In tribute: 'Dub' Hays found calling after crisis

CLOVIS — At age 69, William "Dub" Hays found a new lease on life and dedicated his remaining years to bringing his new-found Christian faith to the West African nation where for years prior he had mined diamonds.

For him the decisive event was just over 16 years ago, in July 2002, when Hays' wife of more than 50 years told him she had filed for divorce.

"I couldn't see how I could live without her. I loved her so much that I nearly killed myself," he wrote in a testimonial on the website of "Holy Cross Movie Ministries," the non-profit he later founded. "I sat alone that evening with a .44 magnum pistol in my mouth."

But a new chapter in Hays' life story was only beginning, one that would engage him until his death June 23, at age 85 following a short illness. The ministry that emerged would bring in excess of 315,000 clothing items, 90,000 bibles, 65,000 toys and 4,200 pairs of shoes to Liberia, and counting. It also screened Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" almost 600 times in as many locations to over two million people, according to its website. Hays never met Gibson but always hoped to, his daughter said.

The night of Hays' suicidal "crisis," in 2002, Lubbock County Sheriff deputies came to his house and a SWAT team hauled him away to a psychiatric award. His daughter signed for his release, and his son told him "the only thing you can do is to ask Jesus into your heart and life," he wrote.

A few months later he was baptized at a small church in Wolfforth, Texas, not far from the communities in eastern New Mexico where he came up and raised his family.

"Before he became a Christian, he wasn't a good husband and he wasn't a good father. Money was his God. ... But he made up for all the bad years, twice, a thousand times over," Pamela Hays Davis told The News of her father's religious experience. "I became a Christian when I was nine, because of my mother, but dad never went to church. (During his childhood in Dora), he would skip church and steal chickens."

Born in Mayfield, Oklahoma in 1933, Hays grew up in Dora, and briefly attended Eastern New Mexico University before at age 19 starting a three-year stint with the U.S. Air Force, including a year in Japan. By then he was married to "the love of his life," whom he'd met in Dora, and they built their family after he returned from overseas.

Hays stayed busy the rest of his life building other projects, said his daughter, including several restaurants of eastern New Mexico's yesteryear - Dub's Drive-In in Portales, Taco Burger in Texico, and La Villa Steakhouse (formerly the Silver Grill and currently Shogun steakhouse) in Clovis.

"He had several things here. He was always thinking of something, some way to make money," Davis said. "This is a man that, before he went to Africa, he decided he'd just go mine some gold in Alaska, and he would just take off. He's kind of a Lewis and Clark kind of guy. There's absolutely nothing he wouldn't have attempted. He was always an entrepreneur. ... It was all just an adventure for him. He loved it."

Hays remained outgoing after his personal crisis, Davis added, but would later "spend every dime he had" in service to the vision of HCMM, which emerged as a combination of his extensive experience mining in Liberia and his new desire to proselytize with an open audience.

"He wasn't a public speaker (he later wrote about failing speech classes at ENMU), so he took 'The Passion of the Christ' (film) and he was showing it to people," she explained. "They went to a church in, oh, Muleshoe or Friona, and they opened up the doors and showed the free movies and stuff and not a soul came, not even the preachers. And my dad said, 'You know what, these people are so spoiled in America, they don't even know.'"

Hays found an abundance of viewers in Liberia, where HCMM established a Monrovia compound with five resident families as paid ministry employees and a 200-seat chapel showing "free Bible movies 3-5 nights a week," according to the group's literature.

Getting to that point was a long process; his daughter said that "God was preparing him years and years and years before that," largely through his time from 1979-1990 mining precious metals and ore in Liberia and learning to navigate the country in the process.

During the pangs of his "born-again" religious awakening, after his mining work and marriage had both collapsed, Hays thought again of the coastal African country bordering Sierra Leone.

"I remember several times stopping my pickup on (the) side of the road, so much tears in my eyes I couldn't see how to drive, I would stretch my arms to the Heavens and ask, Why me God? Why me God?," he wrote. "The vision continued coming to me that I must go back to Liberia and teach people about Jesus. This is a country where the rebels took everything we owned, my partner and I lost one million plus dollars in mining for gold and diamonds."

With some support of churches in the greater area and across numerous missions lasting several months at a time since 2005, organizers claim "over 200,000 souls saved that we know of," to date, according to HCMM's secretary Ruthie "Jerry" Fisher.

The group defines a "new salvation" as those who "repeated the sinner's prayer and gave their lives to Jesus." According to the HCMM website, many salvations are taken after a movie screening and "altar call," and names are kept in a growing library of "large blue books."

Fisher said Hays "got to know the people, and know their customs, their culture" in his prior years in Liberia.

All the same, the language describing "new salvations" in HCMM literature imght not be everybody's cup of tea. One post from 2011 states, "witchcraft and devil worshiping is their god," and another from the same year says "the satanic power in these people was very strong."

"My dad didn't mince words," Davis said. She also said she never knew of her father encountering resistance to his work in Liberia, even recalling an anecdote of him being welcomed at the airport there by some of the country's top leadership.

In any case, there is little question of Hays' conviction.

"For most (at age 69), that's when you would just quit or retire," Fisher said. "Hearing his testimony about the mission, you could hear his heart, and you knew that he loved the people."

"He was a one-man band; that was his deal, saving souls," Davis added.

"I thank God every day for the crisis that came into my life," Hays wrote. "If it had not been, I would still be on a direct road to hell, a crisis that awakened me to what is really important in life and what this life and our next life is all about."

Fisher said the work of HCMM will continue in some capacity, details of which still need to be hammered out.

His son Mikel Hays told The News on Friday "I'm proud of him and I'm going to miss him."

A Clovis resident of more than 50 years, Hays was buried at Dora's Mount Zion cemetery. His obituary stated his wish that any donations in his memory be made to HCMM, "so that spreading God's word would continue."