- Date Of Birth: August 4, 1932
- Date Of Death: May 23, 2020
- State: Arkansas
J.N. Ball, 87, of Mountain Home, Arkansas died May 23, 2020 of multiple myeloma.
He was born August 4, 1932, to Michael and Sally May (Battle) Ball in Byron, a tiny Arkansas town 13 miles outside of Salem. He spent his long life being asked what name lay behind his initials, but the letters were the whole name. According to family lore, he had grandfathers on both sides with those initials, so he was named “J.N.” to honor them both. His friends called him “Jay.”
There was nothing great about the Depression in the Arkansas hill country. Jay had vivid memories of brutal poverty. His family survived on turnips when other crops failed one year; even the milk tasted of turnips because there was no other fodder for the cows. They lived in fear that his late older sister, Maxine, would starve. During World War II, he could scrape up enough money from chores or picking cotton to walk the long road to town for an evening of roller skating or movies. He could recount strange and colorful tales of Arkansas: an uncle who shot off his leg while hunting water moccasins; the blind uncle who played virtuoso fiddle; the time he cowered as a boy behind a mulberry bush as a tent revival preacher baptized his mother in the river.
Jay dreamed of escaping Arkansas with his best friend and cousin, Whorton Cochran, to pick apples in far-off Washington state. Whorton’s death in a freak accident, not long before the teenagers could hit the road, was a loss that Jay never got over. They will rest forever, not far apart, in the Byron cemetery.
