1973-74 Ward O'Malley (No 21)

Ward O'Malley (1918 - 2006) was born in New York City, the son of journalist and playwright Frank Ward O'Malley and Grace Edsell Dalrymple. He qualified as a mining engineer from the Colorado School of Mines in 1942 and was awarded an M. Sc. in geology from Stanford University on 1948. He served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1942 to 1945. After the second world war he was engaged in gold mining in Ecuador, and later worked as a petroleum geologist in the Rocky Mountains and the Middle East. He settled in Golden, Co. Tipperary in 1970, working as a consultant geologist and farmer, with his wife, Catherine Halloway. He was honorary treasurer of the County Tipperary Agricultural and Industrial Show and of An Taisce, South Tipperary branch. He was a keen tennis player  serving for a time as President of the County Tipperary Lawn Tennis Club. He was an excellent horseman and is recorded as still fearlessly taking on the the biggest Tipperary banks while hunting with the Tipperary Foxhounds well into his eighties. He also loved polo, playing in his layyer years with the Whitfield Court Polo Club in Kilmeaden. Co Waterford. He was elected the 21st Chieftain of the O'Malley Clan in 1973 and held his Gathering in the Great Southern Hotel in Galway in 1974. He served as Guardian Chieftain from 2000 - 2003. Eighty Years Young, an article about his polo career, was published in Issue No 9 of the O'Malley Journal, pp 99 - 102, published in 2000.