I’ve been struggling to remember the first time I met Dr. Bailey. It really bothers me that I can’t remember now, since I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the way he left us. But I suppose, like it is for the cohorts of graduate students who had the great fortune to spend our time in Morrill Hall, Bailey was just a given once I started here in 2012. His office in Morrill Hall, with those piles upon piles of book, was the stuff of legend (as was his presence at department talks) and we were all keen to see where all the books would go when he moved into the smaller office in Old Horticulture. But even though it was smaller, that office was just as warm and inviting as the Morrill office had been.

Every time I entered Old Horticulture, I was so glad to see that Dr. Bailey’s door was open. Any topic was open for discussion. I relished the time spent with him, talking about every topic imaginable. When I first told him that I was from Nashville, we spent a great deal of time talking about country music, but also about the history of the civil rights movement in Tennessee and the exceptional black universities that proliferated in the Athens of the South. We also spent an incredible amount of time talking about South Africa, the country we both loved so much. Even though it wasn’t his field, Dr. Bailey taught me so much about South Africa and introduced me to books and ideas that I’m sure I will continue grappling with for the rest of my career. We also spent a significant amount of time discussing his novels. One day, I walked by and asked him what he was working on, to which he responded, “I just blew up the South.” He was working on one of his novels and I settled into his chair to listen to his newest plot, in awe of a man who was such a phenomenal scholar, teacher, and creative mind. That hallway is so quiet now, as others have commented.

Dr. Bailey was not my advisor or a member of my committee or connected to my program of study in any official capacity, but he was a great friend to me. Last summer, I was really struggling with whether or not pursuing a PhD was still the right thing for me. I hadn’t received a grant that I was relying on to research my dissertation and I had begun to think that if I never got a grant, I was really going to be in trouble. I came to campus on a mission to find Dr. John Waller and speak to him, hoping that I might get some clarity as to what I should do. En route, I came across Dr. Bailey, reading outside Old Horticulture in the lovely midday sun. I told him I was looking for Dr. Waller and he asked me, “Why?.” I told him that I was feeling pretty low and like I had no clue what I was doing and that Dr. Waller was the person I usually went to when I was feeling like that. Dr. Bailey looked down, paused for a moment, then looked up at me and said, “Haven’t you figured out that you know what you’re doing yet?” That comment really stuck with me and when I finally got the grant to do my research later that summer, Dr. Bailey was one of the first people I sought out to tell. And his response was, “Well, that’s no surprise. I knew you would.”

I’m certainly not the only student who was changed by their interactions with Dr. Bailey. I am one among the thousands. And this past year, watching him teach the students in his 2000 Election Seminar, it’s not hard to imagine why. I watched as he nurtured his students and fostered their creativity, discovering each of their strengths in such subtle ways that I wish I had spent more time talking to him about his teaching. I feel profoundly honored to have simply watched him teach and I am so inspired by his passion and fierce commitment to his students. I will likely spend the rest of my career trying to emulate him, though I am sure my efforts will pale in comparison to his. Dr. Bailey was such a great example in so many ways, as others have put so beautifully.

I miss him already and I’ll never forget my great friend. Hamba kahle, Dr. Bailey.

Since I first learned of the sad news that Dr. Bailey passed away, I planned to come and pay my respects in person to this truly unique, creative, intellectual giant who profoundly influenced the way I think about history (and I daresay, so many others who knew him) but I had to change my plans at the last minute and unfortunately, will not be able to attend. At the risk of being somewhat intellectually lazy, which would undoubtedly disappoint Dr. Bailey since he was always on his academic game, I will repeat a few things I wrote over the last month about him and will synthesize some of these together in this remembrance. I feel it is warranted in that when I wrote these words, my surprise and grief were raw and I feel they continue to represent how I feel about this man that I truly did love and consider a teacher, mentor, inspiration, father figure, and a lovely human being.

