LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

In Memoriam, Spring 2015

 

Owen Brough, who worked for more than a decade in the Foundation’s Middle East offices beginning in 1962, died in January.
 
Mr. Brough began at Ford as a program specialist in agricultural economics in the Office of Overseas Development in Beirut, working on a two-year assignment. After a year away he became a program specialist in Beirut and then held a series of positions, primarily in agricultural development.
 
He became a program adviser on agriculture in 1968 and then a project specialist in the Beirut office. In 1972 he was appointed deputy director of administration for the Arid Lands Agricultural Development program (ALAD) and then project specialist in agricultural economics. He transferred to the Cairo office soon before retiring from the Foundation in 1976.
 
After leaving Ford he became deputy director of the International Development Research Center/International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (IDRC/ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria.
 
Jennie M. Amadei, an administrative secretary in several offices at the Foundation and a classically trained musician who performed as a soloist at many of the Caroling in the Garden events during Christmas, died in January.
 
Ms. Amadei had worked for several corporations before joining Ford, including International Business Machines, the International Standard Engineering Company at its office in Rome and the Francis I. duPont company, also in Rome.
 
She went to work at Ford as a secretary in the Asia and Pacific office in 1970, then in Higher Education and Research and the Office of Communications. In 1977 she was named administrative secretary to David Davis in the communications office and then executive assistant to Fred Friendly, who then was a program adviser.
 
She moved on to be a secretary in the Human Rights and Governance office in 1981 until her retirement in 1984, leaving to rejoin IBM at its Westchester County complex.
 
Rachel Duira Baldinger Ward, widow of the late F. Champion Ward, who had been a vice president of the Foundation, died in January in Branford, Conn., at the age of 101.
 
She had been involved in many social causes throughout her life and was described in her obituary in the online news service Greenwich (Conn.) Time as a “politic champion of the disenfranchised”.
 
Among her many activities, she was on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Greenwich, where she and her husband lived after he returned from India in 1959 to work in the New York office; lobbied on behalf of health aides and domestic workers; served on the board of the Fair Housing Coalition; was a delegate to the Pacem in Terris conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1967; served on the Greenwich Board of Social Services; and was the founding president of the National Conference on Social Welfare. 
 
Mrs. Ward, a graduate of Oberlin College, was elected the first female president of the Alumni Association and in 1996 received the college’s Alumni Medal. In 2010, the Alumni Association named its new center in her honor.
 
Among her survivors are three children, Geoffrey C. Ward of New York City, Andrew Ward of Davis, Calif., and Helen Ward of South Portland, Maine.
 
David Henry Clark, who worked for nearly three decades on development projects in Southeast Asia, including time with the Foundation, died April 15 in Orono, Maine, at the age of 82.
 
Mr. Clark worked for Ford as assistant director of the Economic Research Centre at the National University of Singapore. His work as a specialist in education finance for several international aid agencies also took him to Indonesia, Bangladesh, Laos, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
 
During most of that time he was on leave from the University of Maine, where he was a professor in the economics department. 
 
A native of Tulsa, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Oklahoma and a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.
 
Frederick Bohen, who was hired as assistant to the president in 1969 and became program officer in charge of Public Policy Studies in 1972 just prior to retiring from the Foundation, died March 15.
 
Alexandrina (Reena) Marcelo, a program officer for Asian programs and then in the Human Development and Reproductive Health program, died in January. She had worked in those positions from 1996 to 1998.
 
Josephine Brune, travel manager in the Office of the Secretary from 1995 to 2008, died in March.

 

 

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