MUNCIE, Ind. - Muncie's most beloved curmudgeon has donated his and his family's papers to Ball State University's Bracken Library.

The papers belong to retired physician Phil Ball, 82, who is nearly as old as Ball State and occasionally refers to the modern university by its original moniker of "Normal School."

Included in the donation are family correspondences and papers belonging to his physician father, Clay Ball. The elder Ball died in 1980 at the age of 102. He had practiced medicine for 65 years in Muncie.

The two men are "original" Balls, jokes Phil Ball in his characteristic style, referring to the famous industrialist family who established a fruit jar company 60 years after his family arrived and for whom Ball State is named.

"My father's family came here to this (Delaware) county full of hope by 1830," Ball said. "This was a primitive, virgin forest then. The family lived through the era of the one-family farm, the gas boom and its manufacturing era, the rust belt, and it would seem now, an age when this town is a service and educational center of sorts."

Phil Ball may be better known by his pseudonym of Dr. Charles F. Coldwater. Under that name, Ball supplied often humorous and sometimes poignant letters and columns to the Muncie Evening Press and the Muncie Star. This was at a time when many people perceived a doctor writing letters to the editors as unethical advertising.

In recent years, Ball has written the "Our Neighborhood" column for the The Star Press under his real name.

The donated papers include business and personal papers, letters to newspapers, letters sent by Phil Ball to his family while he was in the Navy during World War II, copies of Ball's six books, poetry, unpublished writings and much more. The papers are now available for people conducting research.

"This body of work records an important part of Muncie's history," said John Straw, librarian for Bracken Library's Archives and Special Collections. "Phil Ball and his family have seen and recorded some incredible changes in Muncie. Plus, his views as a doctor and writer coupled with his sense of humor give us a unique perspective."

That isn't to say Ball doesn't have his serious side, Straw added.

The collection includes his medical writings and testimony Ball gave before the U.S. Senate in 1970 regarding the first birth control pills that were making women sick.

Always the joker, Ball has written a foreword to the collection. In it he says: "So there are hundreds of pages of typed copy lying around. Some is truth, some is fiction, some is downright dastardly falsehood, and some is of uncertain worth. Much of my writing has to do with the life and times in Muncie, Ind., that legendary community which has been much studied since the 1920s."

By Nancy Prater, Web Editor

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Straw at jstraw@bsu.edu  or (765) 285-5078.)