Queer Places:
Princeton University (Ivy League), 110 West College, Princeton, NJ 08544
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
Oberlin
College
Mount Hope Cemetery
Rochester, Monroe County, New York, USA
Addison Werner Ward (January 13, 1930 - April 11, 1965) was Clara Louise "Clayla" Werner Ward's second son. "Ad" or, jokingly, "George" was friend of William Meredith, who was a 28-year-old instructor of creative writing when Addison entered Princeton in 1947. So successfully did they bridge the gap between their ages and that between teacher and student that by the end of the spring term Ad could report to his parents that "Bill. . . has asked me to spend part of the summer with him -- the place hasn't been chosen as yet, but will probably be New York or his native Darien, Conn. The object of the sojourn will be to, as he put it, put in a six hour day learning how to write poetry. This is being interpreted as reading and writing". An accident in June ("Ad got broken," says Meredith) shifted the locale of the project. His pupil was confined to his family home at Grove Place, Rochester, NY, and a cottage in Canandaigua, so Meredith went to Rochester in July, at Clayla's invitation. Their work prospered. Before the end of the year Poetry agreed to publish a fine lyric by Addison.
After graduating summa cum laude, Addison took a master's degree in English at the University of Rochester in 1952 and a Ph.D. at Yale, where he taught for five years. His letters home, even the earliest of them from St. Paul's School, are full of dash and brio, but he is especially entertaining on graduate studies in the middle 1950's. On 12 June 1954 he married Mary Helen Chappell, and William Meredith wrote them a poem as a wedding gift. On Palm Sunday, 1965, a line of tornadoes took about 250 lives in the Midwest. One of them flattened every building in the farming hamlet of Pittsfield Center, Ohio, and killed nine of the 50 inhabitants. Among the dead were Dr. Addison Ward, a 35 year-old assistant professor of English at Oberlin College, and his son Peter, aged seven. Mary Helen was buried up to the shoulders in the pile of bricks that had crushed her husband and child, but she survived, as did another son, Andrew, and the five-year-old Edith, who was blown out of the house and later found in the road.
My published books:
