American singer and songwriter Ernest Roland Ball of the Tin Pan Alley era is best known for his song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Born in Cleveland and trained at the Cleveland Conservatory, he made his way to New York where his song-writing career got underway in 1905 when state senator James J. Walker, later mayor of New York City, gave him some lyrics he had written and asked for music to go with them. By 1906 he had begun singing and accompanying singers at vaudeville venues like Hammerstein’s Victoria and The Palace. and collaborating with various composers and singers. From 1907 to 1910 he wrote numerous popular songs and several stage scores for Broadway musicals. One of his most successful collaborations was with tenor Chauncey Olcott, whose mother had been Irish. Ball and Olcott produced many Irish themed songs; “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” was originally created for the 1913 musical “Isle of Dreams” and “Mother Machree” came from “Barry of Ballantyne.” In 1911 he briefly collaborated in a double act with his second wife, Maude Lambert, a vaudeville entertainer. Ball wrote a mock ballad, “Saloon,” under the pseudonym “Roland E. Llab.” He was a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers. In 1927, while his singing group “Ernie Ball and His Gang” was on tour in Santa Ana, California, at the Yost Theater, he died in his dressing room just after leaving the stage. He was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. Some of his piano playing is preserved on piano roll recordings he made for the Vocalstyle, an Ohio-based company.

Dr. James Moores Ball was born on September 4, 1862, in West Union, Fayette County, Iowa.

He obtained his medical degree from Iowa State University in 1884 and pursued further post-graduate studies in New York and Europe. From 1894 to 1910, he served as the Professor of Ophthalmology at the St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons. Following this, he assumed the roles of Dean and Professor of Ophthalmology at the American Medical College. Dr. Ball was an esteemed member of the St. Louis Medical Society and had a keen interest in medical history, which is evident through his extensive collection of books, anatomical specimens, drawings, casts, and ophthalmic instruments. In 1920, he donated his collection of ophthalmic instruments to the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health & Medicine). His book collection was presented to the St. Louis Medical Society in 1928, forming the basis of the Society’s rare book holdings. Subsequently, in 1989, the Society transferred the Ball collection to the Bernard Becker Medical Library. A prolific author, Dr. Ball contributed significantly to the fields of medicine and history, with notable works such as "Andreas Vesalius, the reformer of anatomy" (1910), "Modern Ophthalmology" (published in six editions between 1904 and 1927), and "The Sack-em’ Up Men" (1928), a study of the practice of body snatching.

He died on March 1, 1929, in St. Louis City, Missouri.

Stanley Crittenden Ball was born on November 19, 1885, in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

He was an American zoologist. He received his education at Yale University (Ph.B., Sheffield Scientific School, 1911; Ph.D., 1915). He taught at Massachusetts Agricultural College, Springfield College, and the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, before joining the Yale faculty in 1926. He served as a curator of Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Yale University until his retirement in 1954. Ball was a well-known authority on birds and the geographical distribution of animals. He studied the natural history of the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec for many years and published a book, "Fall Bird Migration in the Gaspe Peninsula," in 1952.

In 1912, he married Augusta Lehman (1889–1960). He died on August 9, 1956, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Valentine Ball was born on July 14, 1843, in Dublin, Ireland.

He was an Irish geologist who graduated from the University of Dublin (B.A., 1864; M.A., 1872 and LL.D., 1889). In 1864, Ball joined the Geological Survey of India, working under Thomas Oldham. His task was to survey coalfields and other minerals of economic value, and he discovered several coalfields in West Bengal and central India. He became a Fellow of Calcutta University in 1875 and advised on the alignment of a proposed railway line between Bombay and Calcutta due to his expertise in central India. In 1873, he visited Narcondam Island along with James Wood-Mason. He was elected Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1874. Upon returning to Ireland in 1881, he became a Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Dublin. In 1883, he became director of the Dublin Science and Art Museum, now the National Museum of Ireland. Additionally, he served as the president of the Royal Geological Society (1882-1883) and the honorary secretary of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1882. Ball oversaw the completion of the new museum complex on Kildare Street and produced the first guide to the building. He also contributed to studies in ornithology and anthropology and arranged for his collections of Irish antiquities and Polynesian artifacts to be deposited in the new museum. Due to ill health, Ball resigned from the directorship of the museum in 1895. He was known for his regular contributions to Stray Feathers, the ornithological journal founded by Allan Octavian Hume, and the Andaman scops owl (Otus balli) was named after him by Hume. Ball authored several notable works, including "Jungle-Life in India" (1880), "The Diamonds, Coal, and Gold of India" (1881), and "The Economic Geology of India" (1881), in addition to numerous journal notes.

