Commander
Carter Studdert Ward
1942-2021
Commander Carter Studdert Ward, retired Navy Reserve, passed away on September 28, 2021, at the age of seventy-nine.
Commander Ward was born in Willington, North Carolina to John Ward Jr. and Anne Lindsay Ward (nee Studdert) on September 6, 1942. Carter’s father, John worked as an accountant for the Navy ShipYard in Willington supervising the building of ships for the United States Navy World War II effort. After the war John moved his family to Whiteville, North Carolina, and opened his own accounting business. It was in Whiteville that Carter grew up and spent his boyhood years.
Carter graduated from North Carolina State with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and began a career in the Navy with Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island and the Civil Engineer Corps Officers School in Port Hueneme, California. His subsequent tours of duty took him to Crane, Indiana, the Bahamas, Gulfport, Mississippi, Cutler, Maine, Vietnam, Guam and Cuba. It was in Vietnam where he supervised the construction of roads, bridges and jet fighter hangers that he was exposed to the Agent Orange that eventually took his life. Along the way the Navy sent him for graduate studies in Utilities Engineering at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he earned his Master’s Degree. Carter once said that if you add all the shipboard time he had in his Navy career, you might come up with a two-hour total.
Carter maintained his Navy affiliation primarily with the Seabee reserves where he retired as a Commander. His most interesting reserve assignments included the five years he spent as Operations Officer and Chief-of-Staff for the reserve Seabees on the Atlantic coast. These assignments gave him the opportunity to island hop in the Caribbean from Bermuda to Panama.
At the conclusion of his active-duty years, he turned his interest to utilities by pursuing graduate studies at Indiana University in Utilities
Management. From there he began his Federal Civil Service Career applying his utility knowledge as a Public Utilities Specialist for the Navy, Western Area Power Administration, Defense Logistics Agency and Department of Energy. While working at the Defense Energy Support Center he was instrumental in establishing the Natural Gas Procurement Program that many federal installations use today, saving the government millions of dollars.
During an eighteen-year hiatus from the civil service, Carter started his own energy and utilities consulting business, CTW Ltd. The business supported the Department of Energy in Albuquerque finding solutions to utility issues as a DOE contractor and project facilitator for Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC). Then in 2008 he returned to Washington DC to manage utility and ESPC issues for the National Nuclear Security Administration, and stayed there until he retired in March of 2018.
Carter died in the Tennessee State Veteran’s Home in Murfreesboro on Tuesday September 28, 2021, of service-related injuries from Agent Orange exposure serving in Vietnam.
All Carter’s hobbies involved his family: as a young boy sailing with his father and brother, and as a father and husband, photographing his family, journaling about their times and activities and gathering his family history: names, dates and stories of those passed on and living.
Carter is survived by his wife of 43 years, Sylvia Spicer Ward, and three children, Natalie, Tyler, and Whitney. Natalie is married to Jeremy Bylund, and has four children: Christopher, Caroline, Catherine, and Charlotte. Tyler wed Kimberly Rowberry and has twin girls, Sadie Ann and Daisy Ann. Whitney married Curtis Wilkinson and has two boys: Sterling and Tristan: another little baby girl will join them in late January. Carter’s older brother, John Ward III and his wife, Virginia Nell
(nee Nichols) also survive.
Published by Albuquerque Journal from Jan. 2 to Jan. 9, 2022.
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