Lucille Ball's Tragic Real-Life Story

Publish date: 2024-04-07

Lucille Ball was born on August 6th, 1911, in western New York, the daughter of Desiree (DeDe) Hunt and her husband, Henry Durrell Ball. According to Lucille's autobiography, Love, Lucy, the family swiftly relocated to Montana, where Henry was working as a telephone company lineman, then to Wyandotte, Mich., when Lucille was "about three."

The I Love Lucy star remembered her father as "a wonderful guy," adding that her mother would tell her that she "got [her] sense of humor from him." If that's not all, she also adds that Henry taught her to play rough around the edges, "tossing [her] to the ceiling and catching [her] a few feet from the floor" — perhaps later developing her love of slapstick comedy on the screen. "I'm known among comediennes as a stunt girl who will do anything," she mused in her memoir.

As Lucille writes, she "adored" her father, yet the same year they moved to the Detroit suburb, he came down with a case of the flu. Unfortunately for Henry, before he had a chance to recover, a storm suddenly hit their neighborhood. "Despite his bad cough and fever, he climbed up the poles in the sleet and snow, trying to secure the tangled, fallen wires." Of course, his fever got worse, and his "condition never improved," turning into typhoid fever. "He died not long after that storm," Lucille heartbreakingly remembered, on February 28th, 1915.

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