Author and Sophomore

Most of the small group of Dartmouth juniors who have yet to complete their distributive requirements for sophomore standing are men having academic difficulties somewhere along the line. This is not so with Kendall Bailes '62 of Merriam, Kansas, whose class numerals make him a junior but whose completed course card puts him in the sophomore rank. Ken took a leave of absence from Dartmouth last year when he was awarde the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship by Harper & Brothers. The named purposes of this fellowship are to uncover literary talent and to enable promising writers to have free time to complete books. At 20, Ken is a writer of professional standing and his book, a biography of Senator James Lane, Kansas political leader and Civil War general, is now at the publishers.

The Harper fellowship provided an outright grant for Ken's living expenses while writing. As an applicant, he had to submit about 10,000 words of unfinished manuscript, fiction or non-fiction, along with a detailed outline of the book. Ken's book, written for the most part from June 1959 until September 1960, is a fairly detailed history of Kansas from 1855 to 1866.

Ken returned to his home near Kansas City on receiving the Harper grant and lived there during the writing period. In the beginning, a daily sixtymile trip to the State Historical Society at Topeka kept him on the run. There he amassed a huge card file. Later he traveled to the Kansas University collections at Lawrence for Senator Lane's letters. When the research was completed, Ken looked around home for a suitable spot to begin his writing. His father, the Reverend Ira Bailes, a Christian Church minister, offered a small unused cubicle in the church. There, armed with a typewriter and an all-important air conditioner, Ken Bailes, just after finishing his freshman year at Dartmouth, wrote his first book.

Ken is quick to say that the work has not yet been accepted by the publisher. However, if you pin him down, he will advise that several reputable companies and editors have indicated that he will not have much trouble. The manuscript is now at the University of Oklahoma Press in Norman. They have taken up to a year before notifying an author affirmatively, and Ken has only been watching the mails for about eleven weeks.

When asked what started him in this direction, Ken naturally gives you a short history. Born in Fort Morgan, Colorado, he and his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he first took notice of the history that surrounded him. Exposed to Indian and Spanish-American cultures, he researched as much as any lad can at that age. An assigned history project in eighth grade really started him, and this came after the family had moved to Merriam. One source led to another and the project got longer and more interesting. In the end, the local newspaper helped Ken print his first opus, 350 booklets on the history of the town. Just recently, Ken's mother wrote of selling another copy which brought his total sales to 342 of the 350 copies. Before he had graduated from Shawnee Mis- sion High School, Ken had sold two articles to American Heritage, one of which appeared in the August 1959 issue.

Ahead for Ken is a seemingly wideopen future in writing. American Heritage has suggested several articles they would like him to do. But Ken, an Alfred P. Sloan National Scholarship winner at Dartmouth, is immediately concerned with his college studies, getting into some extracurricular activities he has never had time for, and trying to select a major field. Because though it is somehow difficult to believe Ken is only a sophomore.

Kendall Bailes '62