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            I was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a small rural community called Mt. Vernon.  It’s on the Wicomico River near Princess Anne.  I was an only child and lived on a farm with my parents and grandparents.  It was what we called a truck farm, a fresh vegetable farm.  And we worked it together.  We had a multi-faceted livelihood.  We raised strawberries, string beans, cucumbers, lima beans, tomatoes, and we planted corn and crops to feed the cattle and the chickens.

            During the fall, my father and grandfather had oyster beds and they tonged oysters and sold them.  He had about 50 acres that he would tong for oysters.  I remember one day coming home and asking him how many oysters he got that day.  He said 45 bushels.  He earned about 25 cents for each bushel. Today, a waterman is lucky to get four or five bushels in a day.

            In the winter we trapped muskrats, considered a delicacy.  Primarily they were trapped for their hides, which aren’t worth much today.  But during World War II, they were worth a lot of money.  You could get $5 for certain black muskrat hides.  Most of them were used to line military flight jackets.

            In the spring of the year, we fished from about the first of March until the middle of June.  We fished and shipped the fish to market.  Tomatoes were sold to the tomato canning plant, and the rest of the vegetables were shipped as produce for consumption.  We also had our own pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, fresh milk – the whole bit.  We were very self-sufficient.  We had something going on all year ‘round.  There was always a lot of excitement.

School

            I went to elementary school in the community about three miles from the farm.  Each morning I walked to the end of our property and got on the school bus.  I thought it was the longest walk in the world!  It was actually about a tenth of a mile.

            The school house had four rooms, two of which were used for classes.  We had three grades to a room, and each grade had about 10 kids.  So there were about 30 kids in a room.  When you started first grade, you were in the row next to the wall.  Then, the next year, you moved one row over for the second grade, and then the third grade.  For three years you were in the same room, and the only progression was moving over one row each year.

            The teacher had all those kids in different classes in the same room, but I think we got a better education then you can today for $5,000 a year.  One simple reason – the teacher was dedicated. Discipline was not a problem.  You respected authority.  I remember my mother telling me, “If you get punished at school, you get punished at home.  I don’t care what the reason.”

            We had no electricity in the school.  During the cold days, there was really no insulation.  The window curtains would stand straight out because of the cold coming in.  The coal-fire stove that was in the middle of the room didn’t put out enough heat – even if you put your hands on the thing!  The teacher would make us gather around with our snow suits on because it was so cold.

            It wasn’t until the next year, when I was in the second grade, that we got electricity.  We ended up with three bulbs that hung down from the ceiling.  And they never did put running water or bathrooms in the school!

Reverend Thomas – Parson of the Islands

            I had a distant relative named Joshua Thomas, a Methodist missionary who lived in the early part of the 1800s.  He had a log canoe that he used to sail up and down the Chesapeake Bay preaching the Methodist religion to the people who lived along the Tidewater area, like on Smith, Tangier and Deal Islands.  He was known as “Parson of the Islands.”  His claim to fame took place when the British fleet, after having successfully burned Washington in the War of 1812, sailed down the Potomac and up the Chesapeake.  They stopped at Deal Island to get provisions.  The British soldiers found out that there was a minister on the island and asked him the hold a service for them.  During the service, Rev. Thomas predicted that the fleet would lose the battle they planned for Baltimore.  Once defeated, the fleet returned to Deal Island before sailing home.  Again, they went to hear Rev. Thomas and told him that he had been correct in his prediction.

Visiting the “Big” City

            My family was associated with Baltimore for several reasons.  Many times a year, my grandfather sailed a Chesapeake Bay boat known as a “Bugeye” from home in Mt. Vernon up to Baltimore.  He was a certified bay captain and would sail up to Baltimore with produce like watermelon, or in the fall it would be oysters.  He would dock at Pratt Street where the World Trade Center building is today.  The city people would all come down and buy the produce or the oysters, and he would stay until he was sold out.

            My grandmother had come to Baltimore many years earlier to work in a sewing machine factory.  My aunt came to Baltimore and attended nursing school.  They would come down to visit us, and I used to come up and spend summers in Baltimore.  That’s when I made the decision I wanted to go to school in Baltimore.

