Mayeaux retired from the college in the summer of 2025 after more than 20 years, having served as the clerkship director for family medicine, geriatrics and informatics over the course of his career.
“ We did everything and delivered babies,” Mayeaux said, recounting those days in practice with McLeod, where staff meetings were held around a large kitchen table at a renovated laundromat on Stewart Street across from Joe’ s Pizza in Milton.“ There were no walk-in clinics. You had the emergency room or the office, so we had Saturday hours. It was a real, genuine, old-fashioned practice. And all our phone numbers were listed in the phone book.”
Mayeaux, also a Health & Hope volunteer, shared a conversation that took place more than 40 years ago around their Milton practice kitchen table, foreshadowing their future.
“ Here’ s an example of how deeply embedded we were with that [ College of Medicine ] mission statement but didn’ t know it,” he said.“ We had this profound discussion in the office about affordability of medicine and healthcare when we made the decision to raise our office fee from $ 15 to $ 17. That was a traumatic moment for us, because we were worried about affordability for some patients. It was, from the very beginning, our culture.”
Modeling that culture was a McLeod strength, especially with his students.
“ The thing that really connected Dr. McLeod and myself was how humanistic he was,” said Dr. Jada Leahy, a 2009 College of Medicine graduate and Pensacola surgeon.“ He was very real. There was not any mystical air about him. What you saw is what you got. It was a very natural, very comfortable, very relatable style of teaching.
“ One of his big gifts— mentoring students— is really knowing them as a human and a person; seeing their potential, but also seeing their challenges and supporting them as they get to that finish line on that journey, wherever it takes them.”
It’ s really good to have people in those positions who understand our mission because they were taught in it themselves
Paul McLeod, M. D. Senior Associate Dean for Regional Campuses, Dean of Pensacola Regional Campus
And in many cases, the journey of those students from the Pensacola campus included a return to the area following residency.
“ Between Panama City and Pensacola, we’ ve got at least 55 former students who are practicing medicine and taking care of our communities,” McLeod said.“ That means the mission and the model are working because we were created to do that.”
Several are clinical faculty members, including Leahy and Dr. Glen Thompson( Class of 2014), who are clerkship directors for surgery and geriatrics, respectively.
Admittedly biased, Leahy said the caliber of physicians, physician educators and physician leaders has made the Pensacola Campus something special.
“ The biggest [ influence ] is Dr. McLeod. He led by example,” she said.“ How he encouraged us to practice medicine— to be accountable, to be affable, to own our craft— felt very genuine; something that innately came in the way that he conveyed our education. For me to come back and be a part and be held to that caliber of those educators that I thought so much of, is what drew me in.”
It’ s impossible to exclude the influence of the Pensacola military community when discussing the college’ s presence. McLeod was a military scholarship medical student who served in the Navy, as did Leahy, also a Pensacola native. And a good number of College of Medicine military scholarship students choose the campus for their clinical years.
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