Deceased Name: Dr. Lee Hampton Ball, Jr.

© Durant Daily Democrat

December 24, 2003

Submitted by: Jo Aguirre

Dr. Lee H. Ball, Jr., 77

A service will be held at 2:00 p.m., Friday, December 26 at Dalton-Holmes Funeral Chapel for Dr. Lee Hampton Ball, Jr., Durant, who died December 21 in Denison, Texas. The Rev. James Blagg will officiate.

Family hour will be held at Dalton-Holmes Funeral Home on Thursday, December 25, 2003 from 7:00 - - 8:00 p.m.

Dr. Ball was born to the Rev. Lee H. and Mabel Kent Ball, June 15, 1926 in New York, New York.

Since his father was a Methodist minister, the family moved village to village in the Hudson Valley. These include Irvington, Catskill, Rhinebeck and Mahopac. He also, at the age of eight, he spent one year in Chicago away from his family, in an effort to remediate his spastic paralysis.

At Syracuse University, he majored in English. He was made Phi Beta Kappa in 1946 and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1947 with a B.A. degree. Also, in 1947, he was made a member of the Tabard English Honorary Society. The following year he attended graduate school at Syracuse, and in 1948 received his M.A. degree.

The following year he attended the University of Texas at Austin, Texas in pursuit of his Ph.D. degree in English. In 1949 he decided to change to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin and studied under Harry Hayden Clark, the celebrated American Literature Scholar. On June 13th, 1951 he married Kate Hart of New Orleans, Louisiana, in Irvington, New York with his father officiating.

In 1952, having completed all course work for his advanced degree, he and Kate moved first to Irvington, New York, and then, in 1953, to Pippapass, Kentucky, where he taught from 1953 to 1958. The year of 1956 to 57 he spent working exclusively on his Ph.D. dissertation. In the year 1958 he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin and immediately moved to Indianola, Iowa, where he taught two years at Simpson College. In 1959 he was interviewed by Dr. A. E. Shearer, President of Southeastern State College, Durant and began teaching there in 1960. Here he stayed for the remainder of his teaching career until his retirement in 1991. The only two exceptions were that in 1966 to 67 he went on sabbatical leave to the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, and in 1968, with the generous help of Dr. E. E. Slaughter, then chairman of the Department of English, he spent five weeks alone in Paris, France.

He was inducted in Kappa Delta Pi, an education honorary, in 1972, and became an officer in 1977. After his retirement, he remained an active honorary counselor for many years.

Dr. Ball is survived by his wife, Kate, of the home; son, Roger and wife, Sandy of Seattle, Washington; daughter, Mary Elizabeth of South Sioux City, Nebraska; brothers, Harry E. and wife, Shirley of Tucson, Arizona, and William K. and wife, Ruth of Severna Park, Maryland as well as several nieces and nephews.