Early Career Decisions

            When I was in high school, I liked science.  Somewhere along the line I made the decision that I would become an electrical engineer.  My grandfather on my mother’s side had been a draftsman, and some on that side of the family had been electrical engineers.  I applied for a scholarship at the School of Electrical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, was accepted and enrolled.  Ironically no one in high school ever bothered to tell me that I was probably the least likely person in the world to be an engineer.  I think that the science of career counseling was nothing like it is today.  I did like working with radios.  My uncle was an electrician, so I’d help him, but really nothing else I did was in any way related to science.

            My first business endeavor was selling Christmas cards.  When you’re born on a farm, you learn right away that it’s always best to do things ahead of time.  I sold my Christmas cards in August!  No one else thought of selling Christmas cards in August.  People would say to me “You’ve got to be kidding!”  But they’d buy from me, and I had all my orders in by September.  I sold Christmas cards from the time I was 11 until I was 31.  Even after I had full-time employment, I didn’t stop selling the cards.

            I sold Rosebud Salve as a child too.  You could use it on your cow’s udder or anything else that might be sore.  You’d sell them for 25 cents a can and make a 10 cent profit.  It wasn’t a lot of money – but it was money.  During those years, I also sold matchbook advertising and subscriptions to a magazine called Grit, which is still sold.

            At school, I ran the bookstore.  I was also the manger of the student council and ran all the school dances.  I was the organizer of all the events our class took part in, like field trips and the like.  I was basically the class business manager.

            I go through this whole story to make a point.  No one, with the exception of one aunt, ever sat me down and said, “What on earth do you want to be an engineer for?  I’ve never seen anyone who likes to sell like you do.  You should be a salesman!”

            I learned the hard way when I got to Johns Hopkins.  A lot of the kids at Hopkins were from the Poly A course.  I had that strike against me.  I had never had trigonometry, and I had to go back to take that course.  But the major issue was that the first basic engineering course I had to take was drawing.  As it turned out, I had a perception flaw that probably should have been detected years earlier.  I had real trouble visualizing what something was going to look like.  I came to the conclusion that I just couldn’t make it as an engineer.

            I finally went to a career counselor who gave me a series of tests.  They proved that engineering was not the right field for me.  I then switched to business administration at the Baltimore College of Commerce, which was then a YMCA School.  Many of the YMCAs ran business schools from the 1930s to as recently as the 1960s.  The one I attended later merged with the University of Baltimore.

Bailey Kept Working

            After the year at Hopkins, I had to get a job to help pay for school.  My first job was with the Maryland Game and Fish Commission, the forerunner of the Department of Natural Resources.  The job was to issue licenses, uphold regulations and manage the game wardens.  I was a general all-around everything from the mail boy on up.  They used to publish a little booklet called The Conservationist.  I wrote it, and it was no great literature, I can tell you!  From there I got married and went to work for Crosse & Blackwell.  I was about 20, and I stayed there about 11 years.

            I started at Crosse & Blackwell as an inventory clerk.  We took orders form the customer and passed them on to the plants.  We maintained the records and replenished the stocks.  That led me to have more involvement as a sales coordinator in the sales and marketing areas.  In the late 1950s, Ed Vinnicombe, of McCormick, knew one of the vice presidents at Crosse &  Blackwell and suggested that perhaps McCormick’s Food Service Division could sell a line of Crosse & Blackwell specialty items to the restaurant trade.  We started a two-year experiment where McCormick would sell large containers of Crosse & Blackwell’s relish, preserves, really a whole series of Crosse & Blackwell products.  The experiment really didn’t work out for either company.  Also Crosse & Blackwell was taken over by another company before the experiment ended.  The new owner, Nestle, was more interested in selling the products themselves.

            But through that whole process I got to know a lot of McCormick people as I was one of the point men for Crosse & Blackwell during the experiment.

            Nestle wanted to move the Crosse & Blackwell headquarters up to White Plains, N.Y.  My boss at the time was president of Crosse & Blackwell, and he asked if I’d join him in New York as his assistant.  I was scheduled to move and work for Nestle when Ed Vinnicombe called me.  He said that he’d heard Nestle was transferring a lot of people.  He told me that if I wanted to stay in Baltimore, he had a job for me.

            That’s how I came to work for McCormick.