Ronald H. Bailey

RONALD H. BAILEY

October 14, 1934 – March 29, 2025

Ronald H. Bailey, a former longtime resident of the Town of Meredith, passed away March 29, 2025, in LaFayette, NY. He was 90. Ron was a dedicated husband to his wife of nearly 68 years, Sue, a supportive father to four children, beloved “Gramps” to seven grandchildren, author of 14 non-fiction books, a Senior Editor and Director of Photography for LIFE Magazine, School Board member and president for the Delhi Central School System Board, Meredith Town Board member, a master gardener and a lifelong sports fan.

Ron was directly involved with many seminal events of the 1960s. He covered astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and others for LIFE, reported on the trial of Jack Ruby, participated in the “Turnaround Tuesday” Selma March with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and served as the interim LIFE Saigon Bureau Chief during the Vietnam War.

He is survived by his wife, Sue Heskamp Bailey, of LaFayette, and his four children: Eliza Bailey of LaFayette; Reade Bailey (Karen) of Eden Prairie, MN; Benjamin Bailey (Julia) of Amherst, MA; and Rebecca Bailey of LaFayette. His seven grandchildren are: Keegan Mulholland (Shayna) of Manlius, NY; Dr. Jamus Mulholland (Monica) of Philadelphia, PA; Talia Rueschemeyer-Bailey of Chicago, IL; Logan Bailey of Bloomington, MN; Solomon Rueschemeyer-Bailey of New York City; Sawyer Bailey of Eden Prairie, MN; and Noe Rueschemeyer-Bailey of Amherst, MA. He is also survived by eight beloved nieces and nephews.

Ron was born October 14, 1934, in Middletown, OH, the only child of Norman and Rose Bailey. He grew up in the small town of Franklin, OH, where he played basketball and tennis on his school teams, had a daily newspaper delivery route, worked summers at a local steel plant, was sports editor of his high school newspaper and covered sports for the Franklin Chronicle weekly newspaper. Ron knew he wanted to be a journalist from an early age; he wrote his first sports story at age 10, using a fictional, made-up team.

He attended the Ohio State University, where he majored in journalism. In 1956 as a member of the senior men’s Sphinx honorary society, he helped lead an effort for Ohio State alumnus Jesse Owens, the great Olympic sprinter, to be initiated into Sphinx. As a black man, Owens had not been invited to join the society while a student 20 years earlier. Ron also interviewed Owens and wrote about him for the Ohio State University Lantern, the daily student newspaper.

Ron was editor of the Ohio State University Lantern his senior year and wrote a front page editorial headlined, “Yes, we are Guilty,” which bluntly called for college football players to be paid. “Pay the players,” he wrote. “Only the blind cling to the myth that it is still…amateurism... Cast aside the mask of hypocrisy.” Ron and his editorial were then featured in a front-page article in the Columbus Evening Dispatch, which was then picked up by newspapers nationwide, including the New York Times and Washington Post.

He met Sue Heskamp, a beautiful, dark-haired member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, his senior year of college when she was a copy editor and features writer for the Lantern. After graduating summa cum laude, he was hired by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a police reporter, earning $57.50 a week. He chose Cleveland because Sue was from adjoining Lakewood.

Ron and Sue were married June 8, 1957, in Lakewood and bought their first house in nearby North Olmsted from Sue’s brother, Reade. Soon after their wedding, Ron entered Army basic training at Fort Knox, KY. He later remembered the heat and long night marches followed by coffee and cookies. After his Army Reserve stint was over, Ron continued working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a reporter and was also a part-time “stringer” correspondent for LIFE Magazine.

He was hired full-time by LIFE in 1959 and worked in the New York City office as a sports reporter and then a science reporter. Ron recalled reporting on the world-champion Boston Celtics and interviewing colorful coach Red Auerbach who, of course, was smoking his trademark cigar. 

In 1961, Ron was transferred to the Chicago bureau, where two of the stories he wrote helped bring him to the attention of top LIFE editors. The first was a series on the United States Navy, where he traveled for three months in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and ghost-wrote articles for Navy pilots flying patrol missions on the Chinese coast and for crew members of nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers. Ron also teamed with renowned photographer Burk Uzzle in 1962 to do an article on Chicago death-row inmate Paul Crump, who was later paroled and featured in books, songs and documentaries.

Ron and Sue moved to Houston, TX, in 1963 so he could cover the “New Nine” astronauts of Project Gemini in the United States space program. He had byline articles and also ghost-wrote LIFE stories for astronauts Neil Armstrong, James Lovell (later played by Tom Hanks in the “Apollo 13” movie) and others. Ron and Sue had a pool built in the backyard of their suburban Houston home and regularly socialized at their home with the astronauts and their wives. Like Ron, Neil Armstrong was from a small town in Ohio, so they often spoke about their childhoods. While Ron was based in Houston, he also reported on the Jack Ruby trial in Dallas for LIFE. Jack Ruby was the nightclub owner who killed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

On March 9, 1965, in what would become known as “Turnaround Tuesday,” Ron and 2,500 others marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and held a short prayer session before turning around. After watching the horrors of “Bloody Sunday” on television, Ron had reached out to his Judson Memorial pastor, Howard Moody, and then flew south with Moody and other clergy to march on “Turnaround Tuesday.” Ron wrote about his experience for the Texas Observer newspaper in an article called “Go South to Find Freedom.”

