David Ball

A decade ago, in a scene right out of Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," former MacArthur football player Eddie Bunger told me that if he ever got a chance to speak to David Ball, one of the class's five top academic standouts, he would tell him what a lucky son of a gun he had been.
You see, Bunger, joined the U.S. Marine Corps right out of high school, and found himself within a year of graduation peering out from a foxhole in Vietnam. That's when he made his vow.

He got the chance to do so 30 years later at a class reunion at the old Cadillac Bar downtown. Bunger, holding court with a big cigar, and peering out from a classic 1960s Cadillac, told Ball about his hard-won insights. Ball listened and just nodded in apparent agreement. What else could you do? But the reason Bunger made his vow was to tell Ball that he learned his lesson: Bunger went back to school. And he has convinced his sons and family members to do the same. The lesson was not lost.

At almost 58, Ball just breaks into a laugh when reminded of that moment.
Unlike Woody Allen's hero, media guru Marshall McLuhan, who was pulled out of busy theater crowd to admonish a know-it-all pseudo-intellectual, Ball listened to Bunger's stories and laughed along. He knew he'd been lucky.

Nearsighted, thin, a fellow who always thought through his responses before he spoke as if anticipating a chess move, or perhaps Dylan’s John Wesley Harding gunfighter, Ball never wanted to make a “foolish move.” The actuarian had a rough senior year in high school. He'd been in a morning health class when a note came that told him to go home immediately. His mother had died that morning of an apparent brain aneurysm. It left him, his dad, and a younger pre-teen sister to fend for themselves. It was a heart-wrenching experience for an teen-ager to face his graduation year.

Voted most likely to succeed in that 1967 MacArthur senior class, Ball was one of 13 Texas high school students who were to share in $67,700 in scholarships awarded in to prospective college students by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation.

Ball had also been a semi-finalist in the National Merit scholarship competition and that summer participated in a mathematics summer institute at the University of Texas at Austin. He at first planned to go to Rice University, with majors in math and natural science and eventually pursue a doctorate.

Then Ball says, came a charismatic recruiter for Princeton University. Along with football and track star Jeff Davis and engineer hopeful Ron Beilin, that experience changed his perspective.
Princeton offered "someplace that was different - maybe more exotic, more unfamiliar than Texas. I wanted some adventure," he said.

At Princeton, Ball found odd jobs around campus: He waited tables in the graduate college dining hall, worked as a busboy, server, cleanup, dishwasher and pot scrubber. He also worked in the school library, and later was paid to be a subject in psychology experiments or a research assistant for well-known economics professor Malkiel Burton, an expert in financial economics who specialized in theories concerning the stock market and its impact on gaining personal wealth. Burton became a mentor of sorts, and Ball decided to major in economics. That degree sent him toward a career as an actuary. It's been a good choice. The position requires that he passed a series of ten exams, which he did. "They're very difficult," Ball says. But passing those rigorous tests gave him the same satisfaction he might have had if he’d pursued an advanced degree.

The fact is, though, Ball has always been a student of life. "Education is wasted on the young," Ball said. "There's a lot more you need to know you don't learn in (school). Some of it comes from experience and has to get (absorbed) over a period of time." In high school, he said, "you can't absorb much anyway."

Then came rock and roll. Barely 16, Ball first became enamored with the poet of his generation, Bob Dylan. He won a copy of Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" album from KONO Radio in San Antonio, and with the kinship of classmate Cleve Wilson, became quickly taken with the Rolling Stones. Maybe it was a small act of rebellion- everyone loved the Beatles back then, he said, and maybe it was just the raw blues and rock that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards processed in their versions.That love affair with rock music has progressed for Ball with the music of Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, Al Stewart, Johnny Clegg and most recently, the beach boy aura of Jimmy Buffett.

By the 1990s, his interests in life's force moved him to practice Tai chi, a meditative form of Asian martial arts. "The idea is to use some form of inner energy but you don't exactly know how that comes into play," Ball explains. Tai chi "makes me feel more awake, it improves (my) health," he says. "It's a form of meditation." Ball's wife of 17 years, Lee, also practices the discipline. The couple adopted a daughter, Catherine, from a Russian orphanage a few years ago, and middle-age parenthood has been another challenge, he said. It means, Ball says, that after being labeled most likely to succeed in MacArthur's 1967 class, "I'm still trying."

By: John Edminston