My original posting on Facebook:

The world darkened a bit yesterday as we lost a wonderful, inspiring, creative light, Dr. David Bailey of Michigan State University. His History of the South class that I took when I was a lowly sophomore in 1991 literally changed my life being a sheltered, ignorant white girl from a rural Sundown town in mid-Michigan. He opened my eyes with his lectures and the readings he assigned and is one of the reasons I chose to go into African American history. I was fortunate to take graduate level classes with him along the way and serve as his TA in an online Sports History class. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear I don’t care a bit about sports but Dave Bailey even made sports fascinating in the context of race and social history in America. He was a beautiful, kind person and will be sorely missed.”

I used to periodically check to see if he was on FB and I never found him. He was so terrible with emails (love you, Dr. Bailey!) so I seldom wrote him after moving out of MI. But I used to randomly wander into his office just to chat with him while I was up there and no matter how many papers were stacked and overflowing on his desk, he was always welcoming.

I have given various acknowledgments to Dr. Bailey over the years, and I feel it is worthwhile to share a few of them in this space to demonstrate how deeply entrenched David Bailey’s spirit is within my work, including in my thesis, which he greatly helped shape by serving on my committee and offering his substantial thoughts and criticisms. As I wrote, “Dr. Bailey has always been a supportive and creative mentor. He has consistently pushed his students to examine all potential sources to get at the truth. He was always a proponent of utilizing the material sphere to accomplish this, with the use of archaeology as a tool to flesh out the history about which the documents are silent or misleading.” He constantly encouraged me to continue my efforts in historic archaeology and was interested in hearing about the projects I was involved in and soothed my guilty feelings of having one foot in the dirt and one in the library.

His presence in my life as a scholar continued during the time I returned to MSU as a doctoral student. As I wrote in the acknowledgement to my dissertation, “Specifically, within the Department, there have been numerous faculty members who have imprinted my project and scholarship with their own teaching and writing and served as inspirations in countless ways. Dr. David Bailey and Dr. Richard Thomas have inspired me for decades now with their commitment to arousing interest and passion for history in students. Both are amazingly creative and have shared their zeal for thinking outside the box with students and everyone else they come into contact with. And this has inspired me since I was an undergraduate and master’s student here.”

What a sad event to lose him but he made such an impact on the lives he touched. He was such a generous person with his time and ideas and even food. One of the stand outs about Dr. Bailey was his interest in foodways and the transmission of culture and the interplay of geography within this. He would make seminar classes so much more enjoyable by bringing in bagels and cream cheese. In fact, it was really strange timing but I was just talking about him on the very Friday before he passed because in the US History classes that I teach, we were playing Reacting to the Past and we’ve had three socials for each of the three events and my students have all amazed me by bringing in food and drinks. They made me feel so guilty that I performed “an unnatural act” by baking cookies (I HATE to cook)!! I was just telling one of them about how one of my dearest professors Dr. Bailey would bring food to class (especially bagels!) and how he pointed out rightly(!) that it made discussions so much more enjoyable.

MSU will not be the same without his quirky and creative questions during job talks and in classes. I used to actually look forward to the job talks in the History Department to witness how Dr. Bailey was going to pull it all together and ask the kind of question that inspired awe in the way in which the inner mechanisms of his mind worked. He was truly a one-of-a-kind.

The last class I took with Dr. Bailey was the HIST 9000 class. There were many gems that Dr. Bailey shared with us. One of the more interesting ones I found was to have us mine our favorite books to come up with the best opening lines. In honor of Dr. Bailey, here’s one of my favorites: “This book is a story, but at the same time it is not” (Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek). In fact, it was in Dr. Bailey’s class that I gained a truly deep appreciation of this scholar, who is one of my favorite historians, Winthrop Jordan, because of the way that Dr. Bailey spoke of him to us as a historian who carried his personal principles into his own work. It is evident that Dr. Bailey practiced this philosophy himself.

I continue alternating between tears and chuckles thinking about him. The one thing I’ll never forget is how he was such a hoarder with his books! Towering scads of them. He had a huge collection of records too…blues and jazz, among other genres, I think. True, hard-core historian. Honestly, with all his talk of his Irish grandmother’s stories about “the little people,” (I think that was how he said it), I think he would want to be remembered in all the myriad of ways he left his profound, humorous, brilliant mark on the world. He will never be forgotten and his legacy will live through his students, his colleagues, friends, and everyone whose life he touched, the most important of whom are his family and of course, his wonderful daughters.

