Fred Ball

Fred Ball. Photo: mahina, via Find A Grave.

There's a photograph from 1955 of a teenage boy in Hillsdale, Illinois, one hand resting on a ventriloquist figure named Tom, captioned in exactly two words: “Tom and I.”^[2] Sixteen-year-old Fred Ball had it printed onto a hundred novelty photo-stamps and sold them to fellow ventriloquists for two dollars fifty apiece.^[2] That same year he was already booking vent-and-magic dates around Hillsdale, including a show at the Veterans Domicile in Clinton, Iowa.^[1] Pull up a chair, because that kid from a quiet corner of Rock Island County had no idea he'd spend the second half of his life on the other side of the ocean, in a graduation cap, teaching an entire island of kids to yell “pow, pow, pow” at a television screen.

A country circuit kid, Iowa to Wisconsin

By the winter of 1958 he'd moved a few miles down the road to Taylor Ridge, Illinois, and landed the best job a teenage entertainer in that part of the state could ask for: the Santa Claus gig in nearby Macomb, working every single afternoon from Thanksgiving straight through Christmas Eve, then heading back out for night dates.^[3] A year later he was already four years deep with the Wes Hally TV Troupe, a country-music outfit that hauled him across Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin and got him written up in Country Song Round Up and the 1959 Who's Who of Country and Western Entertainers in America.^[4] He had his own Sunday spot on WREX-TV out of Rockford and a Saturday spot on WGEM-TV out of Quincy, then spent his open days touring high schools and Rotary Clubs, lecturing on the art of ventriloquism he'd apparently half mastered already as a teenager with a figure named Tom.^[4]

College, then Honolulu

Ball grew up around Rock Island, Illinois, and earned a bachelor's degree in English at Western Illinois University.^[6] From there he crossed the Pacific for a master's degree in speech at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the same trick that had carried him through Illinois carried him through graduate school: he worked as an entertainer to help pay his own way.^[6] Nobody taught him the craft directly. “Mostly I was self-taught,” he said years later, describing long hours spent with books and a television set for company.^[6]

Professor Fun

Ball chaired the English Department at Aina Haina Academy for a while, and when the school closed he didn't go looking for another teaching post. He turned the side act into the whole job, adding juggling and balloon twisting to the ventriloquism and magic he'd already brought over from Illinois.^[5][6] That job became Checkers and Pogo, the after-school kids' show that ran on Hawaii television through the 1960s and into the 1970s, and the character he built there, a genial entertainer in a graduation cap and black-rimmed glasses, outlasted the show itself.^[5][6] By the later 1970s he was hosting Keiki TV Pow on Channel 13, Hawaii's first interactive children's game show: kids at home shouted “pow, pow, pow” at their screens to win prizes, Ball phoned viewers at random to confirm they were watching before he ever went live, and he ran the whole thing without a script, missed calls and all.^[8]

Between children's shows Ball found time for adult television and film too: Magnum, P.I., Hawaii Five-O, The Jeffersons, and a role in a Japanese production called Hawaiian Dream.^[5][6] He carried a SAG/AFTRA card, belonged to the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and kept showing up to Honolulu's magicians' meetings every other month for the rest of his working life.^[5][7]

A long way back to Illinois

Ball suffered a stroke in December 2017, was admitted to Kuakini Medical Center, and died there on December 23, three days shy of his seventy-ninth birthday.^[5][7] He left one sister behind, back in Illinois, the same state where a teenager once mailed photo-stamps of himself and a figure named Tom to strangers for two dollars fifty.^[7] Fellow magician Kelvin Chun remembered a man whose enthusiasm ran long: “His passion for magic was evident when he provided so much information that we had to give time limits.”^[7] A friend, Lito Capino, put it simpler: “Too friendly. He's too friendly… gonna miss him.”^[7]

A quiet corner of Rock Island County raised him. A television studio in Honolulu gave him the character people remember. Both halves belong in the same file, because for seventy-nine years they were the same man.

Two-fifty a photo-stamp in 1955 and I'd like to point out that's still cheaper than my current therapy bills. Tom got him started, an island full of kids yelling 'pow pow pow' finished the job, and I'm just glad somebody in this family stuck the landing.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy