Our dinner companions that night were Richard and Armida Avila. Richard is a classmate from the UCLA School of Law, now retired from his first career with the state Attorney General’s office. Richard was inspired by Helen Miller Bailey not only to go to law school, but to follow his heart. A published author, Richard is now in his second career as a history professor at two junior colleges. His goal: to inspire the next generation, just as Helen Miller Bailey inspired him.
His wife, Armida, a retired college educator, is also into her second career. This year, she founded wHealthy Living ( www.whealthyliving.us) to provide the Hispanic community with new ways of dealing with difficult diagnoses.
As for Helen Miller Bailey (1909-1976), her biographer, Richard Soza, wrote, “Why is her memory so powerful after all these years? This petite, fiesty blonde addressed simply as ‘Doc Bailey’ by many of her students, and known as ‘Dona Elena’ by an entire Oaxacan village, sewed seeds of idealism and human dignity in the minds of thousands of young people from 1930 to 1976.
“In 1930 Helen Lorraine Miller earned a master’s degree in history from University of California at Berkeley, supporting herself by waiting tables at night. She was hired to teach junior high school in the barrios of East Los Angeles She soon met and fell in love with a science teacher at Roosevelt High School, Henry Morle Bailey. They married in June 1932. She spent the next two years working on her PhD in history at University of Southern California
