Greensburg (Indiana) Daily News, November 7, 1936, p. 6. NOTE: The item
below was abbreviated from the original as noted by the ellipsis. The
portions excluded were repetitious of information shared in other newspaper
items shared with the INORANGE today.
HOOSIER SHOT BY HIS FRIEND
Assailant of Ed Ballard, Wealthy French Lick Sportsman, Then Commits Suicide
French Lick, Inc., Nov 7--Friends were stunned here today over the death of
Ed Ballard, 63, wealthy sportsman and philanthropist slain in a Hot Springs,
Ark., hotel yesterday by an assailant who later committed suicide.
The friends said Ballard, the former laundry errand boy who rose to
accumulate a huge fortune, had no known enemies in his home community
here...
Ballard was born on an Orange County farm four and a half miles from here,
and French Lick residents remember him first as an errand boy who gathered
and delivered laundry his mother had done. He became manger of a bowling
alley in the West Baden Hotel, a hotel that he later owned. He branched out
into other interests buying large tracts of land in this area and several
hotels, and then entered the circus business.
He was reported to have owned all except one major circus in the United
State at one time. Ballard sold his circus interests shortly before the
depression. He closed the West Baden hotel when the depression hit the
country and later gave the hotel and 585 acres of land to the Jesuit order
of monks. The order established a college there.
The family home was here, but for three years the Ballards had lived
principally in New York and Florida.
Survivors include the widow; a son, Charles E., senior at Yale University; a
daughter, Miss Mary, a student at Bennett's School at Millbrook, N. Y.; a
brother, George of French Lick; and a sister, Rella (difficult to read)
Ragsdale of Bakersfield, Cal.