Fr. William McDermott
(Walter Lecky)

Father William McDermott (psued. Walter Lecky) was at one time a prolific contributor to the Catholic press of America. He was born in Stranorlar, the son of a mechanic, in 1863, and went to the United States as a child. Educated in Villanova, near Philadelphia, before studying for the priesthood he worked as a reporter on the Chicago Times, Herald and Mail and the New York Picayune.

Fr. McDermott was author of books, poems and articles, and was said to have contributed to virtually every Catholic periodical published in the United States. His work Down at Caxton’s (1895) was a criticism of contemporary Catholic thought in America, and included sketches of such writers as Richard Malcolm Johnston, Marion Crawford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Maurice Francis Egan, Louise Imogen Guiney, Agnes Repplier and Eleanor Conway. He wrote much verse and had a volume published as a young man; of his later poems, many were published in the Boston Pilot. His novel Mr. Billy Buttons, set in the Adirondacks area of New York state, was first serialized in the Catholic World.

He died at the age of fifty, in Montreal, Canada, on 17th March 1913. A sketch of him, by Eugene Davis, appeared in the Catholic Columbian (Columbus, Ohio) of 5 May 1894.