From left, Evelyn Ward in 1927, 1948 and on her 100th birthday in 2025. Courtesy photos
Evelyn Irene Ward died on July 4, 2026, a few weeks before her 101st birthday in Mount Pleasant, SC, where she had moved in early 2025. She is survived by son Ralph Jr. and partner Michael Silver, grandchildren Doug and Emily, and former daughter-in-law Christina Ward.
She inspired her family and those around her to be curious about the world and to meet adversity with resilience and renewed determination. She was forever thankful for the many kind neighbors, friends, nurses and aides who helped her remain independent into her late nineties. They kept her car running and the kitchen plumbing in working order, left bags of garden vegetables, eggs and baked goodies at her gate, supported her volunteer work at the library’s used book store, and helped her back on her feet after each setback.
Evelyn was born in 1925 at home in an upstairs bedroom in Portland, Oregon, the oldest of four siblings. Her earliest memories involved the Great Depression: her father’s chronic unemployment, overheard heated exchanges about money for rent and groceries, her younger sister’s untreated scarlet fever. She didn’t see a doctor or dentist until her college years. The family endured due to close neighbors, backyard gardens and chicken coops, berries from neighborhood farms, plentiful salmon in the rivers, clams and oysters on the seashore.
In 1940 they moved to the remote Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, where pre-war construction jobs drew workers to build defenses around the Puget Sound. The family of six rented a two-bedroom wooden cottage set in a remote meadow on five acres near Port Ludlow, surrounded by a deep forest still frequented by cougars and bears. They pumped water from a well by hand and used a wood stove for cooking and heat. There was an outhouse set back in the woods. The meadow supported a large vegetable garden, fruit trees, chickens, goats and an occasional pig or cow. Each summer they spent hours in the steaming kitchen to can hundreds of quarts of fruit, jam, vegetables, and fish.
She remembered wrenching changes soon after her 16th birthday: food and gasoline rationing, blackout curtains, and increasingly ominous news on the radio as the West Coast braced for invasion after Pearl Harbor. Yet life carried on much as before: she helped her mother raise her younger sisters, and they all helped with the interminable housework. Saturdays from dawn to
dusk were devoted to laundry and ironing followed by baths in the kitchen wash tub set behind a screen. Her mother made most of their dresses with a pedal-driven Singer machine.
She developed a sense of fierce independence that she would credit to her father’s claim that higher education was wasted on women. She excelled in school and loved libraries. Her mother quietly helped her apply to the University of Washington and rode with her by ferry and bus across the Puget Sound to enroll in classes. In those years it was still possible for a student to earn her own way through college by part-time work, and it was one of her proudest achievements to graduate cum laude in 1948 after supporting herself with jobs in a student cooperative, waitressing on the Ludlow-Edmonds ferry and working at the Indian Island Naval Weapons Station to inventory bombs being offloaded from ships returning from action in the Pacific. After college she worked almost continuously outside the home until age 80, and even then she was reluctant to stop.
She met her husband, Ralph Sr., in 1957 while working as a secretary at the Bangor Naval Station near Seattle, where he was leaving the Navy after serving in World War II and the Korean War. Ralph was a New Mexico native, and they moved to Los Alamos in 1962 with their toddler son, Ralph Jr. She enjoyed working at the Lab for 43 years, first in J-6 until 1968, then in the main library until 1979, and MST-9 (later MEE-9) until 1993. From that point she worked in numerous temporary contract positions until her full retirement in 2005. She was full of questions, endlessly curious to learn new things, excited by new discoveries. At the same she chafed at the many career inequities most women faced.
In 1964 she and Ralph Sr. began building a house in the Pajarito Acres subdivision. They both had survived near-poverty childhoods where neighbors lost their homes and bank failures were endemic, so were determined to build without a mortgage. Month by month as their savings permitted, they used an old Dodge panel truck to haul loads of building materials up the hill from Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Ralph Sr. did much of the construction himself. In late 1968 they moved their belongings down from the quad they were renting on Arizona Street. The new place was barely habitable. They gradually finished floors, windowsills and closets, installed carpet, planted trees and shrubs and eventually paved the rutted driveway using a hand concrete mixer. Over the next 57 years this became a beloved home, and when Ralph Sr. died in 2001 it became her ‘High Lonesome’ where she could sit in her old green recliner and look 25 miles across the valley, watching for those fleeting moments at sunset when the Sangre de Christo mountains would flare to crimson. And then, some nights after the colors had just faded, a brilliant golden full moon might emerge from those peaks and lift up steadily into the enchanted sky where a few first stars were now shining. She never failed to be delighted.
The family is planning a memorial celebration party for Evelyn at ‘High Lonesome’ in early August for family, neighbors and friends.