Durwood Lee Ballard, Jr.
Lee Ballard was born in Augusta, Georgia, on December 16, 1936, to Annie and Durwood Lee Ballard, an insurance agent in town. At ARC from 1950-1954, he was an active and successful student with honors in his junior year and high honors in his sophomore and senior years. He was a member of the Beta Club all three years. He played B Varsity football in his junior year and was on the annual staff and sports editor of the sports section of the Musketeer student newspaper in his senior year. Foreshadowing his life of service, he was involved with Young Life in his junior and senior years and was on the Christian Workers Council as a senior. He graduated from ARC in 1954 and attended Wheaton College.
A year after his graduation from Wheaton, Ballard and his wife joined the Wycliffe Bible Translators and began work with the Ibaloy people in the mountains of Luzon Island in the Philippines. Learning the Ibaloy language, they undertook the complex task of turning the language’s sounds into a written alphabet. Thousands of words were compiled into a dictionary. Because of his success with the Ibaloy, the Wycliffe organization asked him to work with others in the field who were having difficulties with the complicated tasks of Bible translation. In 1964, working with other translators became a ministry. Ballard had a gift not only with language but with inspiring and guiding his colleagues. Ballard held workshops in many other countries, including New Guinea, Indonesia, Nepal, Vietnam, Panama, and with the aboriginal peoples of Australia. He delivered a paper in Singapore to all Wycliffe translators in Asia and another in Mexico on the management and evaluation of indigenous language projects. In 1975, he was elected to serve as a member-at-large on the Wycliffe Bible Translator Board of Directors. The Ibaloy translation project continued with the New Testament being dedicated in 1978. Ballard also composed and compiled an Ibaloy hymnbook with 178 songs, still in use today. When the Ibaloy work was complete, Ballard served for three years as the chief of language programs in thirty indigenous languages in the United States and Canada.
After his years as a translator, Ballard began work for a large advertising firm, using his gift for words as a speechwriter and naming expert. The naming center expanded and became a company within the agency. In 1996, Ballard formed his own national brand identity company, Name One, with clients that included Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Texas Instruments, Marriott, Freddie Mac, Charles Schwab, and Seven Eleven among others. After retiring in 2006, he spent the next five years producing a 900-page Ibaloy-English dictionary that included grammar and description of the uniquely complicated system of sound changes in the Ibaloy language. The work received the National Book Award in the Philippines in 2012.