Clifford Dennis Ball, aka "Sonny Boy", of Loveland, OH, aged 89, succumbed to COVID-19 complications on the morning of Friday, September 17, 2021, after several weeks on a ventilator at Bethesda North Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cliff was born on November 10, 1931, in Farner, TN to parents Alvin Ball and Ola (Kimsey) Ball, the fourth of seven children. He spent his childhood and adolescent years wreaking havoc in the mountains around Farner, Copper Hill, Turtletown, and Ducktown, TN, his football prowess allowing him to barely graduate from Ducktown High School. He joined the Navy and formed many memories from his time on an ice breaker, navigating the cold waters near Greenland and Iceland. He married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Kilpatrick on March 14, 1953, and went to college at Auburn University, where he studied aerospace engineering at both the undergraduate and Master's levels. He had a successful career at General Electric, where he helped design the formidable Bell UH-1 ("Huey") helicopter, and the stealth fighter plane engines. Always staying true to his back country roots, he enjoyed farming, fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and raising various livestock. Throughout his life, he lived in various places around the country, including Pensacola, FL, Enterprise, AL, Glastonbury, CT, Peebles, OH, and his final home in Loveland, OH. A lover of life, Cliff was well travelled, having visited such far-off places as Morocco, Russia, Thailand, and Alaska. And though he struggled with the English language, even with the pronunciation of words like "mattress," he was extremely well-read, having been especially fond of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. He was an avid learner, working Sudoku puzzles, watching the Japanese stock markets open at midnight, continuously renewing books on monetary theory at the library, and working and reworking physics problems. A constant optimist, he routinely quoted his favorite poem, Today, by Thomas Carlyle, and planned his life as if he were to live forever. No day was useless, and he filled his time with family and friends and hard work. There are few that so fully lived and loved their lives as much as Cliff. Even until the last years of his life, he was water skiing, mowing the grass, swing dancing, traveling out-of-state, planting gardens, tinkering with his tractor, wielding a chainsaw, eating at Cracker Barrel, watching the birds, perfecting his traditional eggs and bacon breakfast and the proper dessert, shooting raccoons, hiking his property, and wooing the neighborhood pets to his patio. Cliff is survived by his wife, Mary Ball, daughter Tasha Menkhaus, son-in-law Michael Menkhaus, brother David Ball, granddaughters Tara and Brynne Menkhaus, and many nieces and nephews. The visitation will be held Friday, September 24, at Tufts Schildmeyer Family Funeral Home in Loveland, OH, from 5 to 7 pm, with a small private visitation directly following. Donations may be sent to Shriners Hospital for Children or St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.