Pre-Senate Career
Joseph Hurst Ball was born in Crookston, Minnesota on November 3, 1905 and graduated from high school in 1922. He financed his education at Antioch College by planting corn on borrowed land, and held jobs during his two years there as a telephone linesman, a construction worker, and a factory employee. In 1925, he transferred to Eau Claire Normal, and then to the University of Minnesota, but never earned a degree. In 1927, he got a reporting job at the Minneapolis Journal. When he sold a story to a pulp magazine for $50, he quit to become a free lance writer, and spent a year writing paperback fiction before returning to journalism, this time for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 1934, he became the paper's state political reporter, and befriended assistant county attorney Harold Stassen, a fellow Republican. As a columnist in the Pioneer Press, Ball was critical of President Roosevelt and the Democratic-majority in Congress, but was also an opponent of isolationism. In the meantime, Stassen was elected Governor of Minnesota.
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