PORT ANGELES — Pastor Charlie Mays, Port Angeles’ best-known clergyman and arguably the one most involved in local social issues, received best wishes from parishioners and friends at a retirement reception Sunday in Holy Trinity Church.
Mays, 65, will retire Dec. 31 from the church he has headed and the community whose needs he has championed since 1988.
“I wish we had 10 like you,” Brando Blore, president of Serenity House, told Mays at the gathering in the church parish hall.
Later, Blore said, “From the first time I met Charlie, I knew he was very caring, very interested in people and their futures and how to get them down the road.
“He just seems to know what should be going on. The community is losing a great man.”
Mays’s colleagues and parishioners gave similar assessments of the man they called Pastor Charlie.