His father was a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone Company, and his mother was a concert pianist. His father contracted typhoid fever while DeDe Ball was pregnant with Fred, and died in February 1915. When Fred was a few years old, his mother met a Swedish Lutheran salesman named Edward Peterson, and married him in 1918. Fred and his sister were raised by their grandparents. Their grandfather was an eccentric socialist who enjoyed the theater and frequently took the family to vaudeville shows. He worked in the furniture industry. He often whittled toys and made doll furniture for his grandchildren. Fred thought of Mr. Hunt as his father ; it was his grandfather who became a surrogate father to him through most of his childhood. Fred, Lucille, and their mother all lived together with the Hunts for a time in Celoron. In 1927, a neighborhood child, Warner Erikson, was paralyzed by a shot accidentally fired from a gun Fred's grandfather had given him for his birthday. Erikson died five years later. The resultant publicity and lawsuit forced Mr. Hunt to sell his house and enter bankruptcy. He was even jailed for a time. After this incident, the family had to split and never lived together in one place again. Fred's grandfather died in 1944.
Career
He left Jamestown, along with his mother and grandfather, to join his sister in California in the 1930s, working as a page boy at Cafe Trocadero. He was Desi Arnaz's band road manager in the 1940s and 1950s and was on the Board of Directors of Desilu Productions. Fred did not have an acting career after managing administration at Desilu Productions but instead continued to manage restaurants and hotels such as the Palm Desert Hotel, as well as self-manage and maintain his own holdings in motels, and mobile home parks. He was a real estate agent and broker in Arizona.
Death
Fred Ball died of natural causes in Cottonwood, Arizona, on February 5, 2007, at the age of 91. He was cremated and buried in the Hunt family plot at Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, New York, where his parents, Henry and Desirée Ball, his sister, Lucille Ball, and his grandparents are buried. He was survived by his four children, Pamela Ball Von Pinnon, Melissa LeBritton, April Jackson, and Geoffrey Ball, as well as seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Fred's wife, Zo Ball, died on May 12, 2013, at the age of 93.
