Donald Lee Mayhew

Donald Lee Mayhew: A Life, an Ode, Not an Obituary

Anyone who knew Donald for any length of time discovered his great love of words—his surprising turns of phrases, his correcting you if you said something not quite accurate, his trenchant messages in cards and emails, his obsessive, voracious reading. If you were talking to him, sometimes he’d stop you to find a better term for an idea you were trying to convey.

And he made up all sorts of playful neologisms when real words didn’t suffice. For example, he and Carol came up with “monjego!” (prounounced “MONYEGO!”), which was a much better way of shouting out that you’d moted someone in an argument—as in, “MONJEGO! I TOLD you it would only take 5 minutes to get to the restaurant!” He also changed words to better express his emotions, as he did with “SREEEEETIE”, with an emphasis on the drawn out “r” to pack that word with as much affection and silliness as he possibly could. Donald’s playfulness with language, his exuberant wordplay, was deeply endearing and spoke to his love of storytelling and poetry.

Thus, we can’t help but think that he’d object to the word “obituary” with its air of actuarial authority. So this is our ode to him—a song of his life, not a dry noting of his death.

The broad outline of his biography is as follows: Donald Lee Mayhew was born on June 20th, 1933 in Los Angeles to Bertie Elise and George Mayhew. He was the second of what would become five children, including Bob, (John) Michael, Karen, and Steven. George was a mail carrier, and as such, the family escaped some of the harder aspects of the Great Depression, but they weren’t wealthy, and life wasn’t always easy.

After a stint in the army in his late teens/early twenties, Donald discovered from his fellow soldiers that he could write—they thought he was smart, so they asked him to write their letters home for them when they were stationed in Germany. When Donald returned to civilian life, he enrolled for a time at Santa Monica City College and then finished his BA in English at Mexico City College. From there he went on to get his MA and PhD from UCLA in Special Education.

During his MA years, he was sent to do student teaching and research at an elementary school UCLA had a partnership with in Englewood Florida. It’s there he met his first wife with whom he had daughter Kelly and son Scott.

In the early 1980s, Donald met his beloved wife, Carol. They were married for 37 years, a partnership in all senses of the word.

Beginning in the late 1960’s, Donald taught in the school set up for children and adolescents who were hospitalized for emotional and psychological problems at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. Through this work, especially his attention to the ways emotional and psychological and family issues impacted the ways kids learn, Donald developed curriculum and therapeutic techniques in tandem to better reach his students. Sometime in the 1980s, Donald started a private practice focusing on educational therapy, and it was to this practice he devoted himself after retiring from UCLA. He also began exploring Gestalt Therapy and earned a certificate in Marriage and Family Counseling.

In the 2000s, Donald and Carol acquired grandchildren: Miles, Maddox, and Macy from Scott and his wife Deeann and Walter from Kelly and her husband Jim. Donald loved his grandchildren, showering them with books, teaching them to play chess, and encouraging them to think for themselves.

Throughout his life, Donald had deep friendships and developed communities of different kinds of folks. He was a supportive and kind colleague and would happily share his insights from his many years of practice.

Donald also wasn’t one to make big distinctions between species: he lived most of his adult life with one cat companion or another (Shag Nasty, Ralph, Phoebe, Oliver, Lulu, Anna, William, Dexter, and Charles among others), always sharing the milk from his bowl of cereal with whoever happened to wander by at the time. He fed squirrels and birds in his backyard. He loved ducks (but never ate them).

He whistled superbly, creating arabesques with his tunes. To dance, he maintained, all you needed to know were the basic steps to the Charleston—and he was right. He cooked a mean beef stew (minus the turnips) and loved to make tapioca pudding with canned mandarin slices.

Donald couldn’t abide cruelty or discrimination and was happy to have been able to vote in the 2020 election on his way out the door. He believed in kindness and decency.

Donald Lee Mayhew was a wonderful human. The world is an emptier place without him, but thousands of traces of his kindness and wisdom carry on in the lives of those he touched.