Four decades of hearing her alarm sound at 4:30 a.m. is a tradition that looks as though it might soon cease for the only person ever employed as an athletic secretary at Whiteland Community High School.
On June 18, Patty Ford, who for 14 school years has helped lighten the workload for athletic directors Butch Zike, Ken Sears and David Edens, will sit down at her desk and tend to her responsibilities for the final time.
It’s a job Ford has thoroughly enjoyed and will miss.
“I will miss the people that I work with, and I will miss the kids,” said the 70-year-old Ford, a 1969 Whiteland graduate known then as Patty Magennis. “There are a lot of kids who have gone through here who are still in the community and remember me, and I remember them.”
Retirement’s gain is the school system’s loss.
In 1981, Ford became a library assistant inside the same building in which she now works, only then the high school’s north annex was the middle school. Her career eventually moved other directions — presiding over after-school detentions, being in charge of attendance and working in the IT department.
By the summer of 2007, Whiteland had grown to the point where an athletic secretary at the high school was seen as a necessity, not a luxury. Zike, the AD from 1975-79 and again starting in 1988, had help running the department his final five years before retiring in 2012.
“I did that job for so many years without a secretary … my job was just to survive every day. You had so much paperwork to do, you couldn’t get your job done,” Zike said. “Patty is extremely efficient. She is conscientious and is going to get the job done and get it done the best way she can.”
Ford’s knowledge and worth ethic was a godsend for Zike, Sears (AD from 2012-20) and Edens, the former Clark Pleasant Middle School athletic director who is applying the final touches to his first school year as a high school AD.
Once retired, Ford — the second of James and Waunetta Magennis’ seven children — and her husband of nearly 52 years, Roger, will turn their attention to helping their eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren in any way they can. The couple’s children, June and Matt, graduated from Whiteland in 1989 and 1993, respectively.
Patty Ford has taken up a hobby (stenciling porch leaners) and hopes to eventually get the family dog, 14-month-old Cooper, a golden retriever/lab mix, certified as a therapy dog in order to spread his infectious personality at local hospitals and/or nursing homes.
Said Ford: “I’m going to have plenty to do.”
Edens, a 1994 Whiteland graduate, admits as a middle school student he was more than a little terrified of Ford during her days monitoring detentions.
Now he’s wondering how the Whiteland athletic department will function without her.
“I came from the middle school world where I didn’t have a secretary or a Patty Ford,” Edens said. “The biggest value is just the things she just knows to get done — rosters, buses, contacting other schools … all the little things no one thinks about until you’ve had to do it without her.
“You don’t want to talk someone who’s ready to retire out of retiring, but I’ve told her several times you can stay right here as long as you want. The new person has big shoes to fill, for sure.”
