[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Page 22128]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       TRIBUTE TO EDMUND F. BALL

 Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, Hoosiers have been remembering and 
celebrating the remarkable life and achievements of one of our greatest 
citizens, Edmund F. Ball. I want to share with the nation a most 
appropriate tribute published in the Muncie Star Press of October 3, 
2000 by Phil Ball.
  The article follows:

       Ed Ball took his last flight Sept. 30. This was an 
     unscheduled flight but with a good pilot who probably let Ed 
     handle the controls for some of the trip.
       This was a flight into history--a flight into legend.
       Ed died in Ball Memorial Hospital. Just across the street 
     is the Edmund F. Ball Medical Education Center. And a half-
     mile away stands the Edmund F. Ball Building on the Ball 
     State campus. A mile and a half away in Community Civic 
     Center (once the Masonic Temple) is an assembly room named 
     the Edmund Ball Auditorium. Those are just a few of the 
     monuments to this most important citizen who has ever lived 
     in our hometown of Muncie.
       But Ed's life and times and image and achievements and 
     generosities were his most important monuments.
       Ed wasn't one to brag. Those who knew him knew his modesty 
     and his tendency toward self-deprecating humor. One of Ed's 
     witticisms was to say that after his life was over, all he 
     had done was ``to cross the street.'' To explain this, he 
     pointed out that he was born on East Washington Street and 
     when he died he would be laid out and prepared for burial at 
     Meeks Mortuary across the other side of East Washington 
     Street.
       But in almost 96 years between those two events, Ed 
     accomplished more than any 10 people and became a legend in 
     his own time, although he would be the first to deny any such 
     words of grandiloquence. This hometown of his and mine and 
     yours has been the beneficiary of countless works of his mind 
     and his generosity.
       The last time I saw Ed was when he was hospitalized in June 
     1999 with a minor problem--heart trouble. I am glad that at 
     that time I did something to boost his morale and help erase 
     one of his lifelong regrets. I made him an honorary member of 
     my Old and Original and Valid Muncie Ball family.
       Many people in the past have thought that Ed might be 
     somehow related to me--it isn't really so. Ed's family were 
     frost-bitten immigrants from Buffalo in 1887, whereas my 
     family were already here and cultivating the soil in Delaware 
     County by 1830.
       Ed wrote me on June 12, 1999, and said he was pleased that 
     he at long last had finally achieved good genealogic status--
     even though it was just honorary.
       His type of man will not be seen again anytime soon, if 
     ever. He was Muncie's man of the millennium.
       Shakespeare said it best when he wrote the last words of 
     Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who lay dying. This is what 
     Hamlet said: ``The rest is silence.''

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