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Dawson, William A. (Father)

September 27, 2016

Jesuit Father William (Cy) A. Dawson died on Sept. 27, 2016. He was born in Baltimore on Oct. 7, 1924.

Dawson, William A.

Jesuit Father William (Cy) A. Dawson died on Sept. 27, 2016. He was born in Baltimore on Oct. 7, 1924. He graduated from Loyola High School and entered the Society of Jesus at the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, in 1946. He received his bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola College in Maryland and a master’s in teaching from Woodstock College, Maryland. He also earned a Ph.D. in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin. He was ordained a priest on March 25, 1958.

Fr. Dawson’s early call was to serve the poor in India. He taught English and math at Loyola School in Jamshedpur prior to ordination, and then served as an assistant pastor in Chaibasa and Anandpur until 1964. For much of the next decade, he taught at the Xavier School of Management in Jamshedpur, namely philosophy and statistics.

In 1973, Fr. Dawson returned to the United States to teach economics for a year at Loyola College in Maryland and labor relations at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri, for four years. In 1978, he became the director of industrial relations at LeMoyne College in Syracuse and in 1981 began a nine-year tenure at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, first as assistant director of the Comey Institute of Industrial Relations and then as a professor of labor relations.

Through the 90’s, Fr. Dawson served as an associate pastor at St. Alphonsus Church in Woodstock, Maryland. He moved to the Colombiere Jesuit Community in Baltimore in 1998 where he continued pastoral ministry work until 2016. He passed away where his journey as a Jesuit began, at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 27, 2016, just shy of his 92nd birthday.