Mo Bailey’s legacy lives on

Seeing Maurice “Mo” Bailey’s name in a press release Thursday morning made us smile. We consider Mo Bailey a friend, someone we got to know well at the Frontiersman during his lifetime.

“He was a true champion for veterans and carried himself with a humility that belied his gregarious spirit. He never said a bad word about anybody and always had a smile and a laugh,” a former Frontiersman editor Greg Johnson wrote in a 2010 column following Bailey’s death.

In his time, Bailey was a fixture in the Valley. You could find him at all kinds of events. But vetersns were his passion. He was most well-known for his work as co-founder of Veterans Aviation Outreach.

The organization sought to address a particularly Alaskan problem: veterans living an extremely rural lifestyle off the grid and well away from anything close to a road had trouble taking advantage of their health care benefits.

The charity Bailey helped found would fly out to those rural veterans and bring them back to the big city for medical treatment. It also worked to sort out other needed transportation for veterans to receive the care they’d earned.

Bailey’s work was honored in 2007 when he received the Alaska Governor’s Veterans Advocacy Award. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has lauded Bailey from no less an august venue than the floor of the U.S. Senate.

“I am profoundly saddened by the loss of my dear friend, Maurice ‘Mo’ Bailey, who will long be remembered as one of the Alaska’s most significant veterans’ leaders,” Murkowski said in press release following his death.

Johnson and others at the Frontiersman came to think of Bailey as more than just a “news source.”

It was a relationship Johnson took the time to describe in a column and which he felt moved to mention just this year on Veterans Day in a Facebook post penned from his new home editing a paper in Wyoming:

“On this Veterans Day, a salute to one of the most memorable and selfless vets I’ve had the good fortune to know during my career. More than that, Mo Bailey was a good friend,” Johnson wrote.

So why did Mo Bailey’s name come up again for us after all these years?

On Thursday, the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs issued a press release about a grant it had received to pay for transportation used to connect veterans to medical care.

The grant, portioned out in $250,000 increments over three years for a total of $750,000, was included in the federal Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act that has been implemented already in test communities of Denali, Kodiak Island, the Kenai Peninsula, Prince of Wales-Hyder and the Matanuska-Susitna region.

The department has used the grant to partner with Valley Mover here and transportation outlets from a cab company to a ferry authority elsewhere. The transportation is free to veterans that need it.

And here we get to the part of the press release that made us smile: they named the program after Mo Bailey:

“The Office of Veterans Affairs has named the grant the Maurice “Mo” Bailey Highly Rural Transportation Grant in honor of the late Mo Bailey. He served in the U.S. Army from 1956-1976 and committed his life toward helping veterans. Bailey was dedicated to rural and urban outreach, from providing veterans rides in his aircraft to access care and services, to distributing food boxes to veterans in need. Bailey was always there to serve.”

Mo wasn’t much for accolades but we hope wherever he is he’s smiling along with us right now. We’re glad to see his legacy continue.