Always in love, gratitude, and remembrance,

I had been at Michigan State University for several weeks when a friend and colleague recommended that I drop by to see David Bailey in Morrill Hall. Like many of those with a joint appointment, I had few expectations that I would be considered a full member of my minority department. David changed that in a single interaction. Having located his out-of-the-way room, more an intellectual’s den than conventional office, I delighted at the evidence of David’s learnedness: haphazard layers of manuscripts that largely concealed the rug and thousands of well-thumbed books packed tightly into wall-to-ceiling shelves or standing in precarious spirals on floor, desk and chairs. A quick scan of these shelves and piles – containing works on everything from anthropology and medieval history to Civil Rights and the philosophy of science – told me that I was not in the presence of a narrow specialist or an ideologue for modish theory. Sitting on a sagging armchair with his laptop balanced on his knees, David invited me with warm enthusiasm to sit on the one accessible chair. When I left work that evening I realized that the Department of History would become for me a congenial home.

Many more such visits followed. Each time I left with further suggestions of books to read, the pleasure of having enjoyed highly intelligent and amusing conversation, and a stronger connection with someone whom I respected and whose respect I in turn would cherish. As my own research strayed into areas novel for me, David would routinely take down from his shelves brilliant books of which I was unaware. And his help was invaluable. Invariably he would recall with startling rapidity what was at stake in different fields and he could be depended on to add his own subtle reflections born of lengthy contemplation and the widest of reading. Such was the quality of David’s intellectual companionship that he maintained decades-long relationships with former advisors from his Berkeley graduate school days, speaking with them weekly on the phone at times scheduled as strictly as any religious observance.

Within a year David’s friendship mattered as much to me as any I’ve ever enjoyed. During nine-years of tea breaks, long lunches at the Peanut Barrel or Snyder-Philips dining hall, and longer stints over beer on my deck, the Harrison Roadhouse or in English pubs over warm, malty beer and sausage rolls, David practiced the wise imperative of E M Forster’s Howard’s End: ‘Only connect’. The academic life can be dysfunctionally isolating, lonely furrows can be ploughed so deeply that we’re no longer able to see over the top. Not so for David. He read the work of his colleagues, was helpfully forthcoming with criticisms and, when deserved, fulsome with praise. For many of us he helped to humanise the academic existence, making the department into the learned community to which we’d always hoped to belong.

David’s kindness manifested in multiple ways. He loved our children in part because towards them he could more freely express the enormous tenderness of his character. He would put them at their ease, make them laugh, and bring them favourite treats, Advent calendars in December, and wonderfully elaborate birthday cakes commissioned from Bake-n-Cakes. This sort of generosity extended to adults, too; those in distress would open their doors to find expensive cakes or entire cured hams on their front steps – as well as David’s Subaru receding into the distance. When we were in extremis David did not always know what to say: he was too honest to offer banal consolation and, I think, carried so much pain himself from the loss of his wife Mary that in emotionally acute situations he often seemed to prefer doing over talking. But he found ways of showing his support, love and understanding that we will always treasure.

When my son was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, at aged 3, David spent long hours with us at the hospital, smuggling in the bottles of brandy that helped make those terrifyingly dark days survivable. In the weeks that followed, when Charlie was receiving radiation and the steroids that made him ravenously hungry, David would always strive to lift Charlie’s mood and maintain his parents’ morale. For two weeks this entailed driving over an hour each way to an Ikea store every other day to buy another tray of the cinnamon rolls that Charlie loved. And, for Abby and I, there were regular deliveries of sanity-preserving cases of wine. Over the years that followed Charlie and David developed a deep bond, both valuing one another’s desire to connect and sensing one another’s humanity. Charlie wept hot, heavy tears one afternoon when we were driving David back from Chicago upon being told that his friend would not be moving into our basement! David was there just a few hours before Charlie passed away. He mostly sat in silence. He had been himself in a similar place and knew that words had no power.

