Biography

June 16, 1897 · Missouri, USA

July 4, 1987 · Roswell, New Mexico, USA

Kelly Ray Masters

Kelly Ray Masters was born in the Blackjack Hills west of Princeton, Missouri, to Abelino and Iva (Herrick) Masters on June 16, 1897. He lived in or near Altoona, Kansas, between the ages of six and thirteen, where he attended school and worked for his father and neighbors. Masters dropped out of school at the start of the seventh grade to help support his family, working in a series of factory jobs in Kansas City, Kansas, and St. Joseph, Missouri. At age seventeen, while working as a bellhop at the St. Charles Hotel in St. Joseph, he joined a small tent repertory show, playing small towns in Missouri. Masters spent the next twenty-five years touring the Midwest with various troupes and as part of a musical act with his younger brother. Second World War gasoline rationing finally put an end to his roaming.

Masters had married Gladys Green in 1931 and had a son, Kelly Ray Jr. He delivered newspapers in Austin, Texas, to support his family while selling stories to magazines of widely varying quality. Masters took the pen name Zachary Ball by combining the names of two of his favorite movie stars: Zachary Scott and Lucille Ball. While in Austin, he co-wrote several short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's with Frankie-Lee Weed (later Frankie-Lee Janas). Weed wrote under the pseudonym Saliee O'Brien. The pair submitted stories under O'Brien's name when the lead character was a woman and under Ball's name when a man.

Ball published two books for adults, Pull Down to New Orleans (1945) and Piney (1950), before turning to children's fiction for the school library market. He specialized in adventure stories for boys. Joe Panther (1950), a novel about a young Seminole in south Florida, was Ball's first juvenile work. It spawned a number of sequels and was adapted as a motion picture in 1976. Bristle Face (1962), one of Ball's many tales prominently featuring dogs, received the Dorothy Canfield Fisher and William Allen White Awards for 1964 and 1965, respectively. It was adapted for television in 1964.

In the mid-1960s, Zachary Ball and his son founded Joe Panther Enterprises, a non-profit mail order business supplying audio recordings of Ball's lively renderings of his stories to foster good reading habits in young children. The company was based in Miami, Florida, Ball's home for several years. Seeking a drier climate, he and his wife moved to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1971. A Zachary Ball Children's Book Collection Room was dedicated at the Central Missouri State University Library in Warrensburg, Missouri, in April 1978. Ball died in 1987.