It's always sad to me to learn of someone passing away that I would have liked to have known about and promoted as a hero. On October 23, 2014, at the age of 85, Bernard Mayes died. Mr Mayes was the founder of the first suicide prevention hotline in the United States and first chairman of NPR (National Public Radio)
Click through the NPR link immediately following the squiggle to read the complete story.
Bernard Hayes in 2006 - Photo from NPR Story Linked Above
Bernard Mayes, the first chairman of the NPR board, died on Thursday in California.
Mayes was a true Renaissance man: He was born in England, studied at Cambridge University and became a high school teacher. Eventually, he went back to school and became an ordained Anglican priest. In 1958, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a journalist, a radio executive, and during his later years a university professor.
As The San Francisco Chronicle recounts it, Mayes was the founder of the first suicide prevention hotline in the United States. He started by simply putting ads on buses that asked people, "Thinking of ending it all? Call Bruce."
The Chronicle goes on:
"Mayes, working under a pseudonym, curled up on the one couch wondering whether the phone would ring. "It did ring once that first night. By the end of the week, there were 10 callers, and that phone hasn't stopped ringing for 50 years now. The one line in a basement room is now five lines in a downtown high-rise. Two hundred calls a month have become 200 calls a day to (415) 781-0500, handled by 100 volunteers and 10 paid staff. They all undergo weeks of intensive training to do what Mayes himself learned to do on that first call, with no training whatsoever: listen."