One of my greatest regrets is that I distanced myself from friendships, including to some extent that with David, in the months that followed, unable to find ways of being authentic without feeling or causing discomfort and embarrassment. But David understood. He knew the pain of loving and losing. On the day of his death, David beckoned my wife and I close to him so we could hear him speak despite his rapidly weakening voice. It was an opportunity for all of us to express the affection that diffidence had silenced. ‘I’m going to see Mary and Charlie later today’, he said. It was an intensely moving moment for which we are profoundly grateful. Just as importantly, David had already provided a model for how one can at least half-heal from tragedy: by living a more selfless life. After Mary’s death, five years before I first met him, David threw himself into nurturing wonderful students at the Honors College. All the time that I knew him he invested gladly and fully in junior faculty. And he was also devoted to the History Department. In support of his intellectual home, David could be the ablest political operator; he would often talk of ‘planting seeds’, making apparently casual statements about what might be done which would germinate months later with astonishing frequency. We relied on David’s political savvy and personal advice because he was both wise and unselfish.

In life and perhaps more so in his passing, David caused many of us to re-examine our priorities. There is much to be emulated in the proud joy with which David talked about his daughters and their accomplishments; in his devotion to Doris, his mother; in the passion that he brought to teaching and mentoring students; in the readiness with which he would drop whatever he was doing to speak with a colleague; and in his willingness to stand his ground in order to do what was right for the department. David Bailey is irreplaceable. I will miss him terribly.

David has a very special place in my heart as a colleague, friend, and confidant. I would like to share a few thoughts and memories that are quintessentially David.

The first time I met David was during my interview at MSU in 1997. He picked me up in his station wagon–a 1980s behemoth. It was stuffed with books and papers. As we drove, he turned to me and earnestly (and dryly) explained why my Pulitzer-prize winning dissertation advisor was wrong about Southern yeoman. He was utterly sincere, and no less so in his pleasure at hearing my retort. During the 18 years that I have known David, this was always his distinguishing feature: he loved history, new perspectives, and a good historical debate.

I learned many things from David as I moved forward in the department and the profession. Perhaps most important, he was committed to the Department and to MSU. One of our colleagues once described him as “The Chancellor” of the Department, an apt description of the role he relished. He gained his authority by being an assiduous student of the University’s culture, by looking at the big picture, by mastering the art of getting things done, by being compassionate at core, and most significantly by listening. His ability to listen to others gave him his greatest strength. He knew what people needed, what they wanted, and what they would compromise on because he took the time to hear what they had to say.

This was not perceptiveness, it was science. I tried over the last couple of weeks to count the number of times in 18 years when I was right and he was wrong when we disagreed. I came up with 2 1/2. [And he would not concede those if he were here to contest it!]

When I became Associate Dean in the College of Social Science, I took with me David’s example of how to approach one’s duties. I made it a point to listen, not take things personally, and serve the College and University’s larger purposes at all times. And I met with David whenever I felt the need to keep my compass. He was always there to listen and advise.

From our first, rather wry meeting to my last visit with David in Ann Arbor our friendship became very strong. He rallied when my tenure case seemed in jeopardy. I owe him always for this. He happily lifted my baby daughter over his head and planted a loud raspberry on her tummy when she was born. He sat with my family in Cooperstown by Lake Otsego enthusiastically munching Brooks BBQ and upbraiding me for being sarcastic toward my mother. He dropped everything and took my wife Sarah and I to Dinosaur Barbeque in Buffalo when we were in town. He watched with smirking bemusement as my children, Ella and Lincoln, scampered, scuttered, and climbed all over Ed Jocques’ boat this August.

He was very much like an older brother to me.

David was all this and much more to his family and so many colleagues and friends over the years that I feel blessed to have had any time with him at all. His ability to touch lives–students, colleagues, family–seemed inexhaustible. He is missed.

Au revoir, mon frere.

