Br. Jude Maurice

William Howard Heggy was born one of five children, three boys and two girls, to George Daniel Heggy and Anna H. Decker on July 29, 1920, in Canton, Ohio. William attended Gibbs and St. Peter's grade schools and Lehman and McKinley high schools in Canton before entering the Civilian Conservation Corp. in 1939 and the Marine Corps in 1942. During his years in the service he received a number of honors, among which were a good conduct medal and a bronze star before being honorably discharged in 1946. He worked as a power lineman and cable splicer from 1946-48 when he entered Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, receiving his B.S. there in 1950. He worked in sales for the next two years, including at the Ohio Power Company before entering the novitiate at Glencoe on June 4, 1952 where he received the habit and religious name of Brother Jude Maurice on August 30, 1952. The following year he was assigned to St. Mary's College until his first teaching assignment at St. Patrick High School in Chicago in 1954. In 1957 he was assigned to teach at De La Salle High School in Chicago and in 1959 at St. Francis High School in Wheaton, Illinois. Brother Jude was assigned in 1961 to public relations work at Christian Brothers College in Memphis but returned to St. Patrick High School in 1963. He was named Director of La Salle Manor in Plano, Illinois, in 1967, worked at St. Joseph High School for one semester in 1969 and in the fall of that year returned to spend the remainder of his teaching career at St. Patrick High in Chicago. He completed his master's degree at Loyola University in 1971. In 1979 he had double-bypass heart surgery but returned to working in the classroom until 1985 when he retired to St. Patrick's Community to continuing writing and working on special projects. In 1995 he moved to Christian Brothers Center at Romeoville where he spent a great deal of his time painting and developing his artistic skills. In January of 2002 he moved into the new Benilde Community in Chicago but in the fall requested to be moved to a nursing home and entered Resurrection Life Center in Chicago. He suffered from kidney failure and diabetes and died at 6:55 p.m. on January 16, 2003, at the age of eighty-two, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for fifty years.