College Republicans drop the Ball

Seems that gubernatorial candidate Danney Ball came to Chico for a whole lot of nothing last week.

Ball, a country singer and maverick politician, arrived in Chico last Thursday in his motor home, which he calls the “Song Wrangler Express.” He was here for a Mexican dinner fundraiser that was scheduled that night at La Hacienda. Chico State’s College Republicans group, which was supposed to sell 100 tickets for it, planned the event, said Dick Nelson, coordinator of Ball’s Northstate campaign.

But the fundraiser never happened.

Nelson said that the event apparently fell “right in the middle” of midterms for the members of College Republicans, and they were apparently too busy with school to sell all the tickets they were supposed to. By Wednesday, he said, they’d sold less than half of the tickets and decided at 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon (that’s three hours before the fundraiser was supposed to start) to call ticket holders and cancel the whole thing.

Ball, who seems to be a pretty easygoing kind of guy, showed up anyway and ended up having dinner with about a dozen people who didn’t get the message that the fundraiser was canceled. While it was “quite a shock” that the event was canceled on such short notice, Nelson said that the dinner ended up “quite well.”

“He just had a nice mellow dinner with some people who wanted to meet him,” Nelson said. “It didn’t faze him a bit.”

Ball is a bit of a local celebrity in his hometown of Hemet. He’s never held public office before and is best known for his local country hit “I Traded My Horse for a Harley.”

College Republican representative Nick Keene didn’t return a phone call for comment.