Fred Ball - Biography - Career

Career

He left Jamestown to join his sister in California in the 1930s, working as a page boy at Cafe Trocadero. He was Desi Arnaz's band road manager in the 1940s and 1950s and was on the Board of Directors of Desilu Productions (the studio that Desi and Lucy purchased in 1951 and that produced I Love Lucy, as well as Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and The Untouchables) until Arnaz fired him in a fit of anger after Fred expressed concern about Desi being able to run the company (this was after the Arnaz marriage had soured).

Fred did not have an acting career after managing administration at Desilu Productions but instead continued to manage restaurants and hotels such as the Palm Desert Hotel, as well as self-manage and maintain his own holdings in motels, and mobile home parks. He was a real estate agent and broker in Arizona. It should be noted that he, much like his sister Lucy, was a very astute business person who maintained his mental faculties and participated in life until his last days.

Read more about this topic:  Fred Ball, Biography

Famous quotes containing the word career:

    “They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
    —Anne Roiphe (20th century)

    “Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
    —Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    “I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
    —Ruth Behar (b. 1956)