Ron transferred back to the New York City office of LIFE in the mid-1960s, where he would remain until the magazine folded in late 1972, working his way up the ranks as Assistant Science Editor, Assistant News Editor, Interim Saigon Bureau Chief, Assistant Copy Editor, Assistant Director of Photography and, ultimately, Director of Photography.

As Director of Photography, Ron worked with some of history’s greatest photographers, including Carl Mydans, Gjon Mili, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gordon Parks and Harry Benson. Ron later recalled how Eisenstaedt, who was in his early 70s by this time, used to come into his office and do pushups to prove how fit he was and ready for assignments. 

At first, Ron and Sue liked the excitement of Manhattan life and especially the music, arts and social justice efforts at their church, Judson Memorial, on Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village. But by the early 1970s, they were spending almost every weekend outside of the city, visiting friends.

In 1972, a few months before LIFE folded, Ron, Sue and their children moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to an abandoned farmhouse and 120 acres on a dirt road in the Town of Meredith, a half-mile from the nearest neighbors. They spent the next 40-plus years renovating the house, doing much of the work themselves. 

Ron and Sue had a huge vegetable garden that, for a time in the 1980s, approached the size of a football field. They paid their children 25 cents an hour to pick rocks from the garden and an acre-size plot of land that became known as the “athletic field” and later featured spirited wiffleball games with their children and grandchildren. Ron and Sue had a basketball court built, complete with lights, and Ron instilled in his children (and later grandchildren) his love for basketball. He taught his children and grandchildren his famous left-handed hook shot, which was always an advantage in competitive games of “h-o-r-s-e.”

Ron’s cozy first-floor office was lined with books and heated by a wood stove. He listened to “A Prairie Home Companion” and “All Things Considered” on NPR while writing or co-writing 14 non-fiction books, most of them for Time-Life Books. His books included four on World War II, three on the Civil War, a history of West Point and a history of Hartwick College. In 1997, he received an honorary PhD from Hartwick. Sue helped Ron as an uncredited contributor on many of his books, whether helping him edit and revise drafts, typing clean copies in the days before he bought his first Apple Macintosh in 1984 or serving as photo researcher on the Hartwick College history book.

Decades before remote work from home became normal, Ron also contributed to more than 100 other books, did corporate writing for leading American companies and wrote magazine articles for American Photographer and World War II magazines, including his last feature when he was 80. In the 1990s, Ron worked as a part-time writing coach for the Oneonta Daily Star. Ron also wrote a series of personal columns for the Walton Reporter newspaper in the 2000s, called “Just a Minute,” that covered everything from his time as a Vietnam War correspondent to his Ohio childhood and observations on current politics.

Ron loved living in the country and immersed himself in the fabric of the community. Ron was a firefighter and ambulance squad member for the all-volunteer Meridale department. He was an elected member of the School Board for the Delhi Central School System from 1977 to 1992, including serving as Board President. He was also an elected member of the Town Board for the Town of Meredith from 2008 to 2015 and served on the Board of the West Kortright Centre for many years.

Ron loved sports. For decades, he was a fixture in the stands or on the sidelines at Delaware Academy home and away basketball and football games, and cross-country and track meets. He took his children to countless Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta basketball games and Oneonta minor league baseball games. Ron was a lifelong Ohio State Buckeyes football fan and the much-younger men he regularly worked out with at the Oneonta Family YMCA dubbed him “Buckeye.” In later years, after moving to LaFayette near Syracuse in 2017, he was a season ticketholder for Syracuse University Orange football and basketball. He especially enjoyed dressing in orange and the camaraderie of tailgating with friends and family, and attended dozens of games, including the Syracuse-Duke basketball contest just weeks before his passing.

Ron loved to read. In the second half of his life he also started listening to audiobooks and listened to more than a thousand, which he documented in a 2008 column for the Walton Reporter. He read a print newspaper front-to-back each morning while he drank a cup of very hot, black coffee. 

Ron went to college as a moderate Republican supporting Dwight Eisenhower and graduated as a liberal Democrat supporting Adlai Stevenson. He remained a proud Democrat until the end and he believed in social justice and standing up for what was right. In 1969, he wrote the poem “Moratorium,” which was published in “Christianity and Crisis,” in conjunction with a nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. During his lifetime, he was involved in local Democratic politics in New York City, Delaware County and LaFayette. Ron helped write campaign materials for New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s first run for Congress in 2006.

Ron loved his four children and seven grandchildren and the yearly summer and Christmas gatherings with them, hosted at the old farmhouse in Meredith. His traditions included cooking pancakes for the grandchildren, supervising the making of hand-cranked ice cream and donning a Santa hat to fill the stockings hung on the railing of the steep staircase.

As a writer, Ron had an extraordinary and eloquent vocabulary, but he also loved to be playful with words. Long before they were known as “Dad Jokes,” Ron was a master of puns and double meanings. He self-titled his column for his high school paper, “Hey! By the Bail,” and his puns and sense of humor continued unabated until the end.

A celebration of life will be held this summer at the May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society in Syracuse, NY. This information will be updated when it becomes available.