Richard W. Bailey, in memoriam

Richard W. Bailey, a Fellow of the Society, died on Saturday morning, 2 April 2011, at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, aged 71. He was born on 26 October 1939, in Pontiac, Michigan, graduated from Dartmouth College (1961), where he took his first course in the history of English, studied at the University of Edinburgh, and earned his doctorate at the University of Connecticut (1965), where he first realized that "people talk the way they talk for a reason, and if you can tease out what the reasons are, you have contributed to scholarship" (Adams and Bailey 2009, 360-361). That principle guided him throughout forty-two years of scholarship and teaching at the University of Michigan, where he ended his career as the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English.¹

As will become clear in this account of his life and work, Bailey was devoted to many organizations besides the University of Michigan, the Dictionary Society of North America not least among them. He was a Charter Member of the Society, elected Vice-President by ballot preliminary to the Society's first biennial meeting at Indiana State University in 1977 (Gates 2004, 151). His greatest contribution to the Society's early history and durable success, however, was serving for a decade as the original editor of Dictionaries, from 1979 to 1989. Starting a new journal requires intelligence and a wide range of contacts among professionals in the relevant fields, but above all outstanding patience, resilience, and energy. Editing Dictionaries remains hard work, but editing it ex nihilo was harder work still. It is fair to say that the Society's success depended in large part on the journal's success, and that we owe a large measure of both to Bailey. Before the biennium beginning in 1983, the Vice-President was not, as today, also the President-Elect. However, it was unthinkable, given his continuous, strenuous, and valuable service, that Bailey would not be President, so he was re-elected Vice-President in 1999 and served in due course as President (2001-2003). He was elected a Fellow in 2005.

This resume hardly captures the man, more impressive by far than the sum of his accomplishments. Bailey knew more than almost anyone about nearly everything, and he did not wear his learning lightly. Many a conversation with him began, "You probably don't know this, in fact, I'm sure that you don't," and then followed an arcane bit of information about dictionaries, English, American history, or architecture that led to another and then another. Walking with him in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or any other place was an amble through byways of local history. I often wished I had remembered a notebook—there wasn't any hope of keeping up with him, but at least with notes, I could catch up later and remember some of what he so readily retrieved from his surplus memory. He was one of those few people who have the broadest possible scope of interests with a correspondingly deep understanding of them all. He was often gruff; he could be intimidating. But when he said "Come with me," you were a fool to hang back.

Bailey's gruffness was just a habit of address. He had a wide grin but usually teased with a straight face. He was a great talker, yes, but also a great listener. And he had a big heart—he loved people, loved his family and friends and colleagues deeply and felt compassion for people in the world at large, and he acted on this love and compassion with determination to be good by doing good. Professionally, in the traditions of his heroes Allen Walker Read and Fred Cassidy, he was committed to the notion of "learned society," with equal emphasis on both terms. He represented, at various times, both the Society and the American Dialect Society as a Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The Dictionary Society of North America wasn't just a journal or a biennial meeting, but a group of people...