Ann Ward followed in the footsteps of her father, Homer Ward, to the University of Tennessee . . . and around the world.
In 1917, soon after the United States declared war on Germany, Homer Ward and his brother drove to Nashville and enlisted in the Merchant Marine. For a couple of farm boys from Loudon County with little life experience outside of East Tennessee, it must have seemed quite an adventure.
Homer soon found himself aboard the USS Harrisburg, a thirty-year-old, fastest-in-its class steel schooner that had been acquired by the US Navy and commissioned as a troop and supply transport. The Harrisburg would make four transatlantic journeys during the war, with stops in England and France, and six more following the armistice, carrying American veterans back home.
Ann Ward (BA political science ’74, JD ’77), the youngest of Homer’s three children, knows little about her father’s time in the service, despite asking him about it as a child. “It would have been all fun and games when they first went over,” she speculates, “because everyone was young and healthy and excited. But then, coming back, he would have transported the wounded and the dead. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised he didn’t want to talk.”
Homer was fifty-seven years old when Ann was born and had already, by that point, lived several lives. Raised on the family’s 300-acre farm, where he tended cattle and harvested hay and tobacco, he matriculated to the University of Tennessee’s agriculture program and eventually graduated in 1921.
Homer was hardly the only UT student whose plans were interrupted by World War I. In a little more than two years, UT’s enrollment dropped by nearly one quarter, from 980 in 1917 to 751 in 1919. Then-president Brown Ayres went so far as to make a formal request to the federal government for UT’s ag students to be released early from service because he needed them back in Knoxville to work the university’s large experiment farm. (The UT farm would become the present-day campus of the Institute of Agriculture.)
After graduating, Homer took a job with Chrysler in Indiana, where he carved wooden molds that were used to manufacture car parts, but when his father died and none of his siblings volunteered to take up the farm, he returned to Lenoir City. Homer spent the rest of his life in the area and became a prominent figure in local politics, serving as road commissioner, a member of the county court, and as president of the Farmers Aid Association.
Homer’s sudden death in a car accident in 1965 was a significant turning point in the life of twelve-year-old Ann. “Even though I didn’t have him around a long time, he certainly gave me the principles I live by. He was a very black-and-white kind of guy, and I think I inherited that.” In the days and weeks following the accident, Ann met Arthur Fowler, an attorney who had written her father’s will and who helped the family in their moment of crisis, and she was so impressed by him that, when Ann’s seventh-grade teacher asked her what she wanted to do as career, she answered without hesitation, “I’m going to be a lawyer.”
Ann enrolled at UT in the fall of 1970 and took a student job at the library in Morgan Hall, which opened the year Homer graduated, a fact she only recently came to realize. “I was walking the same halls that he did!” Over the next four years, she took advantage of every opportunity available to her as a double major in history and political science, including a six-week study-abroad program in the Soviet Union at a time when the Cold War was still hot. “It did so much for my confidence. I mean, I was just a kid from a farm in Loudon County, and here I am going to Moscow.”
The trip also sparked a new connection with Homer, as Ann discovered that she shared his love of travel. “I’ve been on every continent, including Antarctica. I’ve been at the base camp of Everest. I’ve been on a cruise on the Nile. I’ve been to animal reserves in South Africa.” Her face lights up when she tells the stories.
True to her word, Ann graduated from the UT College of Law in 1977 and soon after began a distinguished career in the nuclear industry, managing contracts at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge and later serving as general counsel at Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee. Ann is more eager to talk about Homer than herself, but she has intriguing stories from those years, including her involvement with the recovery of enriched uranium from the European Union.
The COVID-19 quarantine in 2020 gave Ann a quiet opportunity to reflect on the remarkable life she’s lived. “I was sitting there, patting myself on the back,” she says with a note of healthy sarcasm, “and I realized I should do something.” That “something” was the establishment of the Homer R. Ward Scholarship Endowment, which supports students with an interest in agriculture with a special preference given to residents of Loudon County.
“Maybe these students come up with a good way to feed the world, maybe they help with climate change, or maybe they go home and do a good job with their farm.”
-Ann Ward
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