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motion, pounding downstairs two at a time, flashing elegant legs as she whirled in her pleated skirt. At sixteen Lucille was back in good spirits, comely, and popular. By the time the school year ended she was having too good a time to obsess about cracking show business. The summer of 1927 looked to be the best of them all.
    In July 1927, Freddy Ball would turn twelve, and Grandpa Hunt thought the Glorious Fourth might be a perfect moment to salute the season, the nation, and the boy. The day before the national holiday he presented the boy with a long, thin, mysterious package. Freddy impatiently peeled off the brown wrapping paper and gave out whoops of delight. Grandpa let him carry on; not every lad got a .22 caliber rifle on his birthday. Yet when Freddy headed outdoors to shoot some crows, he was forbidden to use the firearm. “Tomorrow,” Grandpa promised, “I’ll show you how.”
    According to Lucille, July 4 dawned bright and hot, with the aroma of lilacs and clover wafting over the backyard. Rehired as a short-order cook at Celoron Park, Lucille was about to go off to work, but she lingered to watch Freddy’s shooting lesson. Before Grandpa Fred set up a tin can in the backyard he gave a brief lecture about guns and safety, emphasizing that behind the target were open fields with no houses or people. “Besides me,” Lucille was to write about this occasion, “there were Cleo and Johanna, a girl Freddy’s age who was visiting someone in the neighborhood.” The company also included an unexpected visitor. “There was an eight-year-old boy who lived at the corner whose name was Warner Erickson. Every once in a while you would hear his mother shriek, ‘War-ner! Get home!’ and Warner would streak for his yard since his mother spanked him for the slightest infraction. This Fourth of July weekend he had wandered into our yard and was peeking around the corner of our house watching the target practice.” At first no one noticed the boy; then Grandpa Hunt spotted Warner and ordered him to sit down and stay out of the way. From her back stoop, a safe distance away, Pauline Lopus watched the action unfold. Freddy took a number of shots at the tin can; then it was Johanna’s turn. She picked up the .22 and held it to her shoulder, one eye closed. At that very instant came the strident voice of Mrs. Erickson: “War
-ner,
get home this minute!” The boy rose and bolted in the direction of his home, crossing in front of the rifle just as Johanna pulled the trigger. The pressure of her finger was to change everything that Lucille knew and cherished. She watched in silent horror as Warner fell spreadeagled into a lilac bush.
    “I’m shot! I’m shot!” he screamed.
    Grandpa Hunt refused to believe what he had just witnessed. “No you’re not,” he insisted. “Get up.”
    Then, Lucille recalled, “we saw the spreading red stain on Warner’s shirt, right in the middle of his back. Cleo screamed, and I took her into my arms. The slam of a screen door told me that Pauline was running to tell her mother.” Grandpa Hunt lifted Warner and, accompanied by Lucille and Freddy and Cleo, carried him the hundred yards to his house as the boy murmured, “Mama, I am dying.” Before they could arrive, Warner’s mother burst out of the house shouting, “They’ve shot my son! They’ve shot my son!”
    They
implied the entire group, but within an hour everyone knew that a child had done the shooting and that an adult had been responsible for the tragedy. On July 5, the Jamestown
Post-Journal
told the story: “Warner Erickson, eight years old, of Celoron, is still in critical condition at Jamestown General Hospital as a result of being shot in the back. The Erickson lad stepped out in the range as Johanna Ottinger, a young girl, fired at about the same time, the bullet entering the boy’s back and passing through his lungs, lodging in the chest. Mr. Hunt, grandfather of the Ball children, was watching the target