Product Code Database
Anthony Bernard Duncan Mayes (10 October 1929 – 23 October 2014) was a British broadcaster, university dean and author. In the United States, he founded KQED-FM, was Executive Vice President of KQED TV, then co-founded and became first working chairman of National Public Radio. He also founded one of America's first Crisis hotline.
Invited in 1984 to join the Rhetoric and Communication Studies faculty of the University of Virginia, in 1991 he was appointed assistant dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and then chair of the Communications department, finally founding the Program in Media Studies. He was awarded the Sullivan/Harrison award for mentoring and received a commendation by the University Seven Society. On retiring from the university in 1999 he published his autobiography Escaping God's Closet, which received the Lambda Literary Award for religion and spirituality, and in 2000 University of Virginia alumni named the Bernard D. Mayes Award after him. His papers are kept in the National Public Broadcasting Archives of the University of Maryland, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, and in the Library of Congress.
In 1991 he co-founded the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual Faculty, Staff and Graduate Student Association at the University of Virginia, known as UVA Pride. On his retirement in 1999, the University of Virginia's Queer Alumni Network (known as QVA) gave Mayes a lifetime achievement award for his accomplishments and for his contributions to UVA in particular. Each year since then, QVA has honored a distinguished graduate of UVA with a Bernard D. Mayes Award for service and leadership in the LGBT community. Mayes also received a lifetime achievement award from San Francisco Suicide Prevention. In 2010 he was given a prestigious Jefferson Award for Public Service, most notably for his suicide prevention work still used as a model nationwide. He last resided in San Francisco.
Mayes's dramatic works included: Homer's Odyssey, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and Plato's Phaedo, each adapted from the original Greek; The Lord of the Rings, a 1979 radio series in which he played the part of Gandalf; and several of Charles Dickens novels. Mayes received financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts for a dramatization of the life of Thomas Jefferson. He also recorded several books for Blackstone Audio (including Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Augustine's Confessions and The City of God, Mises's Human Action, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, and James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson) and was often heard in The Black Mass, Erik Bauersfeld's series of dramatic adaptations for KPFA. An illustrated collection of Mayes's lighter broadcast pieces was published in 1985 under the title This is Bernard Mayes in San Francisco.
|
|
