David Bailey Remembered
By Julia Bailey
(written in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in February, 2008
David Bailey was born July 14, 1915 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to Samuel Orwell Bailey and Grace Simpson Bailey. His parents had expected a girl and would have named him Julia, but Dave fooled them.
Neither Dave nor his siblings Ransom and I had middle names, but Dave felt the need of one as he became an adult, so he took the first name of Samuel, completely unofficially.
David’s childhood was as ordinary and uncomplicated as most childhoods in the 1920s and 30s. His father was an insurance and real estate broker who had difficulty, as most men did then, in making a living. I remember going with my father, especially after I learned to drive, while he went to people’s homes to collect for insurance premiums. If he sold a house, then there might be money to take a trip or to buy something bit. Our mother had been an English teacher, but became a full-time homemaker after their marriage.
Our mother's parents and two of her sisters lived no more than five blocks distance. Our father's brother, James Lee Bailey, also lived on the same streets, so there were always relatives nearby.
Dave and Ransom worked from an early age, delivering newspapers and magazines, maybe mowing lawns or shoveling snow. Both played football in high school, not from great love of the sport, but because they were strong and healthy and thus it was expected of them.
At some juncture they fixed up the attic of the big barn which was behind tgheir home and it became a clubroom of sorts. This was after the barn had housed a cow and couple of small pigs. These were the depression years. The cow was pastured on an empty city block on Clay Street, but I have no memory of anyone’s milking her. I do believe there was a story about the cow’s inadvertently sitting on and killing one of the pigs.
One Fourth of July the boys and their neighborhood friends shook most of the town by dropping a huge rock from the barn attic door onto another flat rock which was on top of many sheets of caps, also on top of another rock. No one was particularly upset by this blast. In fact, Mother rather liked noisy things, like Ravel’s “Bolero.”
One of David’s lifelong interests was music. He played a baritone horn in the high school band and in the Cedar Falls Municipal Band. Twice this latter band won first place in the Chicagoland Music Festival, a thrill for Dave and the rest of Cedar Falls.
After Dave was graduated from Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa) in 1937, he began work on his M.S. at the University of Iowa, putting himself through school mostly by painting houses in the summers. He received both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in chemistry from U.I.
Before finishing his Ph.D, Dave married Ouida Lowry, a biology graduate student from Pembroke, North Carolina. Their first home was in the East, where he worked for Rohm and Haas. He came back to Cedar Falls to become an assistant professor of chemistry at I.S.T.C. Next he became head of the Physical Chemistry Section of the Smith, Kline and French Research Laboratories in Philadelphia.
His final position was director of the Food Sciences Laboratory, U.S. Army Natick Research and Development Command. The laboratories worked on many projects for the army, such as dried foods, etc. One of their assignments was to produce a device that could record the maximum heat of an atomic bomb. Dave was witness to such an explosion at White Sands, New Mexico.
I think Dave got his interest in the Bailey family from our dad. In 1939 our family went to the World's Fair in New York City, visited an aunt of my father in upstate New York, spent a couple of days at the fair, and visited friends in Washington, D.C. I honestly can't remember if Dave was with us, as he must have been nearly at the end of his Ph.D. work in Iowa City. We did visit Bailey's Mill, in Vermont, but I don't believe we got inside. I have trouble remembering that because I have visited a couple of times since.
When Dave first retired, he and Ouida had a house built in Quechee, Vermont, where they expected to live, before Arizona got to them. But they kept the house and it was not sold until after Dave died. They and the family spent summers there. Dave loved New England. (I do too, but am perfectly happy to live in Iowa.) Dave joined the New England Genealogical Society where he did a lot of digging on the Baileys. His description of the little old ladies in the Genealogy library, insisting on absolute silence, was funny.