In 1879, he married Mary Moore. He died on June 15, 1895, in Dublin, Ireland.

William Lee Ball was born on July 18, 1908, in North Hatley, Quebec.

He was a Canadian skier who studied at McGill University, earning a B.Sc. in 1930 and a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935. During his time at the university, he actively participated in sports and was a member of the ski team from 1926 to 1930. He practiced alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, and Nordic combined and qualified for the 1932 Winter Olympics in Nordic combined. He also competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics, finishing 54th in the 18-kilometer-long distance event and 46th in the Nordic combined. Ball was later inducted into the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame.

He died on March 14, 1979, in Ottawa, Ontario.

Frances Elizabeth Stephens, co-founder of the Priory School in Montreal, was a member of a socially prominent Montreal family. She was born in Paris where her parents, stock broker Francis Chattan Stephens and Hazel Kemp, both children of wealthy politicians, were on an extended honeymoon. They returned to Montreal but when war broke out they left Frances’ 18-month-old brother, John Harrison Chattan Stephens, with her widowed grandmother, and Frances and her mother headed back to England where her father was a lieutenant in the 13th Canadian Battalion of the British Expeditionary Force. Her grandmother, Mrs. George Washington Stephens (née Frances Ramsey McIntosh), insisted that, regardless of the war, she must make her regular spring trip to Paris for the spring fashion collections. She and her grandson (with nanny and maid) went down with the Lusitania when it was struck by a German torpedo. Ironically, the ship Hesperian, bringing her body back to Montreal, was sunk by the same German submarine.
Meanwhile, Frances’ father contracted trench fever in France and was treated in a Red Cross hospital in Rouen. After the family returned to Canada with her father in poor health, he died of Spanish flu in 1918. Six-year-old Frances was with her mother in Toronto -- visiting at Castle Frank, the mansion of her maternal grandfather, Sir Albert Kemp, a Canadian MP and later military minister — when her father died. Her mother remarried in 1920 and travelled frequently; Frances would thus often be left in the care of a nanny or governess. After her mother converted to Catholicism and the family moved temporarily to England, teenager Frances was sent to a Catholic boarding school and became quite pious. Back in Montreal, she attended City House Convent of the Sacred Heart, graduating in 1930. She enrolled briefly at McGill University in arts but dropped out to marry Murray Gordon Ballantyne, son of Canadian senator Charles Colquhon Ballantyne.
Frances became a member of a group interested in education and made friends with Alphonsine Howlett with whom she embarked on a plan to start an English Catholic independent school for children 7 to 12. Her marriage in 1947 did not deter her, and the women began lessons in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood with 25 children with herself as principal. She later put up the funds for a down payment on the Sir Charles Lindsay house on The Boulevard; they moved the school there, with the two friends doing the cleaning and repairs themselves. Frances held that principal’s post until 1981, while raising four daughters and two sons. The Priory School, still on The Boulevard, now has more than 160 pupils plus a waiting list. On her 100th birthday she received a blessing from Pope Francis. She died four days short of her 102nd birthday.

Rhythm and blues singer and songwriter Hank Ballard (born John Henry Kendricks), born in Detroit, was one of the first rock ‘n roll singers of the 1950s. His father, Dove Ballard, died when he was seven and he and his brother went to live with his paternal aunt’s strict religious family in Bessemer, Alabama. He began singing gospel in t he church choir and was influenced by the country singing of Gene Autry. At the age of 15 he moved back to Detroit and began working for the Ford Motor Company. One of his co-workers was a member of a singing group, the Royals, and was impressed by Ballard’s baritone-tenor singing in the assembly line; he persuaded him to join the group in 1953. Not wishing to be confused with another group known as the Royales, they changed their name to the “Midnighters.” In 1954 Ballard wrote a song for the group entitled “Work with me, Annie” that was number one on the R & B list of hits for seven weeks; however, the FCC considered it too sexually suggestive and banned their “Annie” sequels from radio. Following their success, the group changed its name to “Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.” In 1959, Ballard wrote and recorded “The Twist” which caught the attention of Dick Clark, host of American Bandstand, the Philadelphia-based television show. Clark invited the group to perform but they were unable; instead, he asked Chubby Checker to cover it, and Checker went on to become a sensation in 1960 and again in 1962. This was the only R & B song ever to hit number one on the charts for two non-consecutive years. The group had several hit singles in 1962 but they broke up in 1965, and Ballard began a solo career. He appeared several times on James Brown’s Revue and recorded several tracks, including a duet on a James Brown album in 1972. He dropped from view for a while, then revived the Midnighters, first as a female group, then male. They performed and made some tours until 2002.