A Register of the Collection at the
Utah State Historical Society

The machine-readable finding aid for this collection was created by the Collections Management staff, Utah State Historical Society, with financial assistance from an LSTA grant provided by the Utah State Library Division.

Utah State Historical Society
Salt Lake City, Utah

Copyright, 2000, Utah State Historical Society. All rights reserved. Reproduction, storage or transmittal of this work, or any part of it, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, is prohibited without prior authorization of the Utah State Historical Society. This work may be used for scholarly and other non-commercial use provided that the Utah State Historical Society is acknowledged as the creator and copyright holder.

Background

Background Note

Paul Dayton Bailey was born in American Fork, Utah, on 12 July 1906. He left home at the age of 13, and traveled the rails until 1922, when he returned to Salt Lake City and enrolled at the University of Utah. To pay for school, he worked as a stable keeper, a hospital orderly, and a reporter for the Salt Lake Telegram. When the Telegram folded in 1926, Bailey left for Los Angeles to find work as a radio operator. There his search for work was also unsuccessful, and he ended up on Skid Bow. Through a happy accident, he got a job in a print shop and in a few years became a journeyman printer. He married his wife Evelyn, formerly of Fillmore, Utah, in 1927.

Still pursuing a career in Journalism, Bailey also worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Record and the Hollywood Citizen. His first novel, Type High, a semi-autobiographical work about his experiences as a printer, was published in 1937, followed by For This My Glory in 1940. During the first part of World War II, Bailey worked for the Lockheed Corporation, editing their plant newspaper, the Lockheed Star. In 1943, Paul and Evelyn bought the Eagle Rock Advertiser, a small local newspaper in the Los Angeles area. Both Baileys threw themselves into the newspaper business, and the Advertiser soon flourished. That same year, realizing that he had no time to run a newspaper and search for publishers for his books, Bailey founded the Westernlore Press.

While he was actively running Westernlore Press, Bailey published many of his own books, as well as books by other western authors such as Robert Utley, Arthur Woodward, Max Evans, Harry James, and Pearl Baker. Bailey's books included Sam Brannan and the California Mormons, 1943; The Gay Saint, 1944; Jacob Hamblin, Buckskin Apostle, 1948; Walkara, Hawk of the Mountains, 1954; and Grandpa was a Polygamist, 1960. His books on Mormon church history were at first well received by church leaders, and for years were serialized in church publications and used for church classes. His first book by a major publisher, however, For Time and All Eternity, (Doubleday 1964), dealt with an issue (polygamy) that the church was very sensitive about, and Paul's relationship with the Mormon church went downhill from there.

In all, Bailey wrote and published over forty books on western history, as well as innumerable articles, book reviews, and tributes. He was in great demand as a speaker, and often gave talks to local and national organizations. He was a founding member of Westerners International, a member of the Los Angeles Corral of Westerners, Death Valley 49ers, E Clampus Vitus, and Western Writers of America, where he served as President in 1979-1980.

After a fire wiped out Westernlore's inventory in 1973, Lynn Bailey took control of the business from his aging father and moved the press to Tucson, Arizona. After a long illness, Evelyn Bailey died in 1981. Paul Bailey died in November 1987, and was buried by his wife in Fillmore.

Scope & Content

The papers of Paul Dayton Bailey (1906-1987) consist of approximately 30 linear feet of materials. They were donated to the Utah State Historical Society by Lynn Bailey after his father's death in November 1987.

Box 1 contains personal items such as passports, medical records, tax records, Evelyn Bailey materials, a single diary kept by Paul Bailey, and other miscellaneous personal materials. Box 2 contains business records that were not retained by Lynn Bailey at the time of donation. These consist of a small amount of material on the Eagle Rock Advertiser, Westernlore Press, and some television and movie production material. The bulk of this box deals with the fire at the Pacific Bookbinding Co. in 1973. Box 3 contains travel records, including an around-the-world cruise taken by Paul and Evelyn Bailey in 1963, and trips to Hawaii. Boxes 4-6 contain records from the many organizations that Paul Bailey belonged to. These included Westerners International, the Western History Association, the Los Angeles Corral of Westerners, and the largest record group, Western Writers of America. Also included but not fully organized are records from the Death Valley 49ers and E Clampus Vitus. Box 7 contains copies of many of the speeches Bailey gave during his career. Boxes 8-16 contain examples of Bailey's writing. This includes miscellaneous short works in Boxes 9 and 10, and manuscripts, galleys, and page proofs of some of his books in Boxes 11-16. Seven boxes of the same sort of materials were transferred from the University of Utah Special Collections Manuscripts Division to the Utah State Historical Society in June 1988.

The largest single part of the collection, and in many ways the most valuable, informative, and interesting, is the correspondence found in Boxes 17-22. All of Bailey's personal and business correspondence (often indistinguishable) is filed in this section of the papers, arranged chronologically by date. The only exception to this arrangement is the correspondence pertaining to Bailey's tenure as President of Western Writers of America, which is filed with other organizational materials in Box 5. Boxes 17-18 are arranged by day; the rest of the correspondence is only arranged by month. In addition, correspondence from 1970-1986 was arranged but not placed in acid free folders and boxes, due to lack of proper archival materials.. It is, however, arranged in the same fashion (chronologically by months) as the aforementioned correspondence. Bailey was a prolific letter writer, and there are probably over 3,000 letters in this section. Included are letters to such well-known western writers as Art Woodward, Robert Utley, Frank Robertson, Max Evans, Samuel Taylor, Harry James, and Randall Henderson.

Series Descriptions

Personal Papers
Business records
Travel
Organizations
Speeches
Miscellaneous Writings
"Concentration Camp U.S.A." (Japanese Relocation)
Manuscripts
Correspondence

Administrative Info

Container List