Over the course of Dublin graduate Roy Lee Mayfield’s 30-plus year career working for TXU Energy, he moved multiple times and started over in different towns across the state before moving back home and settling in Comanche.
“I liked the moving around and learning and meeting new people and finding new ways of doing things,” he said. “But then [I also loved] coming back home. Dublin is still home. Comanche is home right now, but Dublin will always be my home.”
Mayfield graduated from Dublin High School in 1969, and went on to Tarleton to study biology. He earned his bachelors in 1973, and got a job as a biology teacher at Granbury High School.
He didn’t enjoy the job as much as he had thought he would. “At that time, they were only paying like $500 a month for school teachers,” he said.
The next year, Mayfield found a job as a meter reader at Texas Power and Light — now TXU Energy — and he and his wife Sally Schuman Mayfield moved to Brownwood. Over the next six years, Mayfield advanced rapidly in the company, getting promoted and moving five times.
The position he held the longest for the company was as the district chief accountant in Waxahachie. He was in charge of TXU Energy’s operating budgets for Waxahachie and surrounding towns, as well as collecting people’s bills and helping them out when they couldn’t pay.
Mayfield enjoyed meeting people through his job, but over the course of his time there the company culture changed and he had less choice in where he moved to. For his last job with the company, he was placed in downtown Dallas to work in procurement.
Overall, Mayfield worked for TXU Energy for more than 30 years, until he was laid off in 2004. Around the same time, his wife was diagnosed with MS and they moved back to DeLeon to be closer to her family. Mayfield was her caretaker until she passed away in 2006.
After her death, Mayfield moved to Comanche and began reestablishing his life in the area, which was not easy having been gone so long. Mayfield found plenty to enjoy being in Comanche, though.
“There’s a lot of good points over here in Comanche,”he said. “There’s old painters that I’ve managed to collect some of their paintings.”
Mayfield especially likes two of those painters, Ruth and Joe Buckler, who passed away in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Mayfield purchased some paintings from their estate, including one by Joe of the Dublin Train, the “Goober Express,” and one by Ruth of bluebonnets (some of Ruth’s other bluebonnet paintings hang in the First National Bank in Dublin).
While in Comanche, Mayfield started working at Bayer Motors, driving and procuring parts for the company. He stayed there until 2020, when he quit to take care of his father, Roy J. Mayfield, who was sick.
His father passed away later in 2020, and after he passed Mayfield retired for good. In the years since, Mayfield has been enjoying his free time taking care of his three-acre property in Comanche and doing some traveling.
He also attends the Double N Cowboy Church, which his father helped start. “I’ve spent a lot of time at the Cowboy Church,” he said. “It’s very dear to me. I can almost see my dad — he was, he was the doorkeeper there on Sunday mornings from 2008 until he died in 2020.”
Mayfield has two grown children, Kevin, 42, and Kimberly, 47. Kevin lives in Glen Rose and works for TexDOT, and Kimberly lives in Atlanta.
Mayfield’s advice to Dublin graduates is to believe in themselves. “My dad grew up in the Depression, and he was beat down so bad that he told me one time, ‘You’re a poor boy, and you’ll always be a poor boy. Just get used to it,’” said Mayfield. “And I said, ‘No sir, I’m not’. And I did manage to do very well.”
Later in life, Mayfield began looking into his family history. “I did a genealogy study of who we are, and we had connections to George Washington. We were cousins of Abraham Lincoln. And Mayfields were friends with Andrew Jackson out of Tennessee. They fought chickens and raced horses together. Two of them were scouts for Andrew Jackson. So don’t ever let anybody tell you, ‘You just a poor boy.’ You can accomplish anything that you want.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.