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DORIS MCKAY
1894—1992
oris Henrietta Hill was born September 29, [894. Her father, Henry, and his wife, Adeline Burr Hill, had an agreement about the upbringing of their daughter. Henry, a merchant in Lindley, New York, and superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church there, assumed responsibility for her religious education While Adeline, a Choir teacher, would give her moral training. As a child Doris attended church twice a week and accompanied her parents to weekly prayer meetings. She described her upbringing as “strict.” When she was ten, her father’s general store failed, and the family moved to Rochester, New York. When Doris was
Doris McKay
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IN MEMORIAM 1992—1997 31
fifteen, Adeline told her that her moral apprenticeship was over and that Doris was free to make decisions for herself. Adeline said that, as a mother, she had done her best and that she did not think Doris would “go to the bad.”
In Rochester, Doris attended the New York Normal School. Unlike many of the other girls graduating in 1917, Doris found work teaching in area schools. In the autumn of1923 she was teaching in Geneva, New York, and in December she met Willard McKay who had a successful fruit farm there. They married at the end of June, and Doris’s teaching career was suspended. (At that time married women were prohibited from teaching in public schools.)
Soon after the new year in 1925, Doris and Willard attended a fireside given by Howard and Mabel Ives and accepted the Message of Baha’u’llah. Doris describes her
confirmation:
Yet, marveling at this new dimension ofmy understanding, I was miserable. The intonations of Howard’s voice seemed still to ring out, “Mankind is one! All prejudices must be abandoned.” How could I with my own two or three choice prejudices qualify as a Bahá’í? In the searchlight ofthese teachings, how ugly my faults were!
Were the doors closing? For a few hours I had thought that I belonged to “the new creation” mentioned by my teachers. Now I was a little less secure.
I arose and lit a candle, turned the pages of Howard’s prayer book and prayed, almost with fear, that these hindrances might be removed.
My prayer was answered overnight. In the morning I awoke with a free,
unsullied soul. This I knew through
the experience of faith—a positive knowledge of things divine.
Much of the McKays’ early work in the Cause was devoted to the elimination of prejudice. While Willard and Louis Gregory were pioneering the promotion of racial unity through their touts together in the southern United States, Doris was fostering relationships with prominent members of the Urban League and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). She was organizing racial amity conferences in Harlem and Rochester, and despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan the McKays hosted interracial picnics on their farm.
In 1941 the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada asked Doris to go to “the Gateway to the South,” Memphis, Tennessee, and resolve a crisis there. Her task was to unite the separate white and black Bahá’í communities into one administrative unit—a goal won with the first interracial Feast held there at NawRtiz and the formation of its first Local Assembly.
In 1929 she made her first traveling teaching trip to New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, Boston, Portsmouth, and Montreal. In the mid— to late thirties she was a frequent teacher at Green Acre. Notable among her courses were “Fathoming the Most Great Ocean” and “Prayers and Meditations.” In 1939 she returned to Canada to man the Bahá’í Booth at the Canadian National Exhibition and to visit the communities of Hamilton, Montreal, and Moncton.
Three years later the McKays pioneered to Moncton, New Brunswick, and in the fall of 1943 they moved to Prince Edward Island (PEI) to help win a goal of the Seven Year Plan—that of establishing a Local Assembly in the capital of that province. It
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32 THE BAHA’I’ WORLD
was in PEI that her public school teaching career resumed with brilliance when she taught art to children and art instruction to teachers in over seventy—five classrooms throughout the province. She wrote “Art in the Schools” that was published by the provincial Department of Education. Its success saw three printings.
This was not the first of Doris’s publications. As a member of the Outline Bureau of the National Teaching Committee in 1928, she helped develop “36 Lessons,” some of the first deepening materials and study outlines for the American believers. In 1929 she wrote a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly that, when published in the magazine, widely publicized the Faith—an achievement that was recognized at the Bahá’í National Convention that year. Over the years she wrote articles and poetry for Star of t/ae West and later 7778 84/147 I/Vm'ld.
In 1983 Doris began to write what she called her “tne—moires.” She was particularly encouraged by the friends who wanted her to capture the spirit she breathed into oral accounts of her personal experiences with friends such as Dorothy Baker, Martha Root, and May Maxwell. Her book Fire: in Many Heart: was published in 1991.
Doris dedicated the book to Howard Colby Ives—“A lighter of fires in many hearts: his spiritual sons and daughters, impregnated with the love of God, spread first over the eastern United States and Canada. His spiritual progeny have multiplied through the generations to become an army. I am one of his daughters and, to me, he will be always ‘Daddy Howard’.” As a pioneer Doris too was a lighter of fires in many hearts. Her spiritual family has spread to the far reaches of the planet. She wrote:
They have borne me along on their young, strong wings. They have taken me with them to their pioneer posts in Finland, Vanuatu, Madagascar, Haiti, Macau and French Guyana. They have said prayers for me on their pilgrimages, deepened with me in their search for Bahá’u’lláh. To these magnificent souls who are the lights of my life, I want to say that the bond between us, wherever we are, is Charged with a redeeming power. IfI had not stayed on Prince Edward Island I should have never known you; you are all iridescent motes in the atmosphere I breathe. I pray with you more than for you.
Doris died November 30, 1992, in Charlottetown, PEI. To many she will always be “Auntie Doris.” On December 4 the Universal House ofjustice wrote:
Her years of devoted service will long be remembered by the countless believers whose lives were touched by her manifold activities on behalf of the Cause. Her steadfastness and obedience to the beloved Guardian in remaining at her pioneer post will serve as a shining example of devotion for generations to come.
Kindly assure her many friends of our fervent supplications at the Sacred Threshold for the progress of her radiant soul throughout all the worlds of God.
Paul Vreeland
