Service to community and country

“A true hero in real terms of military combat and a hero in how he dealt with problems in Columbus, Georgia.”

Philip Schley, retired physician and former school board member, on friend and former board colleague Owen Ditchfield

If any public figure in Columbus has ever set the gold standard for how to disagree without being disagreeable, it was Owen Ditchfield.

How desperately this community, and this country, could use that rare virtue right now.

Sadly, somebody else will have to step up and meet that standard. Ditchfield, 76, died Wednesday at Gentiva Hospice after a battle with cancer.

Owen Ditchfield’s adult life was dedicated to service. He served his country in the U.S. Army for 10 years that included two tours in Vietnam; Schley describes the courage of a wounded Capt. Ditchfield holding a hilltop position during fierce fighting while “every single man in his company was either dead or wounded, Owen among them.”

His dedication to the Army didn’t end with his active duty: He combined it with his passion for education, teaching at Fort Benning schools for 37 years, and later served in a volunteer capacity as a docent at the National Infantry Museum.

Though he was a member of the Muscogee County School Board for just one term, his fellow board members remember him as fondly and as vividly as if he had been there much longer. Former longtime board member Brenda Storey praised his “ability to see things from both sides but also to make his own decision and to be a man of his word. … A lot of people would do well to strive to emulate him.” Fife Whiteside noted that even when Ditchfield was “trying to make a point he felt strongly about … he did it in a gentle way.”

When he lost a 2004 bid for a second term to the Rev. Joe Roberson (who, tragically, died in a car accident in November 2009), Ditchfield described his victorious opponent as a neighbor and good friend. From someone else, that might have come off as mere political diplomacy; with Ditchfield, you knew he meant every word of it.

So Ditchfield lent his efforts and his wisdom to two other local educational institutions, the Muscogee County Library Board and the Muscogee Educational Excellence Foundation.

He was a determined community booster for South Columbus, where he lived. That he was a white resident in a majority-black part of town was irrelevant to him (and, apparently, to the voters in his district who elected him.) He had the rare quality, Schley said, of being “absolutely color blind,” which no doubt served him and his community well as president of South Columbus Concerned Citizens.

Maybe the most concise and most fitting tribute came from longtime school board chair Mary Sue Polleys, who said in a voicemail, “The city is a better place since Owen decided to stay here.”

This story was originally published June 9, 2016 at 12:14 PM with the headline "Service to community and country."