"High jumping is largely psychological.” June Diemer Bailey draws that conclusion from a lifetime of facing raised bars. In the 1930s, when her Albany, Calif., high school curtailed girls’ track competition after an athlete was injured, June continued practicing at home with a bamboo pole and posts. Her personal best of 5 feet, 4 inches could have beat the ’36 Olympic women’s record.
These days her sights have been on a different hurdle: the First Year Law Student Exam, or Baby Bar. The seven-hour test is required of those who study at a law school not accredited by the American Bar Association or State Bar of California; about one in four students passes each time the test is given. Bailey, who turns 85 on June 1, has been studying law online through Concord Law School. After taking the Baby Bar twice, she is on a semester’s leave to reassess her chances of making a third try.
Bailey has a long history of fighting injustice. In the 1940s, she brought legal action against a Missouri landlord who had violated rent-control regulations. During the war years while her first husband, Jim Diemer, ’41, MA ’47, was overseas, she majored in economics. In 1968, as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, she returned from Chicago and established Action for Youth to honor the assassinated Robert Kennedy. The Napa County program identified potential school dropouts and led Bailey to write The Administrator, a novel about marginalized youth. When no publisher wanted to take on the book, she began her own publishing company.
Bailey traces the roots of her determination to her father, Frederick Ortegren, a 1903 Swedish immigrant and single parent, who reared June and her brother on blue-collar wages. Frederick’s wife, institutionalized after June’s birth, never recovered from depression. “If you manage a home at age 8, anything seems possible,” June wrote in Sticks and Stones Are the Easy Part. Her memoir also recounts a 1947 incident with a male interviewer in the Stanford Placement Service, who was delighted with her résumé. “You type 80 words a minute. You take shorthand at 110. You have a degree in Economics. You’ll make a wonderful secretary.” Instead, she became a teacher, dean of girls, author and activist.
She won a discrimination suit in the 1970s against the Napa school district because less-qualified men were being promoted to principal over women candidates. At age 60, she earned a doctorate in psychology at the Wright Institute. In 1992, callers to Hugh Hewitt’s radio talk show jammed the phone lines to talk to the author of Men Are Not Cost-Effective. Bailey’s idea was controversial: to tax men for the disproportionate cost of male crime in America.
Bailey, who has published 12 books under the name June Stephenson, married her current husband, Bill, in 1999. They live in Palm Desert, Calif. Her daughters, Christine and Evelyn, an attorney and a librarian, also live in Southern California. In July 2002, the Baileys attended Merton College, Oxford, where a course, Justice in England and America, reignited June’s high school dream to study law. Whether or not she faces the bar again, June Bailey’s example encourages others to dare and dream.
