Retired Cocke County optometrist Dr. Nathan Ford will be the sixth recipient of the Cocke County Education Foundation's prestigious Celebrate Our Successes award.

The Foundation honors an alumna of the Cocke County school system each year for his/her exceptional successes.

Ford's will accept this honor at the Foundation's banquet on Thursday, March 11, at 6:30 p.m. at Carson Springs Baptist Conference Center.

A native of Del Rio, Dr. Ford is the son of the late John and Anna (Davis) Ford, tenth of their twelve children.

His own educational career began in the one-room Timber Ridge School where Margaret "Mag" Leach was his teacher.

The next year he transferred to the larger Harmony Grove School where his older brother Jack Ford was one of his teachers.

During his years at Harmony Grove, Ford credits the late Robert Seay and the late Nathan Jones for instilling in him a strong desire to learn and succeed.

"They were the kind of teachers who made you want to excel," he said. "If they assigned eight math problems, you wanted to do ten."

A Cocke County High School senior in 1945, he missed his Class Night ceremony to be sworn into the United States Navy. "I was supposed to dance the minuet with Rozelle West," he laughed.

Following his discharge from the service, Ford took advantage of the GI Bill to further his education, eventually graduating from the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis.

He returned to Cocke County and became Newport's first full-time optometrist.

In 1952, he followed in his family's political tradition, running for and being elected to the Cocke County Board of Education. He was 27.

For the next four years (1952-1956), he served through an era of consolidation of many of Cocke County's one- and two-room schools. Eventually the number of schools in Cocke County dropped from 56 to 28 with the construction of Del Rio, Smoky Mountain, and Centerview Elementary Schools.

More political service included four terms in Tennessee's General Assembly as a state representative.

While in Nashville, Ford saw great strides in Tennessee's vocational education programs and the adoption of the Career Ladder program. He also testified before the Education Committee in a successful plea to leave Newport Grammar School as a one-school system.

Ford's contributions to Cocke County are not limited to the medical and educational fields. He has served as Cocke County Economic Development Commission chairman, Chamber of Commerce Director, and bank director.

He is also a sixty-year member of Del Rio Masonic Lodge and Newport Lions Club and once served as Cocke County Baptist Hospital board chair.

In 1980, he was named Tennessee's Optometrist of the Year.

He and his wife, the former Mary Barger, were married in 1954. They are the parents of three children, Beth, Mark, and John. They have three grandchildren.

The Fords are longtime members of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.

Judge Kenneth Porter was the Foundation's first honoree. He was followed by Dr. Kenneth Olden, Rev. Benny Proffitt, Dr. Cliff Shults (posthumously), and last year's recipient Dr. Kathy Dykes Sims.

Tickets to this year's banquet will be available the first week of February from any Foundation board member. They are $30 each.

Proceeds from the banquet go to the Foundation's Scholarship Fund.