From Ground Water to Grass Roots

Walter Baily, born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, was a signalman aboard a minesweeper in WWII. After the war, he attended Temple University and Bryn Mawr College, still later received a doctorate from the School of Social Services of Catholic University of America. He studied serious family abuse and neglect, especially sexual abuse, at the Family Division of the Sociology Department, University of New Hampshire. Baily and his wife, Thelma Falk Baily, also a social worker, wrote a book on child welfare services, then conducted a three region and five state analysis of emotional abuse and neglect. Initially employed in public health, mental health, services to children and community planning, he along with his wife, joined together for seventeen years to assist public and NGO agencies in the revision of policies and services to protect children. Retiring at age seventy, Baily, who has two sons, a daughter and two grandchildren, has shifted his interests to environmental issues. He became a member of the Green Mountain Conservation Group, comprised primarily of six towns in the Ossipee Watershed in New Hampshire. Those towns, either adjacent to or near the border with Maine, provide a range of activities to protect surface waters and the major aquifer in the Watershed. The educational programs of the Green Mountain group enable Baily to volunteer later with the Parsonsfield, Maine Planning Board to do the needed research to write a regulatory water ordinance for the town. Now in his eighties, Baily lives on an old farm and finds pleasure in caring for a certified tree farm.