Above: Presenting the 2022 Delaware Coalition for Open Government’s Distinguished Journalism Award to News Journal reporter Amanda Fries. Photo provided.
By Bob Yearick
Looking for someone to write your life story? Or someone to edit your life story?
What about a leader and organizer of, well, almost anything: a statewide association for professional communicators, a church fundraiser, a Girl Scout troop, a Boy Scout troop, or a campaign to establish the Office of Delaware Inspector General?
Need a bit of carpentry done around the house — repairs, remodeling?
How about someone to cook a full-course Thanksgiving dinner? Followed, perhaps, by lively harmonica music?
Or maybe you just want to play catch in the backyard — with an ex-ballplayer who still has a pretty good arm.
Katherine Ward has been executive director of the Delaware Press Association for three decades. Photo provided.
Meet Katherine S. Ward. Though she eschews the title “renaissance woman” (for one thing, she claims she’s not good at math), Ward handles those chores — and more — with seemingly boundless energy.
For the past 25-plus years, she has focused much of that energy on leading the Delaware Press Association (DPA), a group of more than 120 journalists, writers, public relations specialists, graphic designers, photographers and educators. Under her guidance, the DPA has become one of the strongest and most active of the 24 state chapters of the National Federation of Press Women (NFPW) — an organization that’s also open to men. The DPA schedules several events each year, and its annual Professional Communications Contest draws more than 300 entries from all over the state.
Mary Sam
It’s no coincidence that one of the founders of the DPA, in 1977, was Ward’s mother and role model, Mary Sam Ward. Any profile of Katherine Ward necessarily starts with her mother.
A WAC in World War II, Ward’s mother, Mary Sam, helped found the Delaware Press Association in 1977. Photo provided.
A warm but formidable woman, Mary Sam, as everyone called her, grew up on a farm in Missouri, went to a one-room schoolhouse, and later taught there to earn money for college — Northeast Missouri State, where she earned a history degree.
At the start of World War II, she was one of a select group chosen for the first officer training class of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps — which quickly became the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). Assigned to the Pentagon, she took classes at nearby Fort Washington, Md., where one of the instructors was George B. Ward Jr., a young army officer and native Delawarean. Teacher and student fell in love and were married in 1943.
Two years later, while the couple was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Katherine was born. Mary Sam gave their daughter the same middle initial as her hero and fellow Missourian, Harry S. Truman. In both cases, the letter doesn’t stand for a name; it’s simply an initial.
When peace came, the Wards moved to Delaware, and George assumed his old job in marketing for the Hercules Powder Co. A son, George III, joined the family in 1947, and Mary Sam managed motherhood while earning two master’s degrees at the University of Delaware. She became a writer and a teacher, mainly at the long-gone Alma Moore College in Wilmington, where she taught American history and served as dean of social studies.
Mary Sam received many awards during her lifetime, including Girl Scouting’s highest honor, the Thanks Badge. She was the 1979 Delaware Mother of the Year, and helped found the Hall of Fame of Delaware Women in 1981.
Shop, Not Home Ec
The two Ward children grew up active, smart, and precocious. Katherine entered first grade a year early, attended public school until ninth grade, and early on displayed a disdain for societal norms: In junior high she tried to enroll in a shop course, but the school didn’t want girls going near all those power tools. She was urged to take home economics instead.
Playing a mean harmonica is just one of Ward’s many talents. Photo provided.
“Why would I do that?” she says today. “I already knew how to sew and cook.” (She made her own clothes, including her high school graduation dress, and prepared the family’s Thanksgiving dinner when she was 12.)
She and her brother loved the outdoors, and they spent many summer days roaming the fields at their maternal grandparents’ Missouri farm or hiking, fishing, and boating at the family’s lake house in Towanda, Pa.
Ward went on to Tower Hill School, where she excelled academically, and played field hockey and softball (second base, left field), in addition to playing the flute in the band.
She enrolled at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a secondary teaching certificate, meanwhile satisfying her athletic Jones by joining the women’s golf team.
