Leah Ward-Lee was born in Trenton, Mo and grew up in Missouri and Illinois. After several years during her teens satisfying her wanderlust by living in Haight-Ashbury, New Orleans, New York, Europe, England, Australia, and Wales in the 60’s and early 70’s, (it was a different time) she returned to Illinois.

Her family had relocated to Collinsville, a suburb of St. Louis. One Sunday, the local Baptist preacher gave a sermon on “service” and said all young people should serve.

She promptly joined the Army to be a Chaplains Assistant and went to Ft. Mc Clellan, Alabama for her basic training, where she was the honor graduate of her class.

She went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina to take her administrative assistant training and was among the first three hundred women to be trained there.

All of the Chaplains Assistants billets were filled and she wound up at the Pentagon in Washington, DC where she began attending night school eventually earning Bachelors’ Degrees in Business and Human Resources (Summa Cum Laude) from St Leo’s College and a Master’s in Computer Information Systems from Boston University. (She had to keep going to school…VA reimbursed retrospectively and she needed one more course to graduate.)

She reenlisted for computer programming school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana and went to an assignment at Headquarters, Forces Command, Fort McPherson, Georgia. While stationed there she was selected as the soldier of the year.

In Atlanta, at 24, she bought her first house, one she still owns, and learned she has a passion for finding and restoring old properties. (Even today, whenever she goes to a city she looks around for an old house to buy!)

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