To friends and relatives of Pamela Thomas Ward:
There will be a memorial service for Pamela at St. Thomas Church 1 West 53rd Street (Corner of 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue) at 10:30 AM on Friday September 16, 2022. Following the service from noon to 3:00 PM there will be a reception at The New York Yacht Club, 37 West 44th Street.
All are invited, so please pass this information on to anyone who might be interested.
Request for Photographs:
We plan to have a display monitor at the reception showing photographs and other memorabilia of Pam in a continuous loop. If you have a photo or anything else that you would like included, please send in a copy, either by e-mail to [email protected] or by mail to:
Sedgwick A. Ward
P. O. Box 273
Shelter Island, NY 11964.
With best wishes
Sedge Ward
Pamela Thomas Ward, a prominent New York editor and author of 14 nonfiction books, died in NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on May 15. The cause was cancer according to her husband, Sedgwick A. Ward. She was 76.
A native of Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, Ms. Ward graduated from Ohio Wesleyan College with a degree in English Literature. After completing the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe College, she came to New York to forge a career in book publishing. During her years as an editor at William Morrow & Company, where she was mentored by the renowned editor, Narcisse Chamberlain, and then at Crown Publishers, she acquired and edited over 150 books, specializing in editions requiring complex production, including books on photography, antiques and sports. Cookbooks were a special interest, and she was an active member of the New York Women’s Culinary Alliance, an organization of professionals in the food and wine industry.
She went on to become Executive Editor at Prentice Hall Press and Vice President and Associate Publisher at Dorling Kindersley, establishing the New York office of the British firm.
Ms. Ward was also a prolific free-lance writer and ghostwriter. One of her favorite projects was Greenmarket: The Complete Guide to New York City’s Farmers Markets with 51 Recipes. Her most personal effort, Fatherless Daughters: Turning the Pain of Loss to the Power of Forgiveness, was about her own experiences growing up without her father who died when she was a child.
As a ghost writer, she worked on a range of subjects. Ain’t Nothin’ as Sweet as My Baby with Jett Williams, the little-known daughter of singer Hank Williams, was called “spellbinding” by Variety. Reversing Dry Eye Syndrome with Dr. Steven Masking was voted Best Book of the Year by the American Association of University Presses and Best Consumer Book of the Year by Library Journal.
For the 16 years leading up to her retirement in 2018, she pursued a number of her own projects, while serving as a part-time editor for children’s books at Sesame Workshop, where she commissioned books for Sesame Street and co-wrote Ready for School: A Parent’s Guide to Playful Learning for Children ages 2 to 5, published in 2019.
Pamela’s extraordinary empathy and outreach resulted in an unmatched ability to make and keep friends, and she will be remembered fondly by a legion of mourners from all walks and degrees of life, from many different regions of the United States and from abroad. This vast army includes her high school and college friends, a large swath of the publishing industry, people she knew from group rentals in the early days, colleagues many years her junior from Sesame Street and scores of others with whom she crossed paths and whose friendship she never relinquished.
New York City was her beloved adopted home for over fifty years, the subway her preferred mode of travel. She attended numberless ballet performances on its stages, developing a passionate love for, and broad critical knowledge of, classical and modern dance. She was never at a loss for a restaurant recommendation and always au courant with Broadway and the museums. She traveled to Europe whenever she could afford it and to the British Isles, particularly to Wales, the home of her paternal ancestors.
Accompanying her around Manhattan, it was startling how often she would point to a building and say, “I used to work there,” or “I had an apartment in that building,” or “my friend, so and so, lived (or worked) there.” This would be true on both the East and West Sides, but her deepest and most abiding love was for Greenwich Village where she lived for nearly forty years, supported with zeal the campaigns of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and luxuriated in the Village ambience.
When circumstances dictated a move to Brooklyn, she embraced that borough and her neighborhood, Midwood, with enthusiasm. Other favorite venues included Sagaponack on the east end of Long Island, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Guilford, Vermont where she bonded with the members of a commune, Total Loss Farm. Three years ago she moved to Shelter Island with the intention of becoming a member of the year-round community there, volunteered to work in the archives of the Shelter Island Historical Society and was elected to its Board of Directors. She also volunteered for the Shelter Island Educational Foundation and served on its Board.
She is survived by her husband, two stepchildren, five step-grandchildren, her brothers, Robert Thomas and Stephan Thomas, her stepsister, Gail Negilski and stepbrother, Gregory Mathews. Her brother, Herbert, predeceased her. Also surviving are ten nieces and nephews and many great nieces and great nephews. Her surviving cousins include James N. Land, Jr., his son James N. Land, III and granddaughter, Olivia Land, Margery Tucker, her sons Andrew, David and Jeffrey and grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in her honor to: Heifer International https://www.heifer.org; Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation https://www.villagepreservation.org; or The Shelter Island Historical Society, https://www.shelterislandhistorical.org
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