In our lives it is so very rare that someone we meet changes our way of thinking for the better. David Bailey had that impact on me. I first met him in an American intellectual history course in the winter of 2009. The insights he offered and the intellectual challenges he presented to our class created one of the most rewarding, most positive learning experiences I had at Michigan State. His lectures were not simply about history, they were about how to live in a historical moment with the weight of history behind oneself. He was the sort of intellectual who could walk into class five minutes late and craft a brilliant lecture from memory.

I had the privilege of working with David that summer in Oxford. The guidance, the humanity, the warmth he offered me while I researched the British Coal Miners’ strike in 1984 gave me an invaluable first experience in real historical research. I still have not yet fully realized the value of my experience that summer, and I have David Bailey to thank for that. Without his support I would not have gone on the trip, without his belief in me I would not have embarked upon my chosen project, and without his insights I would not have matured enough to understand that history is really an attempt to understand human experiences in the midst of chaos.

David deeply impressed me with his down to earth sensibility. I remember him beginning class before MSU’s men’s basketball team played in the Final Four in Detroit in 2009 by encouraging us to embrace the moment. His perspective on life always pleasantly surprised me.

I met David at a difficult time in my life when I was quite lost. He encouraged me to pursue graduate studies in history at a time when I had no clue what to do with myself. His belief in me and his gentle understanding of my overly ambitious and naïve understanding of social history tempered my impulses to stumble around history. His guidance gave me the opportunity to achieve something I likely never would have, earning a Master’s degree in history.

I will always remember with great fondness the creaking floors leading to David’s corner office, the desk overwhelmed with books and papers, the worn leather chair in which he tapped away at his computer with endless energy. Like Morrill Hall, I will not have the privilege of seeing such things again, but then I think that David always lived in ideas, in the ether where our hopes and imaginations and dreams exist. In that way he will always be part of our lives.

David was my closest friend for 50 years and these comments represent a redaction of the eulogy that I delivered at his memorial service in Buffalo on November 21. I am sure that everyone who views this website shares the tremendous sense of loss that I feel and that those feelings are tempered by only one thing- our deep appreciation for the lasting rewards that have accrued to us from knowing David whether as a family member, a teacher, a colleague or a friend. My grandmother, Anna Maisel, who David knew and respected, used to have a saying that you never knew who your real friends were in life until you needed them and that when you needed them, you could count them on the fingers of one hand. For the last 50 years, whenever I started to count my friends, David was always the first person that I counted. When I dropped out of graduate school in 1974 and was unsure of what to do, it was David who invited me to come out and visit him in Berkeley. Perhaps he hadn’t realized that I was going to stay with him for the next 5 years! But the point is that he was there for me. Similarly, when my father died unexpectedly, David came back to Buffalo from California to be with my family. And when my mom went through a long and difficult illness, David was there for her as well. Of course, our friendship was reciprocal. I recall the day that David persuaded Mary and I to go with him to the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California and Mary stumbled a few times when we were walking around. That night at dinner, they told me that Mary had just been diagnosed as having MS and that for now I was the only person that they wanted to share this with. Twenty years later, when I learned that Mary had died in East Lansing, I picked up Dave’s parents who lived near me in Buffalo and the three of us immediately drove to Michigan to do whatever we could to help out.

