Kelly Ray Masters Sr (1897–1987), also known by his pen name Zachary Ball, was an American author. He is noted largely for his novels Bristle Face and Joe Panther and other adventure stories for boys.[1]
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Masters was born in the Blackjack Hills west of Princeton, Missouri, to Abelino and Iva (Herrick) Masters on June 16, 1897. Between the ages of six and thirteen, he lived in SE Kansas near Altoona, KS where he attended school. Masters dropped out of school at 13 in order to support his family through working in a series of factory jobs in Kansas City, Kansas, and St. Joseph, Missouri. In 1914, while working as a bellhop at the St. Joseph, he joined a small tent repertory show and spent the next twenty-five years touring the Midwest with various troupes and as part of a musical act with his younger brother.
Masters married his wife Gladys (Green) in 1931 and had a son, Kelly Ray Jr. While living in Austin, Texas, he began to sell stories to magazines of widely varying quality in an attempt to supplement his income. Masters took the pen name Zachary Ball by combining the names of two of his favorite movie stars: Zachary Scott and Lucille Ball. Eventually he would co-write several short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's with author Frankie-Lee Weed. Weed wrote under the pseudonym Saliee O'Brien. The pair submitted stories under Weed's pen name (Saliee O'Brien) when the lead character was a woman and under Ball's name when a man. Ball published two books for adults, Pull Down to New Orleans (1945) and Piney (1950), before turning to children's fiction for the school library market.
Joe Panther (1950), a novel about a young Seminole in south Florida, was Master's first juvenile work. The plot centers around Joe Panther as he comes of age outside the Florida Everglades by trying to enter the establishment (white man's world). He gets work as crew member on a fishing boat, hunts for alligators, and has cathartic encounters with bad guys trying to bring illegal aliens into Florida on fishing boats. Joe Panther was adapted as a motion picture in 1976 and starred Ray Tracey in the title role, Brian Keith, in his second Zachary Ball screen adaptation (starring in Bristle Face in 1964), as Captain Harper, Ricardo Montalban as Turtle George, Alan Feinstein as Rocky, Cliff Osmond as Rance, and A Martinez as Billy Tiger.[2] Joe Panther spawned a number of sequels by Masters including Swamp Chief (1952), Skin Diver (1956), and Salvage Diver (1961).
Bristle Face (1962), one of Ball's many tales prominently featuring boys and their dogs, received the Dorothy Canfield Fisher and William Allen White children's book awards for 1964 and 1965, respectively. The story is based on runaway teen Jace Landers who is befriended first by stray dog Bristle Face and then lazy shop owner Lute Swank and their adventures together as Jace, Lute, and neighbor Emory Packer teach Bristle Face to hunt racoons. Similar in many ways to the 1961 novel Where The Red Fern Grows, the book is a coming-of-age story about a boy and his dog. The book was later adapted for television and aired on 26 January and 2 February 1964 as a two-part entry on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color with Phillip Alford as Jace Landers, Brian Keith as Lute Swank, Wallace Ford as Emory Packer, Parley Baer as Sheriff Rad Tolar, George (Goober) Lindsey as Hermie Chadron, and Slim Pickins as Newt Pribble.[3][4] Masters would follow up the huge success of Bristle Face with the sequel Sputters (1963) which follows Jace as he raises a new 'coon dog, Sputters, and follows Lute as he runs for sheriff, looks for a bride, and tries to provide a real home for Jace.
In the mid-1960s, Masters and his son founded Joe Panther Enterprises, a non-profit mail order business supplying audio recordings of Ball's lively renderings of his stories to foster good reading habits in young children. The company was based in Miami, Florida, Ball's home for several years. Seeking a drier climate, he and his wife moved to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1971. A Zachary Ball Children's Book Collection Room was dedicated at the Central Missouri State University Library in Warrensburg, Missouri, in April 1978. In the mid-1980s, Masters donated his collection of literary papers, publications, correspondence, photographs, audio recordings, and business records created and accumulated by himself and his son between 1944 and 1983 to the University of Southern Mississippi. "The Zachary Ball Papers" in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection were created primarily from his composition of nineteen published and unpublished works and the operation of Joe Panther Enterprises.[5] Masters died in 1987.