The first suicide hotline
All things considered, Bernard Mayes had done most of them.
He was the first board chairman of National Public Radio. He was a journalist, a gay rights activist, a university dean, a classics scholar who translated plays from the Greek, and an Anglican priest who became an assertive and sardonic non-believer. He was the voice of Gandalf on a radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings, and he provided elegant British narration for dozens of audiobooks.
And in 1962, he founded America’s first suicide hotline — a service he conceived when, as a BBC correspondent, he filed dispatches about despairing people in his adopted hometown of San Francisco killing themselves at three times the national rate.
“I felt obliged to do something constructive about what I had discovered,” he wrote in his 2001 autobiography, Escaping God’s Closet: The Revelations of a Queer Priest.
Mayes, whose volunteer-staffed hotline was greeted with skepticism by mentalhealth professionals but became a model for hundreds of other hotlines across the U.S., died on Oct. 23 at a San Francisco hospital. He was 85.
Mayes had Parkinson’s disease, according to KQED, the San Francisco radio station of which he was the first general manager.
Born in London on Oct. 10, 1929, Anthony Bernard Duncan Mayes was the son of a telephone operator and a watercolourist who illustrated travel brochures for British Railways.
Ahandsome man with a craggy face and, in his later years, a shock of white hair, Mayes was an upbeat companion, his longtime friend Sandy Snyder said in an interview. “In his deepest heart of hearts,” Snyder said, “he was an actor.”
Mayes had dropped his faith, proclaiming that souls do not exist, and prayer is futile. Religion “excluded half of humanity and decimated the other half,” he said, but “its narrow views . . . were mere peccadilloes compared with the inherent falsity of its basic claim to explain existence.”
But he was enthusiastic about “soupism” — a belief that every element in the endless, timeless universe is as interdependent as the ingredients in a good minestrone.