Area residents are invited to the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration at 7 p.m. on Jan. 16 at Ward Chapel A.M.E. Church, 523 N. Buckeye.
Neal Washington of Lawton, Okla., son of Helen and Spencer Ambler of Iola, will be the guest speaker. Community members will present the musical portion of the program.
Washington was raised in Iola and attended Allen County Community College and Wichita State University.
After receiving an Army field artillery commission, his military education included graduating from officer’s basic course, advanced course in applied mathematics, lance missile and division logistics course. His civilian education in Oklahoma was expanded by attending Cameron University, Oklahoma University and Oklahoma City University, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in business, math and education and a Master of Business degree in administration, with an emphasis in economics and applied statistics.
As a captain he commanded an artillery battery and taught ROTC at Grambling State University in Louisiana. His tours of duty sent him throughout the continental United States, Europe, Hawaii and Korea.
He is married to Alice Cheney of Humboldt, who is a retired medical technologist and a graduate of WSU.
They have two sons, Maj. Christopher DN Washington is a ROTC graduate of CU and has a master’s in strategic military intelligence from Command General Staff College. He is assigned in the Washington, D.C., area as a military intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Younger son Tracy Alexander Washington graduated as a national merit scholar from high school and graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry and minors in mathematics, biology, chemistry and Spanish. He is completing his last year in a doctoral program in computational systems biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Washington had the opportunity to work as a registered representative for a major investment firm before accepting a position as the director of Student Support Services at Cameron University. He also taught in the mathematics department with the developmental math up to elementary statistics and finance in the business department. He developed the first Texas Instruments graphing calculator workshop for the university. That course became a required elective for mathematics majors in 2009.
The couple are members of Union Baptist Church in Lawton.
Proceeds from the event will be divided between the Iola Area Ministerial Association and the Allen County Community College Endowment Association.
