September 1970. I came on campus certain no student entering Carleton was in greater need of guidance. I was most fortunate. Vern Bailey was assigned to be my academic advisor. From the first day he advised me well, steering me away from calculus and what he termed “the typical ball-buster Freshman schedule.” Vern became more than an advisor. In his year-long seminar on cinema, Vern immersed me in the new wave of film makers, the old masters, criticism, and theory. That year and in all his cinema classes later, I learned about more than the art and theory of the moving image. I saw a man who was passionate about his discipline, who was a master of his discipline and an incredibly decent human being.
I learned so much from Vern on all these counts. He never lost his patience or his enthusiasm. Well, perhaps just once. When an unknown malefactor damaged the editing equipment he had installed in the lower levels of Sayles-Hill, I observed Vern’s lips tighten and a stream of muttering issue from clenched teeth. Vern loved to work with us taping together bits of super-8 film for student films of questionable quality, as much as he loved sharing revolutionary essays from Cahiers du Cinema and exploring the growing language of cinema. He was at his core a teacher.
After graduation I stayed in touch with Vern. He continued to offer his time and assistance. One year he traveled to Des Moines to speak to our Carleton Club about cinema. Another year he volunteered to convert one of my student super-8 films to digital, which was a much more laborious effort than I knew until after the fact. For one of our class reunions he searched through the boxes and files of cinema classes past to assemble a program of student films for a movie night. Even when Alzheimer’s stole words and sentences, and erased pages from his life, Vern was instinctively a teacher. In late 2013 I called and invited him to be the guest of my class at our 40th reunion dinner the next June, and at a one night film festival in his honor. Vern said he didn’t think it would work, because his schedule was such that he could not help with the film festival, and my classmates might be disappointed because he was not who they remembered. When the sadness lifted enough that I could speak, I assured Vern his only job was to enjoy himself, and let us say good things about him for an entire night.
It happened just that way. I shared a table with Vern and Marilyn at dinner. We talked about a new camera he might buy, and projection equipment he wanted to give to anyone willing to keep working on it. He and Marilyn then joined us at Casset Hall for the first Vern Bailey Mini Film Festival, where we watched a collection of heartfelt video tributes sent in by Vern’s students from the 70s through the 90s. We presented him with the DVD of those messages, and then a gift of lap blankets embroidered with “Vern Bailey – Champion of Cinema.” After that it was popcorn and Dots, a cartoon and a light main feature. The true main feature, however, was Vern. He had a very good night. We were happy to be there with him.
Steve Braun, Class of 1974 (Attorney, Krigel & Krigel)