Veteran senator, leading Democrat Robert Bailey dies

Tue., Aug. 16, 2005

Associated Press

OLYMPIA – Longtime Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Robert C. Bailey, who represented southwest Washington in Olympia for 26 years, has died. He was 87.

Bailey’s son, Mike, said his father died in his sleep Sunday of natural causes.

The towering, silver-haired Bailey, the subject of a state oral history book, also was a newspaperman in South Bend, Pacific County clerk, a top aide to former U.S. Rep. Julia Butler Hansen, manager of the Port of Willapa and chairman of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.

He was elected Pacific County clerk in 1947 shortly after his Navy tour of duty ended. He was elected to the state House in 1951 and to the Senate in 1957.

When Hansen retired, Bailey narrowly lost a primary to fellow Democrat Don Bonker in the 3rd Congressional District. He later said he was glad he lost: “I wouldn’t be alive today if I’d gone back there and had to deal with all that backbiting and duplicity,” he told the Daily World of Aberdeen last winter.

Retired Senate Majority Leader Sid Snyder, D-Long Beach, called Bailey “probably the most highly respected legislator in his time that I knew of.”

He said Bailey was key to getting approval for a bridge across the Columbia River to link Megler with Astoria, Ore.

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