BOUNCING BALL

January 16, 1965

By JOAN CROSBY, NEW YORK — (NEA) — 

Lucille Ball looked very much the glamor queen as she descended an orange-carpeted circular stairway, her gold and white silk sari hostess gown trailing her one arm gracefully behind her back  

“They are great stairs for falling down” she said as she got to the bottom “so I come down barefoot" She was holding a pair of high-heeled mules in her hidden hand! 

Lucy, who is a star of both CBS television and radio, may have looked like a glamor girl and acted like the zany character she is to fans, but she was concerned with a mother-next-door problem.

“I don’t have any pessimistic thoughts, nothing drags me down. I don’t have moods of depression and I think everything is possible, but" Lucy said “I find it a little hard to help a teen-age daughter.”

ADDED BURDEN 

Lucy’s daughter, Lucie, is 13. Her son, Desi IV, is 11. As the children of a wealthy and famous mother there is an added burden on Lucy to keep them normal, something she says "the average layman doesn’t understand.” 

Middle class Americans have too much free time and too easy a life to make disciplining youngsters easy Lucy believes. 

"Electric appliances make everything in the kitchen easier and the laundry is generally sent out. What is a mother going to do?” 

“Force her child to iron shirts because that’s what her grandmother did when the grandmother was a girl?” 

“It’s harder these days for young people to have a purpose of direction because families don’t demand responsibilities from their children” 

LITTLE CHANGE 

Lucy, who feels she hasn’t changed much over the years, is sensitive to the fact that people in small towns act unnaturally with celebrities. 

“I went back to a small town where I spent some early years and I found the people who expected me to be different had beaten me to it. I walked in one room and It was cold as Siberia. The highest compliment these people can give you eventually is to say ‘Gee, you’re real’”

[The photograph accompanying the article was taken from “Lucy Gets the Bird” (TLS S3;E12).]