OUR NEIGHBORS: To-do list keeps octogenarian busy

WASILLA — After a life filled with public service, Harold Ward willingly admits he has one more chance to get things done.

“I’m 85 years old,” Ward said with a knowing smile. “If I’m going to do anything, I need to do it now.”

Anyone remotely involved with the veterans community around the Valley is familiar with Ward. Those who don’t know him as the long-time chaplain for the Wasilla Veterans of Foreign Wars post know him for his involvement with the American Legion, Pioneer Home and senior centers around the area.

A commitment to something larger is not something that came with old age for Ward. He first served his country as a 15-year-old boy in his hometown of Sitka, running telegrams for the Army. He claimed he was the youngest employee on the government’s payroll.

“It was important to know the people you were delivering messages to, know how they would react, know how to approach them,” Ward said. “I knew how to make the personal deliveries to someone. I sold the director on that.”

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Ward was eager to enlist. He spent the holidays with his family, then signed his life to the Army the day after Christmas in 1941.

“Two days later, I was on a troop ship to Tacoma, Wash.,” Ward said.

He joined the Army Air Corps in Bakersfield, Calif., was transferred to Texas, and ended up in Roswell, N.M., where he was an ambulance driver for a test flight center.

As the war intensified, Ward was assigned to the 97th Infantry Division, an amphibious unit training for deployment to the Pacific. However, as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe, the 97th deployed to Germany.

“We were right at the edge of the front. We were going through towns that were completely destroyed,” Ward said.

When his unit was redeployed to the Pacific, Ward had enough points to be honorably discharged from the service.

Back in Roswell, Ward went to work as a salesman for Folgers Coffee. Driving home from one sales trip, the traffic stopped. Up ahead, he saw some black government cars come out of the desert, turn on the road and speed past.

“We found out later they had found some remains of some type of aircraft that crashed out there. They took them to the same hangar I drove an ambulance to,” Ward said. “It was all very top-secret.”

After meeting his current wife during a relocation to Tacoma, Ward started thinking about Alaska. Ward’s grandmother was from Alaska, and he met some people who knew that side of his family living in Kodiak.

Ward came up to the island in 1965 after hearing there was construction work after the tsunami generated by the Good Friday Earthquake. Working as a Teamster, he moved his wife and six children up two years later. They stayed there until all the children were out of high school.

Ward and his wife then moved to Anchorage, but the island would play a major role in the next stage of his life.

In the late 1970s, International Seafoods of Alaska announced their plans to build a processing plant in Kodiak harbor. International Seafoods is a subsidiary of the Unification Church, a group at that time led by a Korean minister named Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

“We’re talking about a subversive organization that’s out to overthrow the government and have a one-government world with Moon at the head of it,” Ward said during an interview in 1979.

What ensued, was a battle between Ward and the church he likened to a cult. He said he became committed to getting the church off the island after hearing accounts from past members. He said he spent thousands of dollars of his own money and sacrificed years of work to the cause.

“I paid to bring up a family from Kentucky to tell people in the community what a bad guy (Moon) was,” Ward said. “He needed to be kicked out.”

While International Seafoods eventually established its plant, this type of personal passion is present in whatever Ward does. And for the past three decades, Ward has focused this passion on two causes that speak personally to him: rights of Alaska Natives and veteran affairs.

For his efforts, Ward was tapped to give the invocation at the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention in 1988. He later testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs as to the needs of Native American veterans.

A champion of increased services, Ward was asked by the Alaska House Finance Committee to prepare a report on the level of resources available to Alaska veterans. He took it upon himself to recommend to Sen. Ted Sevens that American troops be provided with candy to hand out to children in the Iraq war. The senator passed the recommendation along, earning a thank you note from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Today, Ward sees veteran involvement at a critical low. Attendance is dismal, as many veterans choose to stay at the bar drinking instead of going to the meetings, he said. Those who do attend look too much like Ward, he said, the wrong generation to ensure a group’s longevity.

That is why, now in his eighth decade, Ward is trying to organize a new veteran support group away from the bar and catering to a younger generation of vets.

“I don’t do this for me. That’s not for me,” Ward said. “I’m looking to go on to eternity and live happily ever after. … But if I’m going to do it, I need to do it (now).”

Contact Todd L. Disher at todd.disher@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.