Terry Ford: SWOSU-Sayre Instructor With the Write Stuff

May 5, 2023 News
terry-ford

May 5, 2023

By Landry Brewer

Terry Ford became a teacher to make English fun. And for the health insurance.

The summer after graduating from Sayre High School in 1983, Terry (Callahan) Ford took her first class at Sayre Junior College. That fall she took another 18 hours—a heavy college class load.

She had fun there. She met a lot of people and made a lot of friends.

She liked one guy she met there so much that she married him.

Terry Callahan had a physical education class called “Miler” with Troy Ford. Ford boasted that he could do twice as many sit-ups as his female classmate. He couldn’t.

He may have lost that bet, but he eventually won her heart. They married a few years later.

When Ford transferred to the University of Oklahoma, she took those 21 SJC hours with her. She’d made all A’s, which was a good thing.

With distractions aplenty in a relatively large college town far from home, students sometimes don’t fare as well academically as they would like. “I was so thankful to have that under my belt,” Ford said of her hometown college credit. “It really helped my overall GPA.”

Ford adjusted to OU life and earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism.

Asked why she pursued a writing career, she credits educational encouragement from her high school English teachers. They praised her writing as a teenager and even selected her to participate in SWIM—SWOSU’s annual interscholastic competition—where she placed third in English.

“I thought perhaps I did have some little bit of skill in that area,” Ford said.

After a brief stint as a photographer in Hawaii, Ford returned to western Oklahoma in 1988. To pad her resume and hopefully land a journalism job in Tulsa or Dallas eventually, she began submitting stories to her hometown newspaper, the Sayre Record.

The paper’s owners were so impressed, they hired Ford full time as a photographer and reporter. “I did everything from breaking news to obits to school board and city council meetings,” Ford said.

But her favorite assignment was the “Heritage Highlight,” several stories which allowed her to dig into the history of local people, places, and events. She even helped the newspaper win an Oklahoma Heritage Society award for the series.

Though Ford loved working for the Record, she was making minimum wage and didn’t have health insurance. She and Troy wanted kids, so insurance was a must.

So she pounded the pavement in Sayre. Accessed the asphalt, actually.

She drove around Sayre looking for the best opportunities for women. “I noticed that the teachers seemed to have the nicest homes, so for a woman earning a second income for the family, education seemed like the best opportunity,” Ford said.

Ford became certified to teach English by taking classes through SWOSU, and Sayre Public Schools Superintendent Paul Conner hired her in 1992.

Ford and some other local ladies carpooled to Weatherford to continue taking graduate night classes, and she earned a master’s degree from SWOSU.

Teaching junior high English was, by her admission, the hardest work she’s ever done. “Junior high students wiggle and giggle A LOT,” Ford said.

She soon became the permanent junior and senior English teacher at SHS. She thought that she could make English fun for her students, but she also had a lot of fun, especially teaching Shakespeare.

Then, more than a decade later, an opportunity presented itself.

In 2004, SWOSU-Sayre English faculty member Mike McKinney passed away, creating an opening. Some of the university faculty who knew Ford encouraged her to apply.

“They said I’d never have to do duty at a basketball game again,” Ford said.

She’d also make more money, and she thought highly of the SWOSU-Sayre faculty, especially Tommye Davis. “Her basketball All-State photograph lived on in majesty inside the Sayre High School trophy case,” Ford said.

She got the job. And nearly 20 years later, she’s gotten to work with wonderful people at SWOSU-Sayre whom she treasures, and she’s still having fun teaching students on the same campus where she began her own college career.

She frequently sees former students who tell her how much fun they had in her English class.

Which was her goal when she began teaching in 1992. That and the health insurance.

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