Helaine Ball Eckstein, 84, grew up with her siblings and cousins on 200 acres of farmland at the infamous “Balls Bend” on Route 228, but she really didn’t know that.

Eckstein explained that after graduating from Mars High School in 1956, she moved to Florida, where she lived for many years.

In 1989, she married Ted Eckstein, whose family remodeled the Ball farmhouse when they purchased it in 1947 to raise polled Hereford cattle.

She and her bridegroom moved to Renfrew to her husband’s family property, and one day she made an appointment to get her hair done.

At her appointment, she told the stylist she had grown up in the Mars area and explained the location of her childhood farm.

“She said ‘Oh, it’s near Balls Bend?’” Eckstein recalled. “That was the first time I had ever heard it called Balls Bend. It wasn’t called that when we lived there.”

“I called some of my family and said ‘Guess what happened today?’” Eckstein said. “My husband had never heard it either.”

The state Department of Transportation is currently straightening two bends in Route 228 in a $26.5 million project known as “the Balls Bend realignment project.”