Born in Daytona Beach in 1892, Ervin (“Eddie”) Ballough grew up in one of the area’s pioneering families. Legend has it he took his first airplane ride with aviatrix Ruth Law, lifting off from Daytona’s hard-packed sand beaches in 1914.  During World War I, after the U.S. Army Flying Corps rejected him in 1917 for lack of a college education, he traveled to Canada where he enrolled in the Royal Flying Corps as a mechanic. He was accepted to flight school in December 1917 and soon earned a commission as a First Lieutenant and made a flight instructor.

After the war’s end, Ballough began a varied civilian flying career that took him first to Newark, New Jersey, where he flew for Bamberger & Company. On September 1, 1919, he became the first pilot to land and take off from the roof of a building when he put his Curtiss Jenny down on an Army quartermaster warehouse and departed again before a crowd of astonished onlookers.

In 1920 Ballough moved to Minnesota to work for Bill Kidder at the Curtiss–Northwest Airport near the Twin Cities. There he served as a flight instructor and pilot, teaching students such as Charles “Speed” Holman. Over the next several years he flew a wide range of assignments: aerial news coverage with radio reporter Stanley Hubbard, power‑line patrol for Northern States Power, fire patrols for the Backus‑Brooks Lumber Company, and aerial mapping of the Twin Cities with photographer Paul Hamilton. He also performed regular Sunday stunt flying and survived a notable incident in which a control stick detached during a loop, forcing him to fly the aircraft by climbing out of the cockpit and pulling on its control wires until he could land.

In 1926 Ballough met Chicago businessman and aviation enthusiast Charles Dickinson, who operated the air mail route between Chicago and the Twin Cities. Ballough flew for Dickinson and later served as his personal pilot after the route was transferred to Northwest Airways. Together they entered several major air races, including the 1927 New York‑to‑Spokane Air Derby and the 1928 New York‑to‑Los Angeles Race, finishing second in both events. Ballough also flew Dickinson’s aircraft in additional competitions and participated in experimental demonstrations, including an attempt to launch mail from a moving train in 1928.

His reputation as a skilled pilot soon led to employment with Pitcairn Aviation, one of the nation’s pioneering air mail carriers.

On March 1, 1929, Ballough piloted the first scheduled U.S. Air Mail flight into Daytona Beach, helping inaugurate the city’s new municipal airport and connecting Florida with a rapidly expanding national and international air mail network. The event carried special meaning for the Ballough family. More than fifty years earlier, his uncle, Charles A. Ballough, had inaugurated mail service into Daytona Beach by horse and wagon. Their shared belief that “the mail must go through” became a proud family tradition spanning two generations and two very different eras of transportation.

When Pitcairn Aviation became Eastern Air Transport, and later Eastern Air Lines, Ballough remained with the company as one of its most respected pilots. Throughout the 1930s he flew passengers and mail over the airline’s growing route system and earned a reputation for exceptional judgment and professionalism. In 1937 his skill was credited with saving the lives of everyone aboard an Eastern airliner when mechanical trouble forced him to ground-loop the aircraft into an embankment rather than crash into an airport hangar near Atlanta. 

By the end of the decade Ballough had become one of Eastern’s senior captains, a “million-miler,” recognized for ten years of service with the airline and its predecessor companies. In 1940 he developed health problems which denied him his medical certificate, resulting in his retirement from Eastern in 1941. Ervin E. Ballough died of heart failure at his Daytona Beach home on May 19, 1948, at the age of 55.