with thoroughbred cattle and point to it as a retirement site when he and Carole decide to quit pictures–which many believe may come much sooner than the expiration of Clark’s contract in 1945.

From June 1936: Hollywood–Breathlessly I must report the biggest story you’ve heard this week. Down in Olvera Street, which looks like a chunk of Old California, a crowd of folks was watching a Mexican child sing and dance on the pavement. In the crowd were two very well-knowns but not a soul paid a but of attention to them. However, it appeared to me that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were having a swell time.

From June 1936: It begins to look as if Clark Gable and Carole Lombard are something more than pals. They see each other constantly and travel about in an old car that Carole once presented to him as a joke. The no less whimsical Clark went ahead and spent 300 dollars fixing the car so that it looks like new. Carole’s great enthusiasm these days is her new home in Bel-Air. She is in the delightful throes of house-decorating, and is expressing herself in a dozen different color-schemes. Every room will be individual, and as bright and cheerful as she can get it. No pallid pastels for Carole. An indispensable…

From May 1940: Clark Gable telephones his Carole from the set of “Boom Town”—“Keep lunch late for me, honey. I’m on my way.” Someone recently asked Miss Lombard whether she had found it difficult to adapt herself to her quiet country life. Carole, before her marriage to Gable, was one of the gayer girls around town and famous for her screwball parties. “But I never really liked that sort of thing,” she says now. “There was just nothing else to do!”

From May 1939: The Clark Gable-Carole Lombard honeymoon is definitely set for August. They’ll probably spend two or three weeks roughing it in New Mexico’s painted desert and a week or two riding hither and yon from their new 14-acre San Fernando Valley ranch home. Carole, who once rode a great deal, has done little of late but Clark moved his three horses onto the ranch the other say and she’s going to take it up again. Clark gave Carole a horse a year ago but the nag turned out to be so frisky the screen hero later made his lady give him away. Clark gets finished with “Gone with…

From April 1942: You remember in January, after Carole Lombard finished the picture TO BE OR NOT TO BE which plays Friday and Saturday, she volunteered to tour the United States for several months to promote the sale of defense stamps and bonds. She completed her first tour in the east and was returning to Hollywood when the plane crashed in Nevada. There was immediately speculations whether or not the picture would be released. Clark Gable, the husband of Carole Lombard, immediately released a statement saying that he knew it would be Carole’s sincere desire that the picture be shown if it would help people to laugh during these strenuous…

From April 1936: Hollywood says it’s romance, this keeping-company-of an-evening of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, screen stars. Yes, or no, the two are keeping company, and though seldom seen in public, the photographers found them at midget auto races in Hollywood.