Wendell Ford

Wendell Ford was born near Owensboro, in Daviess County, Kentucky, on September 8, 1924. He was the son of Ernest M. and Irene Woolfork (Schenk) Ford. His father was a member of the Kentucky Senate and ally of Governor of Kentucky Earle Clements. From 1942 to 1943, he attended the University of Kentucky. The couple had two children. Daughter Shirley (Ford) Dexter was born in 1950 and son Steven Ford was born in 1954. He was trained as an administrative non-commissioned officer and promoted to the rank of technical sergeant on November 17, 1945. Over the course of his service, he received the American Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal and earned the Expert Infantryman Badge and Good Conduct Medal. He was honorably discharged on June 18, 1946. Following the war, Ford returned home to work with his father in the family insurance business, and graduated from the Maryland School of Insurance in 1947. On June 7, 1949, he enlisted in the Kentucky Army National Guard and was assigned to Company I of the 149th Infantry Regimental Combat Team in Owensboro. On August 7, 1949, he was promoted to Second lieutenant of Infantry. In 1949, Ford's company was converted from infantry to tanks, and Ford served as a Company Commander in the 240th Tank Battalion. Promoted to First lieutenant of Armor, he transferred to the inactive Guard in 1956, before being discharged in 1962. ==Political career==

Ford was very active in civic affairs, becoming the first Kentuckian to serve as president of the Junior Chamber International in 1954. While lieutenant governor, he became an honorary member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1969. Governor of Kentucky At the expiration of his term as lieutenant governor, Ford was one of eight candidates to enter the 1971 Democratic gubernatorial primary. He also questioned why Combs would leave his better-paying federal judgeship to run for a second term as governor. During the 1972 legislative session, he created the Department of Finance and Administration, combining the functions of the Kentucky Program Development Office and the Department of Finance. that found that a citizen who had lived in a state for 30 days was resident in that state and thus eligible to vote there. Kentucky's Constitution required residency of one year in the state, six months in the county and sixty days in the precinct to establish voting eligibility. This issue had to be resolved before the 1972 presidential election in November, so Ford called a special legislative session to enact the necessary corrections. All of these measures passed. Despite surgery for a brain aneurysm in June 1972, Ford attended the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. Cook opposed the dam, but Ford supported it and allocated some of the state's budget surplus to its construction. In 1981, prosecutors asked for indictments against Ford and Carroll on racketeering charges, but a grand jury refused. United States Senator Ford entered the Senate in 1974 and was reelected in 1980, 1986, and 1992. He was unopposed in the 1986 and 1992 Democratic primaries. Republicans failed to put forward a viable challenger during any of Ford's re-election bids. In 1980, he defeated septuagenarian former state auditor Mary Louise Foust by 334,862 votes. Ford's 720,891 votes represented 65 percent of the total votes cast in the election, a record for a statewide race in Kentucky. Ford seriously considered leaving the Senate and running for governor again in 1983 and 1991, but decided against it both times. Early in his career, Ford supported a constitutional amendment against desegregation busing. Ford got a late start in the race, and a New York Times writer opined that he overestimated his chances of unseating Cranston. Ford said he was motivated to form the caucus after seeing the work done by Mississippi United States House of Representatives member Sonny Montgomery with the National Guard Association of the United States and the National Guard Bureau. In 1999, the National Guard Bureau presented Ford with the Sonny Montgomery Award, its highest honor. U.S. Senate member Thomas Eagleton from Missouri opined that Ford and Dee Huddleston made "probably the best one-two combination for any state in the Senate." Both were defenders of tobacco, Kentucky's primary cash crop. As he had as governor of Kentucky, Ford gave attention to improving the efficiency of government. While serving on the United States Congressional Joint Committee on Printing during the 101st and 103rd United States Congresses, he saved the government millions of dollars in printing costs by printing in volume and using recycled paper. In 1998, Republican U.S. Senate member John Warner from Virginia sponsored the Wendell H. Ford Government Publications Reform Act of 1998; Ford signed on as a co-sponsor. The bill would have eliminated the United States Congressional Joint Committee on Printing, distributing its authority and functions among the Senate Rules Committee, the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the administrator of the United States Government Printing Office. It would also have centralized government printing services and penalized government agencies who did not make their documents available to the printing office to be printed. Opponents of the bill cited the broad powers granted to the printing office and concerns about the erosion of copyright protection. The bill was reported favorably out of committee, but was squeezed from the legislative calendar by issues related to the impending Impeachment of Bill Clinton. Warner did not return to his chairmanship of the Joint Committee on Printing in the next congress, Ford retired from the Senate, and the bill was not re-introduced. ==Later life, illness and death==

Ford chose not to seek a fifth term in 1998, and retired to Owensboro. He worked for a time as a consultant to Washington lobbying and law firm Dickstein Shapiro. At the time of his retirement, Ford was the longest-serving U.S. Senate member in Kentucky history. In January 2009, Mitch McConnell surpassed Ford's mark of 24 years in the Senate. The Western Kentucky Parkway was also renamed the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway during the administration of Governor Paul E. Patton. In 2009, Ford was inducted into the Kentucky Transportation Hall of Fame. Later in life, Ford taught politics to the youth of Owensboro from the Owensboro Museum of Science and History, which houses a replica of his U.S. Senate office. On July 19, 2014, the Messenger-Inquirer reported that Ford had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Ford died from lung cancer at his home on January 22, 2015, at age 90. He was interred at Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery. ==See also==