Bucknell Romance
Much like her mother’s assignment to Fort Washington, the move to Lewisburg led to marriage. Jim Smigie, a record-setting co-captain on the Bison swim team, caught Ward’s eye, and vice versa. (“He never lost a meet and he missed qualifying for the Olympic team by four-tenths of a second,” she says proudly.) They got married in June 1966.
In 2003, with then-Sen. Joe Biden,
who was among the speakers at the NFPW national conference in Wilmington. Photo provided.
Smigie was on active duty with the Coast Guard for a few years, making life a bit peripatetic for the young couple. They moved from Delaware to San Francisco to Boston, where Ward earned a master’s in English and Irish literature from Simmons College. After his Coast Guard stint, Smigie went to work for DuPont, which led to moves to Virginia, Minnesota, and New Jersey before they settled in Wilmington. (In all, Ward has lived in 11 states).
They have two sons, Michael and Steven. A full participant in her boys’ activities, Ward sometimes characteristically ignored gender roles: When no father stepped up to serve as Steven’s Cub Scout pack master, the former Girl Scout summer camp counselor took the job.
In 1989, Mary Sam was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Ward’s father had died the previous year, so she, Jim, and the boys moved from New Jersey to the house in Westover Hills where she grew up to be her mother’s caregivers. Mary Sam died in 2000, and later that year was honored as one of NFPW’s Women of the Millennium at the Alaska conference.
Building on a Legacy
Ward expanded on her mother’s legacy by not only leading the DPA to national prominence but also engaging in myriad civic and church activities. For several years she was president of the Prison Arts Advisory Board for the Delaware Department of Correction. As a board member of the Delaware Coalition for Open Government, she helped lead COG’s successful effort to get a bill passed in August creating an Office of the Inspector General for the First State.
At the NFPW’s 2007 National Conference, Ward received first place in Book Editing from NFPW President Marsha Shuler. Photo provided.
She has served as lector and communion assistant at Christ Church Christiana Hundred, and has used her considerable culinary skills to prepare food for the unhoused. She’s the longtime committee chair for the annual Christ Church Green Show — a fundraising event for various Delaware charities.
Professionally, Ward has made her mark as a writer and, especially, as an editor. In the last 25 years, she has edited memoirs, novels, poetry, scholarly works, religious, young adult fiction, and crisis management. Nearly all of them have won state and national awards.
As their editor, she tells writers: “I always will be honest with you: about what I read and about what I think would be helpful in regard to changes. Whatever I say to you is meant only to be helpful, and bottom line, it is your article, story or book, and you are the final arbiter of what is — or is not — to be done.
“Once on the job, I am a grammar nerd but also a ferocious fact checker.”
(Full disclosure: Whenever I’m stumped on a grammar issue, whether for a story or in “The War on Words” column, I consult Katherine, who invariably responds in detail, often with asides about related — or semi-related — subjects.)
One of her editing jobs was the 2006 memoir Write Home for Me by Australian journalist Jean Lamensdorf, who spent a year working for the Australian Red Cross in field hospitals near South Vietnam’s front lines. By the second week of publication the book was number one on the bestseller list in South Australia — with The Da Vinci Code at number eight.
DPA Highlights
Ward’s three decades as DPA executive director have been marked by many personal highlights, including:
• In 2003, she organized the NFPW’s national conference, which drew several hundred communications professionals to Wilmington. She corralled featured speakers such as former CNN World Affairs correspondent Ralph Begleiter, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Sharon Kelly Baker of Teleduction in Wilmington, HBO VP Jay Roewe, bestselling Delaware author Julianna Baggott, CBS News White House correspondent Jim Axelrod, and U. S. Sen. Joe Biden. The session is considered the gold standard for NFPW national conferences.
• She was named the 2007 DPA Communicator of Achievement, the organization’s highest honor. In accepting the award, she remarked, “What could be cooler than being the 007 DPA Communicator of Achievement!”
