Cleo Marie Bailey (nee Hurst), 94, passed away peacefully in her daughter’s home in Eagle Mountain, Utah, on December 22, 2021. She left behind a grateful family of over one hundred descendants and rejoined a loving husband and a caring complement of parents, siblings, and friends.
Cleo was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on December 6, 1927, to Samuel Harris and Ida Matilda Hurst. She graduated from Granite High School in 1945 and, a year later, married Frank Donald Bailey in the Salt Lake City, Utah, temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Smart, beautiful, and meticulous, Cleo devoted her gifts and talents to family and church. Her husband’s thirty-year career as an officer in the United States Air Force necessitated multiple family moves within the western United States. Every few years, at each new duty station, she established a clean, inviting, and nurturing home (often in base housing) for a family that grew to five sons and one daughter. She regularly plugged her family into whatever local congregation they happened to belong to. In those wards, she served five times as president of its women's group (the Relief Society) and just as often as a teacher in Sunday School or Seminary.
At home, amid the daily grind of cleaning, ironing, and cooking for her family, she became a scholar of the scriptures and of history. She loved painting and classical music. And she imbued in her children similar interests and loves. She traveled widely. During a summer at Cambridge University in England, she researched the life of the Celtic warrior queen, Boudica. (Go ahead, look it up.)
Upon her husband’s retirement from military service in 1973, they moved back to Utah where she established yet another home, this time in East Millcreek. From there, they were called to serve as head of the church’s Columbus, Ohio, mission from 1977 to 1980. After returning to Utah for several more years of service, they moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where they established another lovely home and, for many years, created cherished memories for children, grandchildren, and friends. Following her husband’s death in 2014, she moved back to Utah and lived in the care of her children. She leaves behind years of a creeping Alzheimer’s disease that eventually cut her off from her memories, but not from her kindness, compassion, and charm.
Cleo is survived by her five sons, one daughter, and each of their spouses: Stanley and Linda Bailey, Michael and Glorianne Bailey, Brent and Janet Bailey, Brian and Jodi Bailey, Wade and Merri Bailey, and Carla and Kent Ipson;, also by one younger sister, Carol Briggs. She has 24 grandchildren and 83 great-grandchildren.
She was preceded in death by her parents; by one brother, Paul Hurst; by two sisters, Inez Kenner and LaRae Kramer; and by two great-grandchildren, Joshua Ipson and Jane Hackett.
Funeral services will be held on Friday, December 31, 2021, at 11:00 am at Holbrook Mortuary, 3251 South 2300 East, Salt Lake City, Utah with a viewing from 9:30 am to 10:30 am prior to services at Holbrook Mortuary. If you would like view the service by livestream, please go to the bottom of the obituary on the day of the service. Interment: Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park, where her remains will rest next to her husband’s.