In the 1950s, Lucille Ball helped make television a viable and extremely popular source of entertainment with I Love Lucy, a show she developed with her co-star and husband Desi Arnaz.
Things always seemed to go very wrong for Lucy in her comedic scheming, making for a perfect comedy for the small screen; Her performances were sweeping, slapstick, and crowd-pleasing, whether she was stuffing chocolates in her mouth, trying to get spotted by Hollywood talent scouts, or getting drunk on medicine.
Already a star of movies and radio long before the advent of television, Ball continued to delight millions of viewers weekly for years, starring in and directing such hits as The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy, working almost until his death in late from the 1980s. On-screen, Ball brought joy to countless fans. Off-screen, her life was filled with drama, tragedy, and sadness.
A tragic death in the life of young Lucille Ball
According to Lucille Ball's autobiography With Love Lucy, the comedian was born to parents Henry and Desiree Ball in western New York in 1911 but experienced an itinerant childhood. They moved for a period to Montana, then to Michigan, where Henry, an electrician, and lineman, found work with the Michigan Bell telephone company. Lucille's young life would take a tragic turn before she was old enough to go to school. After Henry contracted the flu, a severe winter storm hit the Balls' suburban Detroit neighborhood. The family patriarch braved the cold and snow to climb poles and fix broken lines. Henry's condition only worsened: He contracted typhoid fever, according to Charles Higham's The Real Life of Lucille Ball (via the Los Angeles Times), forcing the entire family to live in quarantine to prevent the spread of the deadly disease.
After a rise in temperature and a series of neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms, Lucille's father died in February 1915. She was only three years old at the time. A few years after Henry's death, Desiree remarried metal polisher Ed Peterson, and shortly thereafter the family moved once more to Celoron, New York, to a house with young Lucille's grandparents.
Lucille Ball witnessed a traumatic accident
When Lucille Ball moved to New York and her grandparents' house, she was among the three families that would live under one roof. "My grandparents had little money," she wrote in Love Lucy, "but they gave us a richly satisfying family life." Ball recalled a day in her teens when her grandfather came to her house with what she described as "a mysterious object wrapped in brown paper." It was a birthday present from her brother, Fred Ball. For her 12th birthday, she received a .22-gauge shotgun. Lucille recalled that her brother "wanted to shoot crows right away," so her stepfather, Ed Peterson, set up a target practice with some cans in the backyard, and Lucille he invited the neighboring children Cleo, Johanna, and Warner to join the gun. fun. But when it was Johanna's turn to shoot and she took the firearm, Warner's mother called him back home. Warner ran "right in front of the rifle"... just as Joanna fired. He was rushed to a local hospital, where doctors discovered that the bullet had severed Warner's spinal cord, leaving him unable to walk again.
Peterson offered to pay Warner's medical bills, but Warner's family refused and sued. They won and got everything, including the Balls' house. "My grandfather never worked again," Lucille wrote. "He lost his heart. Celoron ruined us; he destroyed our life together there.