My wife Patti was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years and has always said that you tell pretty much tell what a person will be like as an adult from the way that they act in kindergarten. I didn’t know David at that young an age, but his character and interests demonstrated a remarkable consistency over the last 50 years. From the time that he was a very young man, David always loved music and theatre. When other 13 year olds were watching monster movies, David was into The Sound of Music. In fact he and I, along with our friend Andy Myer, were probably the only straight guys in our high school class of 800 students who really loved musicals. David always acted in our high school musicals and he and I ushered several night a week at a professional theatre in downtown Buffalo where we were paid $2.00 each per performance. Every summer for years David and I, and frequently Mary, would go for a marathon trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. David would pick me up at 5:00 am in the hope that we could get to the box office when it opened at 8:00 so that we could get the limited student price tickets. Then we would see two Shakespeare plays in one day and crash for the night sated on Cymbeline, King Lear, or the Dutchess of Malfi. When we were in high school, David proposed that he and I write a one act musical as a class project. My piano teacher liked one of our songs called Paint a Horizon so much that he did a choral arrangement of it and had it song by the high school choir where he taught. Then he introduced David and I as the young composers and everyone in the auditorium gave us a big round of applause. It was a great night for us and our parents who were all there as well.
Along with music and theatre, David had a lifelong love for books and learning with deep roots in his youth. Here it might be possible to liken David to Othello as “one who loved not wisely but too well” insofar as his book collection may rival that of the Library of Congress. This started at an early age. Every Saturday when we were not engaged in a hot game of Risk, David and I and our friends would take the bus to downtown Buffalo and hit our circuit which included the library ( where we would each take out the 6 books/records that we were allowed per week), the music store and a variety of new and used bookstores. Years later when David and I were both in graduate school at UC Berkeley we followed the same pattern. In our free time we would either comb the multiple used bookstores on Telegraph Avenue or for a special treat go into downtown Oakland, San Jose, or San Francisco to visit the bookstores there. More recently, on David’s trips home to Buffalo to visit his mom, he and I would always search the bookstore in North Buffalo for interesting finds. Part of David’s perpetual quest here was the sheer joy of the hunt- trying to complete his set of the works of James Thurber or the American Guide Series. And part of it was more personal. For example, David had great respect and admiration for my father who was also a book collector. After dad died, he purchased my father’s collection of Harry Steven Keeler books ( known as the Ed Wood of mystery writers) from my mom. Over the years, David assiduously added to the collection because this was his way of maintaining a connection with my father. In fact David’s last words to me on the day before he died were that we had something of great importance to discuss and when I asked him what it was, he said ” the Keeler collection.”
But David was not just a book collector who enjoyed the possession of his books, he was an amazingly avid reader himself with a tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge. Again, the roots of this go back to when he was a young man. Every Sunday morning, he and Andy Myer would walk to Benson’s drugstore on Kenmore Avenue, even in the bitter January cold of Buffalo, so David could buy his Sunday New York Times which he would then read pretty much in its entirety. Based on this, he developed a remarkable knowledge of the world around him at an early age. A love of learning came naturally to David and years later he was able to share it with his students through a wide variety of courses that he taught- from American religious and intellectual history to courses on sports and music. In addition to having a special gift for learning, David was fortunate as well to have a reciprocal gift for teaching. In his senior year of high school I heard him speak to our combined two english classes for 45 minutes on the works of his then favorite playwright, Eugene O’Neil and I can’t remember his using any notes! It was the best english class of the year. Many years later, I heard David give a class at MSU with the same fluidity and drama and passion that he had demonstrated 30 years earlier in high school.
I cannot overestimate the influence that David has had on my life- always in ways that have helped to make me a better person. He will always be in my thoughts and will be a profound part of the world around me. Thank you for allowing me to share these thoughts and memories.

Dr. Bailey was one of three wonderful professors who led a study abroad to Oxford in summer 2009. It was a powerful experience in so many ways, not least because we were living on our own at a proper Oxford college. We had a full English breakfast provided every morning, and the professors were always there to provide conversation and advice on our research or even ideas for what to do in our free time. Dr. Bailey always had a smile and a joke at hand, even if (or maybe particularly if) the joke was self-deprecating, as in the case of being “only Canadian” and not properly English. I remember his dismay when we found the professors’ favorite pub hangout- The Turf, where Bill Clinton famously “did not inhale”.

My fondest memory of Dr. Bailey (and indeed the whole trip) occurred when I was walking to our college, when I spotted Dr. Bailey and a few other folks sitting outside the Kings’ Arms. Somehow the fact that I was from Oklahoma came up, and Dr. Bailey asked if I knew the theme song, to which I replied, “of course!” He then began singing it, and I hesitantly joined in. I’m not sure what the native Oxfordites (Oxfordians?) thought of our song, but I enjoyed singing it at top volume on a street corner in England.

