 |
| A portrait of Ed Ballard overlooked Mary Lassiter and her son Ethan when they stopped in the Ed Ballard Room during their visit to West Baden Springs Hotel last week. Mary's great-grandfather was Ed Ballard, the famed businessman who owned West Baden Springs Hotel from 1923-1932. |
It’s the standard traffic for a Wednesday afternoon in the West Baden Springs Hotel atrium. Tour groups milling through. Across the atrium, a few dozen folks enjoying afternoon tea with harp music wafting throughout. There’s first-time visitors simply staring at pointing at the dome overhead. Others have claimed a comfy chair and are licking ice cream cones.
In the middle of it all is Mary Lassiter. You could make the
case that her family is the reason we’re all here enjoying ourselves under the
dome.
Mary’s great-grandfather was Ed Ballard, the man who owned
West Baden Springs Hotel from 1923-1932. Mary never met her grandmother (Ed’s
daughter). And Mary wishes we could’ve found out more tales about
great-granddad from her mother, who died about a year and a half ago and wasn’t
much of a storyteller in the first place.
But Mary’s heard bits and pieces about her
great-grandfather, his colorful life and his magnificent hotel — enough to make
her feel bonded to Ed Ballard when she sees old pictures of him.
“I’ve always felt sort of connected to him,” she says.
Mary has lived out West most of her life, currently in Salt
Lake City, and last week she was finally able to visit West Baden and see what
her great-grandfather once ran. And if it weren’t for Ed Ballard, West Baden
Springs Hotel might not be standing today.
Ballard took ownership of the hotel 22 years after it was
originally built, and after the Great Depression struck and his hotel business
went south, Ballard famously sold the building for $1 to the Jesuit Society
which operated its seminary there. The Jesuits inhabited the building through
the mid-1960s, then Northwood Institute used the building until the early
1980s.
By essentially donating his hotel to the Jesuits rather than
just letting it sit empty, he set forth a sequence where the building was
inhabited and maintained for the next 50 years. Considering how badly the
building deteriorated from 1983 to 1996 when the restoration process began — parts
of the hotel exterior were literally crumbling by then — it would’ve certainly
been in disrepair had it been vacant all those years.
And we have Ed Ballard to thank for that.
No surprise that Ballard made a sage decision there, given
that he was considered to be one of the most economically powerful people of
this area from 1910 through the 1930s. His interests covered everything from
farms to rental properties to circuses to banks.
His first job was being a pin setter at a bowling alley, and
then he delivered mail on horseback in the county’s rural areas. But Ballard
didn’t see a future delivering mail, so he made moves. Not long after his 21st
birthday, Ballard was running a tavern called the Dead Rat Saloon near West
Baden Springs Hotel that was frequented by guests since the hotel didn’t serve
alcohol. Ballard ran a couple saloons with both fun and games — he was also running a small gambling parlor in the
back. (This was all kept hush-hush, since Ed’s mother was a religious lady who
wouldn’t even allow her sons to bring a deck of cards into their home.)
Mary shares a tale she heard about Ed’s underground games: “He
ran a little card game, and there was a hardware store nearby. He would run to
the hardware store to borrow cash from the owner. He’d borrow this cash and
he’d always pay it back, but then one time he had a chance to do a bigger game
down the street and he needed $1,000. This hardware store owner loaned him the
money again. (In later years) when that man was going to go into bankruptcy or
having financial difficulties, Ed loaned him some money. When it was time for
the debt to come due, he essentially forgave a good portion of that debt,
because he always remembered how this hardware store owner loaned him money all
the time to run these card games. Basically, he was who he was because this
hardware store owner loaned him money all the time.”
 |
| The West Baden Springs Hotel atrium, early 1900s. |
There’s also a famous tale about how Ed Ballard got on Lee
Sinclair’s radar as a young man. Sinclair was the one who built West Baden
Springs Hotel and owned it prior to Ballard. In those days, hotels had their
own ice houses where they’d cut ice from the rivers and ponds in the winters
and store it for later months. In the summer of 1895 (when Ballard had just
turned 21), Sinclair’s hotel ran out of ice. Sinclair sent a messenger across
the road looking for a favor, as Ballard had also built an ice house for his
saloon.
“Tell Colonel Sinclair
he can have anything I have,” goes the story. “Col. Sinclair never forgot this gesture.”
A few years later, Sinclair selected Ballard to run West
Baden Springs Hotel’s casino — that was in the day the hotel had a casino on
property. All these years later, it gives Mary a sense of wonder about how her
great-grandfather provided gambling and drinking to people in the era when it
was illegal: “I don’t mind that he was a little bit strategic. You have to be
able to appreciate a little bit of deviancy.” Especially since she’s heard
stories that suggest Ed Ballard had a truer moral compass than most business tycoons.
 |
| Mary and Ethan outside the Ed Ballard room at the hotel. Mary's middle name is Elizabeth, which has been in the family for generations as Ed Ballard's mother and daughter were both named Mary Elizabeth. |
“He understood there would be a sense of ruin if the
townsfolk lost their money there,” Mary says.
Ed Ballard lived larger than life all the way to the day he
died — murdered in Arkansas hotel room in a dispute over a gambling club he
owned and later sold. His life and times are like something straight out of a
fiction novel. And almost a century after Ed Ballard ran West Baden Springs
Hotel, his great-granddaughter has a sense he’d love what it’s become today.
“We were sitting in the restaurant and I was watching the
folks coming and going thinking, people are employed here and this town has
some vibrancy because of this place. I just felt for a moment a sense of pride,
for him, if he could see this today. And what would it feel like to have him
standing there looking, saying, this is
awesome.”