Fred Ball
American movie studio executive

Frederick Henry Ball (July 17, 1915 – February 5, 2007) was an American movie studio executive and younger brother of Lucille Ball.
Early life
Ball was born on July 17, 1915, to Henry Durrell Ball (1887–1915) and Désirée "Dede" Evelyn Hunt (1892–1977) in Jamestown, New York. He was named after his grandfather. He grew up in a Baptist family; his father was of English and Scottish descent. His mother was of French, Irish and English descent. His genealogy can be traced back to the earliest settlers in the colonies, including Edmund Rice, a founder of Sudbury, Massachusetts. Another direct ancestor, William Sprague, left England on the ship Lyon's Whelp for Plymouth/Salem, Massachusetts.
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. In 1918, his mother married a Swedish Lutheran salesman named Edward (Ed) Peterson.
“Fred Ball” enters the record as american movie studio executive. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fred, Ball and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5494523. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 2007, 1887 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fred Ball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.