• In 2014, Ward received the NFPW’s highest honor, the President’s Award, for exceptional service that included moving the state and national communications contests from a hard-copy format to an all-electronic system. (Unlike many of her contemporaries, Ward has transitioned smoothly from the analog world to the digital.)
Smigie is by her side at most local and national events, and serves as the DPA’s unofficial photographer.
Disparate Hobbies
Slim and soft-spoken, Ward projects a gentle mien, and her many hobbies reflect that nature — to a point. She likes to garden, knit, sew, and cook — her 10-bean soup is the stuff of legend at DPA and Christ Church events.
But some of her interests are a bit disparate from those quiet pastimes. She played organized softball for many years before, to quote her, “hanging up my spikes” at 40. She likes to hike, and she played golf until a few years ago.
True to her agrarian heritage, Ward is handy with tools, and says, half-seriously, “I was born to be a carpenter; my favorite Christmas present was a radial arm saw.” In several of the houses she and Smigie have owned, she has added crown molding, chair rail and door trim.
She insists she is in no way a musician, but she can still play the flute, as well as the organ that sits in her Westover Hills dining room.
Her preferred instrument, though, is the harmonica, which she mastered when she was a youngster. She owns several and usually breaks out her favorite during the Christmas holidays. Karen Jessee, a long-time friend and DPA member, recalls that, one Christmas, after their gift exchange, “As we were leaving her house, Katherine came out and played ‘Silent Night’ on the harmonica in the driveway . . . and she was good! I don’t know squat about the harmonica, but I know it brought tears to my eyes in that snowy driveway.”
Ward dotes on her two granddaughters and grandson, and says her favorite writing project was “publishing” books of stories, poems, and art produced by her granddaughters 12 years ago, when they were 6 and 8.
Always an advocate for young journalists, she was co-director of NFPW’s national High School Communications Contest for years. At its height, she says, the Delaware high school contest attracted 600 entries. That number has dwindled in recent years, reaching a low of about 30 last year.
“When newspapers started to go down, high schools followed suit, and very few are publishing papers now,” she says.
Ward calls the fourth estate layoffs troubling and the future of journalism “worrisome,” but adds: “Which is not to say there are not some really fine journalists out there, and there are a good number of them in Delaware.”
Among them is Beth Miller, former News Journal reporter, now science writer at the University of Delaware, and the 2011 DPA Communicator of Achievement.
“Journalists are an endangered species, in my opinion, and they face many different challenges,” Miller says. “They need much more encouragement and cheerleading than they ever get. That’s why I treasure Katherine Ward. An ardent supporter of journalism and freedom of information, she has been a relentless advocate for the free press.”
Ward plans to continue being an advocate for some time to come. The hardy octogenarian is still able to pull two or three all-nighters a week editing manuscripts. And, she says, “I’m determined to live to 100.”
Take it from those who know her: Don’t bet against it.
What Colleagues Say About Katherine Ward
Katherine’s observations and insights come wrapped in collegial warmth, humor and the kind of wisdom and savvy gained by experience. She is a skillful, intelligent coach, sharing her goodness, knowledge, and joy of living in a world that needs exactly those things. I love her, I do!
— Beth Miller, former News Journal reporter, now science writer at the University of Delaware
Katherine Ward has made immense contributions to journalism in the State of Delaware. Long into the future, the work of journalists will benefit from Katherine’s work with the Delaware Coalition for Open Government. She can spot a Freedom of Information Act violation or a First Amendment infringement a mile away.
— Mark Fowser, news reporter and anchor, WDEL AM
Katherine has been the backbone of the Delaware Press Association for as long as I can remember. Her work to bring journalists together — to learn, to collaborate and to work in service to the community — is an inspiration.
— Allison Levine, publisher and CEO, Spotlight Delaware
Katherine has given her time, talent, and energy to the DPA and its events, particularly the communications contest. She’s turned a demanding process into something thoughtful and inspiring, honoring not just the craft of journalism but the people behind it. Her care and dedication have strengthened our work and lifted our community.
— Maria Hess, assistant vice president of Executive Communications at Wilmington University, and former editor-in-chief of Delaware Today Magazine
