📍Celoron, NY 14720, USA
1915 – 1927“My father died of typhoid when I was three, and my mother took us home to her parents, Fred and Florabelle Hunt, in Celoron, a lakeside village next to Jamestown in western New York. We lived on Eighth Street, now renamed Lucy Lane. The little red-brick Celoron schoolhouse was a block from our house, and there a teacher, Miss Lillian Appleby, encouraged me to channel my restless energy into performing. Across the way was Celoron Park, an amusement park on Lake Chautauqua with a roller coaster, a ballroom and vaudeville shows, and it planted the seed of everything I later did. Grandpa Hunt was a kind, eccentric man who loved the theatre and took us to vaudeville. In 1927, while I was away at drama school, a neighbourhood boy was paralysed by an accidental shot from a gun my grandfather had given my brother. The lawsuit cost Grandpa his house, and our family scattered. I went on to become the queen of television comedy, but I always came back. Jamestown now has the Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum and the National Comedy Center.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today