Instructor Spotlight: Fred Bailey

By Daniel Johnson, Section Manager

Every OLLI at TTU location has a few instructors that are a crowd favorite among the OLLI members. These are usually instructors that members can tell have a strong passion for teaching, stimulate the mind, and can relate to members that are looking to learn just for the sake of learning. Maybe it is because OLLI instructor Fred Bailey is like them and has never stopped learning, or maybe it is because he has never met a stranger, but for whatever the reason, Bailey has quickly become a favorite for OLLI at TTU, Abilene, with his history and political presentations.

Bailey, originally from Arkansas, enjoyed a 40-year teaching career, starting at a small college in Tennessee and completing the last 30 years as a professor and department chair at Abilene Christian University, where he retired in 2013.

After retirement, Bailey's love of research and teaching did not end, and he soon found himself creating lectures for the Abilene Public Library about Queen Victoria's England. It was at these lectures where he first learned about the OLLI program through Texas Tech University.

"These courses were well attended and there was a couple that brought me the brochure. Using that brochure, I contacted the Abilene OLLI coordinator, Misha Price, and offered to teach Civil War classes," said Bailey.

"I love teaching, I have always enjoyed teaching. It is a form of sharing and it is a form of art. Once you retire you move away from that. I am glad I am retired; I no longer have to mess with reports, and committee meetings, provosts or sophomores, and all that sort of thing. I love the OLLI philosophy that we don't have to worry about that. I don't have to grade all those tests that I used to have to grade."

Bailey's interest in the Civil War started as a young teen during the Civil War centennial in 1960 when Bailey was 13 years old.

"At a time when most boys were collecting baseball cards and noticing young women, I got fascinated by collecting everything I could about the American Civil War. I started keeping notebooks, drew my own maps, and learned about all the battles. So initially it began as a juvenile fascination, and that began my background in the American Civil War."

While the American Civil War has been an interest to Bailey since early in life, it was no longer a focus as his direction changed during high school and college.

"In college, I went through several different possible majors. My real interest was to become a speech major, and I had visions of becoming a debate coach. I was on the debate team in high school and in college. Interest in history eventually brought me to being a history major, but as an undergraduate, I moved away from the Civil War."

Shortly after completing his doctoral dissertation on a completely unrelated topic, a friend asked Bailey to write an essay for an anthology he was putting together. This essay soon changed the course of Bailey's life. The topic assigned to him was "The Common Farmer Before the Civil War." While researching this topic Bailey stumbled on something many had not seen before.

"On a December day in 1979 about 3 p.m., there was a young archivist at the library I was researching at who asked if I had ever heard of the Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires."

"What is was, was a very crude, sociological questionnaire created in 1913to 1919, comprised of 1,648 letters, mostly from Confederate soldiers and about 200 Union soldiers. Soon I realized I had a short-stilted biography of nearly 1,600 individuals, and I could compare them. Many of them were wealthy and many were dirt poor, and everywhere else in-between. It was a godsend," stated Bailey. "That became the basis of my first book, titled Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation."

Bailey published several articles from his findings, and his book won the Tennessee History Book Award. People were then starting to show interest in what Bailey was doing and what he had to say about the subject.

"I write history from the bottom up. What that means is, most history that we read is about less than 2% of the population. In other words "the important people," the political leaders, military leaders, and the movers and shakers who have been covered in newspapers or saved their letters; and that is where most historians are drawn. But I was drawn to see if I could write the history of the common folk."

"Because of my childhood, and rather juvenile interest in the Civil War back in 1960 that got me into the history profession, and then because of my interest in social and intellectual history, it took me back into Civil War-related topics and how people have interpreted them, and in turn, shaped our society."

In retirement, OLLI at TTU provides an opportunity for Bailey to continue his research and share his findings with others who share a similar passion for history.

"In my teaching, I taught many times about the Civil War era, not just the Civil War. When I talked to Misha, I said, 'what if you allow me to do what nobody does, and that is go into detail, instead of trying to fit everything into one short semester, or two semesters. Let me treat the Civil War from the beginning all the way to how it affects us today,'" said Bailey. "I developed a timeline for a six-part series. Currently, we are in part two."

The way the course is set up might not work for a normal university setting or student. It takes a special program and individuals to understand and stick with a course that is so detailed. OLLI was able to provide that platform for Bailey to share his findings. However, between part one and part two of the Civil War courses, the OLLI program moved to the Zoom online platform to deliver courses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While this has been somewhat of a difficult transition for both members and instructors, Bailey still finds a lot of value in the Zoom OLLI courses.

"OLLI offers the opportunity to help people grasp the world around them and go into it with a certain amount of maturity. OLLI is great because it has mature people, they have been around, they are curious, and they are interested. That adds a whole new dynamic to it, and you can still get much of that in the Zoom environment."

"I was fortunate to have the end of the spring and summer to figure out what worked and what didn't and am now beginning to get a sense on how I can do this," Bailey said. "This is simply a new direction and new way of doing things, and we are all learning and trying. I prefer a live audience, but if I can't teach live, then Zoom is something that I feel I can still reach out to people with and I enjoy doing it."

Lifelong learning is near and dear to Bailey's heart as he shares the same passion as a lot of the OLLI members by continuing to learn as long as he can. Now an OLLI instructor and board member he has found a place with like-minded individuals.

"If you are over the age of 50 and still have that 'gee whiz,' and that desire and wonder of it all, that is what OLLI is all about. That desire to learn should not end when you are 21 years old, or when your family gets grown, it should end when you take your last breath," said Bailey.