Sadly, Lucille Ball had to learn some tough life lessons at a young age. When she was just four years old, her father Henry Ball died of typhoid fever. Shortly after his passing, a bird flew into the room where she and her family were mourning. The animal began to panic and it became a traumatizing event for the actress, who later suffered from a fear of birds, better known as ornithophobia (via History Collection).
Eventually, Ball's mother remarried a man named Edward Peterson. In her memoir, "Love, Lucy," Ball recalled a moment that changed her family forever. In 1927, Ball said her grandfather came home with a .22-caliber rifle as a gift for her brother, Freddy. Peterson set up some cans for Freddy to practice shooting at targets. Other kids came by, including a friend named Johanna as well as a neighbor named Warner Erickson, who often came by uninvited, Ball said. When Johanna took her turn, Erickson's mother called for her son while Johanna was aiming at the cans. The shout startled the girl and caused Johanna to inadvertently shoot Erickson. The boy suffered a severed spinal cord and his parents sued Ball's family (via Huff Post).
"They took our house, the furnishings that [Ball's mother] DeDe had bought so laboriously on time, week after week, the insurance — everything. My grandfather never worked again. The heart went out of him ... It destroyed our life together there," Ball wrote of the incident.
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