Remembering Barbara Bailey, Seattle Bookseller and Civil Rights Champion

My friend and Peace Corps partner Barb Bailey died in 2018 in Seattle, her hometown, where her father Phil was longtime publisher of the gadfly weekly Argus. She was lauded as a champion of the Civil Rights movement and the LGBTQ community by scores of friends and customers of Bailey-Coy books on Capitol Hill, her long-time perch at Seattle’s center point.

My sense of Barb was someone else, as we all are when we are young, although nothing she said or did in the last 50 years of her life was surprising. There is something special about people (as we were) being thrown together into an alien culture at the cusp of adulthood, learning together to deal with a world so much bigger than we had imagined, and so much earthier. Her passing turned back my clock and stopped me in that wonderful time in my life when Barb and I were Peace Corps volunteers in Turkey.

I found a few pictures to send to her brother on her passing. There’s one of her scrubbing
laundry by hand on a wooden washboard I’d fashioned for her; another where she is on the
back end of a box with two rails, carrying manure to be pressed and dried into stove fuel called tezek. In another, she stands by a new village fountain we helped initiate in the Kurdish section of our village called “Zenikan.”

And, finally, there was a picture that brought tears: it’s Barb and me at the train station in
Diyarbakir as we finished our two-year tour in June of 1967.  It was mostly men who came to see us off — they include the mayor and Necip, my best friend, who is holding one of our
suitcases. And then, next to Barb, an older woman. The young women and girls she had spent most of her time with had said their goodbyes and shed their tears in the village that morning as we got on the minibus. But this old woman made sure she was there, standing beside her American friend, to say goodbye.

Barb talked fast and had a mild stammer, which made speaking Turkish more difficult for her than it was for me. As most of the official Turks in our provincial city that we dealt with were men, it was more comfortable for them to look and talk first to me. It was the same in the village, briefly — until we became part of them, and then men and women addressed either of us comfortably. 

I have sometimes thought that Barb (and many other Peace Corps women in Turkey) might
have been happier as volunteers in some Pacific Island nation where they could have lived by the sea and swam with dolphins. Or at least in some non-Muslim country where they didn’t feel obliged to wear long-sleeved blouses and skirts over leggings. 

But it was 1965. And although modesty was the order of a young woman’s day in the village, the Turks we visited in the city, like our Turkish teacher, Nili, who became Barb’s life-long friend, wore short skirts and smoked in public. In fact, in 1965, in Ankara and Istanbul, miniskirts were shorter than they were in New York. And the women engineers, doctors, and agriculturalists we met were all new to our American eyes.

Looking back now, I think Barb took much, including examples of confident and highly placed women like Nili, from those years. In the village and on trips to the nearby city of Diyarbakir — we went there for supplies by shared minibus or on the wooden floors of wagons pulled by tractors — Barb charged from shop to shop, fruit market to butcher, like it was the thing she was born to do. I prided myself on my Turkish, and was often complimented on it. But I did not have the bargaining gene — shopkeepers loved bargaining, and preferred dealing with Barb, who was a very good bargainer.

In the village we would touch base during the day and eat dinner together at her house, and then I would go to the coffee house, play backgammon and dominoes, catch up on village gossip, and practice my Turkish. In those evening meals, we shared each other’s days in the village and news from home. We read the Argus, her father’s newspaper, and she read and reread the letter-stories about Thatcher, her youngest sibling and the apple of her eye.

I learned, over time, that the Argus was not a money-maker, but her father’s opportunity to interpret Seattle his Stevensonian-Virginia-Democrat way. I learned also that the Bailey family had property in Port Townsend, and that money was not their concern.

After dinner, I had the coffee house; Barb joined us there only when government officials came to visit. Otherwise, she was part of the women’s world, watching over baby care, pounding bulgur, making tezek, preparing for weddings and circumcisions, listening to women complain about husbands.

On our mile-long walks to and from Zenikan. One time a man who had come home from the Army to build a village school, plant a mulberry orchard, and teach in the school, invited both of us and a guest Peace Corps couple to lunch in his house in Zenikan. He fed us meat and vegetables, bread and more bread, bulgur, yogurt, cucumbers, tomatoes, white cheese and olives, melons, and on and on.

When we went to Ankara for conferences, we would always have at least one dinner with Nili in her modern apartment. Her children were beautiful, and they were learning Turkish as we were. Nili worked for Turkish state radio and television. Her husband was a civil engineer. Their friends were teachers and engineers, educated people. Most of them had studied in the United States. The women would gasp and giggle as Barb told stories of her very explicit conversations with village women about their matrimonial lives. There was a wonderful kind of reciprocity in these dinners, with the men and women who had helped teach us Turkish, and then asked us to tell them about the villagers in their own country.

When we came home,. Barb went to Seattle and worked with juveniles for a time, and then she went to Sun Valley to ski and ended up owning the bookstore there. I went back to Turkey on staff, and then to D.C., and then to small-town eastern Oregon to work for the OSU Extension Service. After five years, Judy, my then wife, and I decided we wanted to open a bookstore, and Barb came down to help us make our first orders. We did that for 12 years, and the Bookloft still lives, over 40 years on, in the small town of Enterprise.

Barb went back to Seattle and started two bookstores — B. Bailey Books, and Bailey-Coy Books. We saw each other only a few times over the years. And on her fiftieth, Barb wrote to say that she had parachuted out of an airplane. More recently her brother Bruce visited an old Seattle friend who now lives here in the Wallowas, so I’d reconnected with her that way. And one day that fall Bruce’s Wallowa friend called to tell me that Barb was gone, that she’d played golf with Bruce just a day before, and that her death was sudden.

I sent Bruce a brief note and gathered up old photos and sent them to him. And he in turn shared a newspaper tribute written by the Mayor of Seattle. I realized that I’d never told Barb how important she was in those days. How without her I would have learned less than half as much, been an orphan in that new world rather than a partner in it.