05/25/2026
Today the Order remembers William Francis Mayo, OHC, who died on May 25, 1946:
William Francis Mayo was born in Peoria County, Illinois on March 11, 1861. He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Racine College, went to General Seminary, was ordained priest in 1889, and was a parish priest in Illinois and then for five years was General Missionary to the Diocese of Quincy. He joined the Order in 1900, with Fr. Hughson and Fr. Sill. Fr. Sargent was the novice master, upon whom, Fr. Hughson later said, they practiced the virtue of Christian charity. Fr. Mayo was professed on February 24, 1903, just before the Order moved to West Park.
In 1905 Fr. Allen and Fr. Mayo went to Tennessee to take over what was then called St. Andrew's Industrial and Training School for Boys, which had been begun by the Rector of Otey Memorial Chapel in Sewanee. They lived in a two-story frame farmhouse and assembled eight boys for St. Andrew's first class. The poverty of those boys was extreme, and each day there was foot washing at 7:00 p.m. because none of the boys had shoes and needed to have their feet washed before going to bed. With the arrival of Fr. Hughson and Fr. Lorey, Fr. Mayo began to do more mission work, going from farm to farm, usually on foot, building up the Christian life in the mountains. He remained at St. Andrew's for many years, and then was bursar at West Park. Later he was at Kent where he was a great favorite with the boys. When he was no longer able to keep up the pace of school work, he returned to West Park.
Fr. Mayo combined deep faith and charity with marked eccentricity. He always wanted to help anyone who was in trouble, even to his own inconvenience. Once he worked as a railroad mechanic for a man who had fallen sick, and earned the family’s livelihood until the illness passed. Whenever there was a particularly difficult job to be done, Fr. Mayo was the first to volunteer. He would lug heavy boxes up the stairs, shovel wet snow or dig a grave with equal generosity, and nothing delighted him more than to put on a dirty old. black habit to shovel a freight-car-load of coal from a railroad car at the West Park station into a truck and then into the bins at the monastery. As a preacher he was not brilliant or eloquent, but he was in demand because his sheer goodness shone through everything he did or said. Fr. Whittemore says that several of the novices who were having a hard time confessed that it was only the example of Fr. Mayo that kept them at Holy Cross.
He loved to repair machinery, which he could take apart, but not put back together. The brethren went to lengths to see that he did not know when something was broken. As bursar he kept every old envelope or scrap of paper, dividing them into packets marked "Grade I", "Grade II" and "Grade III". Grade III were museum-pieces.
Fr. Mayo was zealous in adding to the community intercessions list, and those 15 minutes were often his own private list. Fr. Baldwin devised a scheme to pray for the usual needs and the welfare of various places. To save space, Fr. Baldwin typed a list of professions, followed by a list of dioceses in parallel columns. Fr. Mayo “began to pray as follows, with the utmost solemnity and a short pause between petitions: For the dentists in Alaska - (pause) - For the carpenters in the Panama Canal Zone - (pause) - For the firemen in Western Massachusetts - and so on, to the bottom of the page, with Fr. Mayo serenely unconscious of the agonizing efforts of his brethren to suppress their laughter. Each new and gloriously-combined petition almost annihilated them."
In his last years his mind became foggy, and he was placed in a sanitorium in Kingston, but he never lost his spirit of generosity or his humor. He was almost deaf, and one day the doctor examining him leaned down and shrieked in his ear "DO YOU HAVE ANY PAIN?" "Do I have any brains?" Fr Mayo responded: "Oh goodness me, I'm afraid not."