Dr. Bailey was a warm, genuine, and funny man, and I know he will be missed dearly by friends, colleagues, and family. I was so saddened to hear of his passing and regret that I didn’t get a chance to wish him well before the end. I count myself so lucky to have had the opportunity to meet and interact with him, even for such a short time.

The day Polly Pockets, My Little Ponies, and markers of various colors entered Bailey’s American survey is the day I realized I could be comfortable as a professional historian. In the mid-1990s I had the great privilege of being one of three teaching assistants for that class (Maria Quinlan Leiby and Manelissi Gengi were the other two), where we sat spellbound along with the undergrads as he delivered one fantastic lecture after another. One day his daughters, Jeanne and Lizzie, joined us, who were I believe in 4th and 1st grades and enjoying a no-school day. They were excited to be joining their Dad in his classroom but the adults all knew their presence was a childcare issue. Bailey (the grads just called him “Bailey”) sat them next to us in the front row, threw us one of those eyes-twinkling looks, and wished us luck. Big sister Jeanne took this college thing very seriously and proceeded to take notes on Dad’s lecture (her notes were much better than mine that day) while Lizzie decided it was time to play, “my toys are in school” and did so rather loudly. Within minutes, we were navigating coats needing to be unzipped, sibling snipes, toys tossed on the floor, spilled juice, rolled eyes, some exaggerated coughing, and a few episodes of students laughing at the commotion in that front row. And, Bailey never missed a beat. As we gathered up those coats to leave, he asked Jeanne what she had learned and she launched into a detailed account of the Second Great Awakening (scary smart this gal); then Lizzie presented her Dad with the newly named “College Polly,” who stayed in his hand as we all walked back to Morrill Hall. Professor Bailey navigated many things in his personal life but I hadn’t experienced how he managed it. Calm. The guy was brilliant and calm and absolutely devoted to his family. I’ve often reflected on that day when I’m having a tough day on campus (I’m a professor at Illinois State University), in the community (I’m an advocate for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence) or at home (I’ve got a spouse and a 17-year-old). I’ve been fortunate to have many wonderful mentors in my life and I’ll forever be grateful to Bailey for teaching me that I could have a fulfilling professional life without sacrificing what I held dear: my family and friends. He encouraged us to BE with our families and friends rather than just talk about doing it, and he modeled that encouragement. Thanks to Bailey, I’m very comfortable with the multiple, colorful, and diverse roles I enjoy in my full life, and I thank his daughters for sharing him with his students. He was one of a kind.

I had the pleasure of taking one of Dr. Bailey’s classes during my time as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University. The class was titled “American Intellectual History to 1860”, and I was intimidated at first due to him assigning readings that I have never heard of. Bailey assigned the class readings from historical figures such as Theodore Dwight Weld, who was one of the architects of the the abolitionists movement, speeches from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the various drafts of the Gettysburg Address, and Rousseay’s “Social Contract”. Each of the readings he assigned the class, we never finished discussing because we would spend the entire class period discussing the first sentence or paragraph of an historical document. I have never been that intellectually stimulated over a sentence or paragraph, but that was Bailey’s style of teaching, and it worked.

I remember him coming to class and having no notes or PowerPoint slides. This was very different from any professor I had encountered at Michigan State. He magically facilitated discussion and pushed me to always think deeper. One particular point in the class, we had a discussion on Abraham Lincoln, and this is where I developed a fond interest in the “Great Emancipator”. Bailey challenged me think about Lincoln’s upbringing, what he said in his speeches and writings, and how that correlated to his actions. This pushing led me to conduct my Ronald E. McNair Scholars program research on Abraham Lincoln and The Reconstruction Era. At the time I didn’t realize how Bailey’s pushing led me to delve into serious scholarly research on one of the most enigmatic President’s in U.S. History.

I am now a teacher of History and English at the high school level, and the teachings that Bailey gave me, I now give to my students and it is in that way his spirit and legacy will carry on for generations. My pedagogy as a teacher and my views as a human being have been forever changed due to Dr. Bailey, and I’m forever grateful for his contributions to myself and Michigan State University. Rest peacefully, Dr. Bailey.