Casey Parker Ward was born on Dec. 5, 1937 in Minneapolis, the daughter and second child of Margaret and Mark Parker, a newspaper editor and homemaker. She died at her home with her husband in Newcastle on Jan. 16, 2025 at age 87. Casey was named at birth Kay Walbridge Parker, but her older brother Pete gave her the nickname Casey, which stuck for life. Casey attended schools in Minneapolis and Excelsior and worked at age 16 at Smack’s Drive-in as a short-order cook. Casey attended Bates College in Lewiston due to her great admiration for Excelsior’s Congregational minister, who was a Bates graduate. Casey made lifelong friends at Bates and during school holidays stayed at friends’ houses on Nantucket, in New Bedford, and Torrington, Conn.
There was a marvelous variety of jobs, locations, and personalities in Casey’s life. She worked as a switchboard operator in Minneapolis, a door-to-door salesperson for Royal Plastics kitchenware in Topsham, as a query clerk at Johnson’s Wax London headquarters, as Alumnae secretary for the Oldfields School in Glencoe, Md., as the headmaster’s wife at Bush School in Seattle, as a collective member at the Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C., as volunteer coordinator at the Pineland Center in New Gloucester, where she also coordinated Pineland’s Anniversary Celebration, as assistant to the warden at Maine State Prison in Thomaston, as a director at Johnson Hall in Gardiner, and its successive Vaudeville festivals, as secretary and newsletter editor at Chewonki in Wiscasset, as director of the Lincoln Arts Festival in Boothbay Harbor, and moderator of the Festival’s Art Schmoozes for practicing artists, and for 15 years as staff member and printer at the Copy Shop in Wiscasset. Casey got a degree in public administration from the University of Maine in Augusta in 1976.
Casey married John Grant in December 1956 in Minneapolis. After he had completed graduate studies, had a scholarship for study in Oslo, Norway, and taught school for three years in England, Casey subsequently had three children with him: Peggy in 1965, Ian in 1967, both in Maryland, and Patrick 1969 in Washington state. The couple divorced in 1976.
Casey married her second husband, Stephen Ward, in November 1990 after having lived together as a couple in Washington, D.C., Edgecomb, and Newcastle. Steve and Casey met at the Community Justice Project in Waterville, where they both worked with corrections inmates and pre-trial detainees. Years later they co-led weekend workshops with inmates at Maine State Prison on Alternatives to Violence, an opportunity to support rehabilitation in the same prison system they had first worked in together in the 1970s.
Casey first met her dear friends, Nancy and Bob McGuire, at Oldfields School for Girls in Maryland, where John Grant and Bob McGuire were both on the faculty. It was the McGuires who found for Steve and Casey a house lot on Perkins Point Road that was for sale in 1986. Happily, the McGuires’ own residence in Newcastle on River Road was a short walk away.
Steve and Casey traveled extensively, together with the kids and as a couple to St. John in the Virgin Islands, St. John in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Taos, Tucson, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Guatemala, Barbados, the Bahamas, Antigua, and, after Steve’s retirement from Maine’s Public Advocate Office, for three months in Amsterdam, where they had swapped houses with a Dutch couple. Their favorite trip was to England in 1997 using backpacks and train rides to London, Salisbury, Bath, York, Hastings from where Casey’s grandfather emigrated and Pateley Bridge, the town of Steve’s ancestry in Yorkshire.
Beginning in 1996, the couple was the happy owners of a shorefront cottage on Sand Pond in Monmouth where there was plenty of boating, swimming, game playing, and feasting for the three kids and four grandchildren, plus visiting friends from San Francisco, Seattle, Brunswick, and London.
Casey was a great lover of dogs beginning first with a rat terrier, then an English setter, a standard poodle, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, and finally ending with his death in 2024 at age 15, a mixed breed rescue dog named Parker — coincidentally Casey’s maiden name.
Casey had a ready laugh and a strong urge for justice. She was active in Quaker-led prison reform efforts in Washington state and was a member of the Northwest Minority Coalition. Throughout her life she was involved with civil rights, feminist, LBGTQ, and prisoner rights issues. She had many friends of all ages. She stocked the shelves every Monday for Newcastle’s Ecumenical Food Pantry on Tuesdays for more than 10 years.
She leaves behind her loving husband, Steve Ward, of 47 years; and her three children and their spouses, Margaret James and husband, Don James, in Washington, Ian Grant and wife, Michelle Grant, in Maine, and Patrick Grant and wife, Kristin Harward-Grant, in Georgia; as well as four grandchildren, Liam, Ginger, Dillon, and Elle; and many lifelong friends. Special thanks are due to staff from Beacon Hospice, particularly Samantha, Olivia, Ashlyn, and Cory, and to hospice helpers Laney Harlow, Alden and Susan Sproul, and Ian Grant.
A memorial celebration of Casey’s life will be held this coming summer. All who knew her are invited.
Arrangements are under the direction and care of the Strong-Hancock Funeral Home, 612 Main St., Damariscotta, ME 04543. Condolences, and messages for her family, may be expressed by visiting stronghancock.com.
