HCH photo by Lisa Dahm

A recent photo of Florence McPeek in Annuciation Church, Waimea.

Flo McPeek, strength behind the training of Hawaii deacons

‘What she has done for the diaconate is almost impossible to measure’

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

HCH file photo Bill and Flo McPeek in 2005, the year of their 50th wedding anniversary.

Florence “Flo” McPeek, the retired public school teacher whose calm, optimistic spirit helped shape the newest generation of permanent deacons for the Diocese of Honolulu, died on June 1 in her Kohala home on the Big Island after a valiant struggle with cancer. She was 75.

McPeek, with her husband Bill, directed the formation of the two most recent classes of Hawaii deacons, which account for about half of the permanent deacons working in the islands today. Their first class produced 18 deacons in 2001. Their second class ordained 17 men in 2007. Flo has been described as a model for deacons’ wives.

Her funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. on June 13 at Annunciation Church in Waimea. Visitation will begin at 8 a.m. She will be buried in the parish cemetery at Sacred Heart Church, Hawi.

McPeek was born on a Big Island sugar plantation in Kukuihaele on March 6, 1934, to a Philippine immigrant father and a Japanese mother. Her father, Florencio Alegre, died in December; her mother Mikiyo died last May.

A lifelong Catholic, McPeek graduated from Honokaa High School, and then from Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley, Colo., in 1955, in the same class as her husband William, whom she married in December of that year.

The couple moved to Hawaii in 1961, teaching in public schools on Oahu’s Waianae coast for nine years before moving their growing family to Kohala in 1970. At Kohala Elementary and High School, Bill served as principal and Flo taught physical education.

Bill joined the diocese’s deacon formation class in 1984, a program that requires the equal involvement, short of ordination, of wives. He was ordained in 1987.

The McPeeks retired from teaching in 1989, the same year they joined the “core” team that would train the next class of deacons. That team was run by fellow public school educators, Deacon Wallace Mitsui and his wife Gwen.

Bill and Flo then succeeded the Mitsuis, taking over the formation of the diocese’s following two deacon classes.

Each formation program involves the comprehensive training of a group of men and their wives, one weekend a month, at St. Stephen Diocesan Center on Oahu over the course of five years. This would have been a mighty commitment for any retired couple in their 60s, but the McPeeks lived on the Big Island in the Kohala uplands, an hour’s drive from the airport.

“She loved it,” Bill said of Flo’s work in the diaconate program.

“She loved the people we worked with. She loved guiding those who were coming through formation. She enjoyed that fellowship on the weekends. It was good.”

“She wasn’t really ready to retire,” Bill said.

Bill and Flo always did ministry as a team. At their parish of Annunciation in Waimea, they worked together handling Baptism and Confirmation classes, marriage prep, lector and eucharistic minister training and catechism.

Gwen Mitsui admired the McPeeks’ close relationship.

“Bill and Flo really respected each other,” she said. “They worked well together as a couple. They were always a couple in ministry together, a very well-balanced leadership.”

“Bill relied very heavily on her opinion,” Mitsui said. “Flo was the organizer; she was the strength in their leadership.”

With Flo and Bill on their formation team, the Mitsuis got to know them very well.

“Over four years we got to be very close friends,” Gwen said.

The Mitsuis would drive them to and from the airport before and after the weekends. Gwen said the McPeeks would help clean up after the deacon weekends without showing any impatience to get to their flight for their long inter-island commute. That impressed her greatly.

“Flo was a woman of great faith,” Mitsui said. “She was always very positive. She and Bill had complete trust in Christ. She was a wonderful role model for me.”

Impossible to measure

Kathleen Coughlin stepped into Flo’s shoes this year when she and her deacon husband John took over the directorship of the emerging deacon formation class. The Coughlins were in the McPeeks’ last deacon class.

“Flo was truly an amazing woman,” Kathleen said, a person of “incredible kindness.”

“She was always patient, positive, just so special,” she said, “always considerate of the very small details, such as when someone was sick or hurting. She helped intuitively in such a delicate way.”

“What she has done for the diaconate is almost impossible to measure,” Kathleen said. “She provided the wives the model for how you can make this work.”

“She was my mentor,” Kathleen said.

“It’s not easy to be the wife of a deacon,” she explained. “You got to watch her in action working with Bill. You could see how she dealt with stress, how she supported him in a very positive way.”

“I actually sensed she was the stability and underpinning in this program,” she said. “Her kindness, her positive approach helped other women adapt to the changes in their lives. You could always call her. She was very impressive, a very special lady.”

Kathleen’s husband John agreed that McPeek’s contributions to the diaconate program were significant and vital.

“It was evident that, while she was the soft voice, she was the steel behind the formation,” he said.

Flo provided the “structure, the intellect and the discipline,” he said.

“There was nothing superficial about her,” John said. “Early on, you knew the person you were dealing with was authentic.”

“Her calm nature in the midst of the storm helped us gain perspective,” he said. “Her inner sense of spirituality, her peaceful nature, came in large part from her prayer life,” he said. “She was a deeply prayerful person. I know that lots of her strength came from that.”

Influence beyond Hawaii

Flo McPeek’s touch extended beyond Hawaii’s diaconal world. Talented with her hands, she knitted sweaters in her spare time for a charitable organization that sent them to poor children around the world.

“Flo probably knitted 400-500 sweaters,” Bill said. She also had a “rubber stamping” hobby making cards and bookmarks, and “loved her garden and her flowers.”

Condolences have come from as far away as Albania where Flo and Bill visited for a few weeks in 1992 with their son Stephen on a mission to help villages emerging from the dark decades of Communist rule.

“They mentioned her smile,” Bill said.

Other e-mail messages have arrived from Ecuador and Italy from former exchange students who had stayed at the McPeeks’ Big Island home.

John Coughlin said that Flo’s influence stretched the length of the mainland among her peers in diaconate formation from California to Florida. When she became sick, there was an “outpouring of concern from folks from across the nation,” he said.

John said that among the “greatest treasures” he and Kathleen will long cherish are the times spent with the McPeeks at their Kohala home “there in the little spot on the hill.”

“The utter beauty, the seclusion there” was special enough, he said, but Flo’s hospitality made it exceptional.

A faith so strong

Even in illness, McPeek continued to be an inspiration.

After a lull in the disease, the cancer came back with a vengeance to her back and brain, paralyzing her right arm and hand so that she couldn’t knit.

“Her faith was so strong,” her husband said. “She was not afraid to die.”

She passed away at home, assisted by North Hawaii Hospice.

John Coughlin said that, knowing Flo is in heaven, this “moment of sorrow” co-exists with a “moment of extreme joy.”

As he and Kathleen embark on the next formation process, he said he is very conscious of the legacy left by Bill and Flo and others before them.

“We’re always humbled to recognize that we are carrying on the heart and soul of those who came before us,” he said. “To be a part of this is astounding.”

And while he can no longer consult with Flo, he is confident that she will help nevertheless.

“She will be with us in a different way. I have no doubt about that,” he said.

“It is consoling,” he said.

In addition to Bill, Flo is survived by their five children: Becky, who lives in the Philippines, Stephen of nearby Kukuihaele, Robert and Donald of Honolulu, and Julie who lives in the McPeek home.

She also has five grandchildren, five great grandchildren, and one surviving sister, Doris Teller of Makakilo.

Condolences may be sent to: Deacon William McPeek and Family, P.O. Box 278, Kapaau, HI 96755.