Obituary: Gordie Bailey, 90, loved plants, hated buckthorn

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Gordie Bailey had a burning-hot hatred of buckthorn.

Bailey, the former president and chairman of the board of Bailey Nurseries in Newport, was “a one-man buckthorn eradication machine,” said Pat Bailey, one of his sons. He estimates his father removed “hundreds of thousands” of the invasive plants during his lifetime.

Bailey, who worked for Bailey Nurseries for more than 70 years, died Jan. 29 at his home in Newport from complications related to multiple myeloma. He was 90.

Bailey once auctioned off his “buckthorn-removal services” at a fundraiser for the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, and a man from Edina won the bid, Pat Bailey said. “My dad shows up and starts working in his back yard removing buckthorn. He was never very flashy about how he dressed or with his equipment. He shows up, and he’s dressed in his old khakis and his old beat-up jacket with duct tape, and his old beat-up boots and a ratty old hat. He’s back there doing his buckthorn removal, and the guy’s neighbor calls him up and says, ‘Jim, there’s a homeless guy rummaging around in your yard.’ He got a kick out of that. Here’s Gordie from Newport coming over to Edina.”

Gordon Bailey, who grew up working at the family nursery in Newport, had a deep knowledge of plants, and worked to steward the land and communities he loved, said Ryan McEnaney, a great-nephew and the company’s director of marketing and communications.

Bailey played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s growth, culture and long-term vision, McEnaney said. “He was a great mentor and leader for us. He taught us not just about the business, but more importantly, how to treat people. One of the most resounding things we’ve heard from employees and partners in the industry is how generous and thoughtful he was and how much he cared about people and giving back to the community. That’s the legacy that we’re excited to carry on.”

Said Pat Bailey: “He really loved people. At the nursery, the land and the buildings and the greenhouses, none of that mattered if you didn’t have really good people to make it all click. He just really had a passion for the people who worked with us.”

Hall of Famer

He also had a passion for plants. Among his claims to fame: selecting notable varieties such as Frontyard Linden, Wildfire Winterberry and Shamrock Littleleaf Linden.

“With plants, there’s a lot of variability,” Pat Bailey said. “Once in a while, you’ll get something that is just more vibrant than most of the other seedlings, or it might have more berries, or bigger berries. He just had a really good eye for new plants and plants that would do well in a landscape.”

Longtime gardening expert Bonnie Blodgett, of St. Paul, said many of the plants she grows in her Crocus Hill garden “wouldn’t be hardy here in Zone 4 if it weren’t for Gordie.” “There must be dozens,” she said. “Endless Summer hydrangea gets most of the press, but … oh, the roses!”

Bailey, who served as president of the Minnesota Nursery & Landscape Association and was inducted into the Hall of Fame for both MNLA and the American Nursery & Landscape Association, was a mentor to many in the nursery industry in Minnesota, said longtime friend Dale Bachman, the former CEO and chairman of the board of Bachman’s Inc.

“He always put people first, you know,” Bachman said. “Well, maybe plants came first, but people were first, too. He had two firsts. Gordie would just treat all people in a wonderful way, and we all benefited from having known him. He was always learning, always sharing.”

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Bailey Nurseries has long been a wholesale supplier for Bachman’s, he said. “All I can say is: Thank goodness, since their inception, they decided not to go into the retail business, because they would have been successful in the retail business, too,” he said. “But they stayed in their lane as a tremendous supplier to the industry and have expanded greatly. They are one of the largest nursery wholesale suppliers to the country.”

In 1978, Gordie Bailey was named president of the company, and his brother, Rodney, was named secretary/treasurer. Gordie Bailey was in charge of managing administrative functions; Rodney Bailey managed production.

“They were just the best combination you could ever have imagined for a family business,” Bachman said.

Started young

Bailey started working for the family business, which was founded in 1905 by his grandparents, John Vincent “J.V.” and Elizabeth Bailey, when he was a young boy. Among his early jobs: weeding, propagating, picking up rocks and picking apples, Pat Bailey said.

“We had a retail store in an old shed for a while back then, so he would have worked selling apples and plants at certain times of the year,” he said. “Whatever they needed you to do on the farm, you did.”

Bailey graduated from Park High School in St. Paul Park, attended Saint John’s University in Collegeville, and graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in business, he said.

In the late 1950s, he met Josephine “Jo” Brunner, a nurse from Gibbon, Minn., on a double date. “They weren’t paired up, but whoever they were each with failed,” Pat Bailey said. “They started dating after that.”

The couple married in 1960 at St. Willibrord Catholic Church in Gibbon. They had seven children.

Gordie Bailey served as a trustee for the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum Foundation, Saint John’s University and Carpenter Nature Center, among other organizations.

Philanthropist, outdoorsman

In addition to his leadership roles, Bailey was known for his philanthropic efforts and advocacy for horticultural research and education. He spearheaded the “Tour de Hort,” cycling 2,100 miles across the United States in three segments to raise $1.25 million for the Horticultural Research Institute.

When he was 79, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to help fund the construction of a girls’ school in Nairobi, Kenya.

“He was a real outdoorsman,” Pat Bailey said. “He was much more at home being outside and in nature amongst plants, going for a hike or camping up in the Boundary Waters. He once organized a bike trip from Newport up to Ely. It took five days. He rode a century (100 miles) on his 80th birthday. He was much more of a doer than a talker. ”

Bailey, an avid hunter, fisherman and cyclist, loved spending time with his family at their cabin on Snowbank Lake near Ely and at their hobby farm in Wasioja, Minn., near Dodge Center. He was ice fishing into his late 80s, and only stopped biking a year and a half ago, Pat Bailey said.

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“He was big on prairie restoration, so he did a lot of prairie restoration on the farm,” he said. “He loved planting trees. He was very happy just being outside, being able to plant trees and enhance the habitat for animals on his farm.”

Bailey is survived by his wife, Jo; five sons, John, Pat, Mark, Mike and Joe; two daughters, Mary Hope and Melissa Cullen; 16 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.

A Mass of Christian burial will be at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 14, with visitation one hour prior, at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in St. Paul Park, where Bailey was a lifelong member.

Kok Funeral Home is handling arrangements.

Former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, leader of Sept. 11 panel, dies

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By TOM DAVIES and ISABELLA VOLMERT, Associated Press

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) — Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a crewcut-wearing Indiana Democrat who was a leading foreign affairs voice during three decades in Congress and helped oversee investigations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died Tuesday. He was 94.

Hamilton, who also led a congressional probe of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair while representing a rural southern Indiana district, died peacefully in his home in Bloomington, Indiana, said his son Doug Hamilton, who did not cite a specific cause.

Hamilton was at the forefront of congressional opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War waged by President George H.W. Bush and advocated continued economic sanctions against Iraq before military action over its invasion of Kuwait.

He decided against seeking reelection in 1998 and said after leaving Congress that he believed the U.S. needed to be regarded around the world as more than a leader of military coalitions.

“The United States must be — and must be seen as — an optimistic and benign power,” Hamilton said in 2003. “We must speak and act as a source of optimism, a beacon of freedom, a benign power forging a consensus approach toward a world of peace and growth and freedom. And American power must be accompanied by American generosity.”

President Barack Obama presented Hamilton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, saying during the ceremony that Hamilton was a man “widely admired” on both sides of the aisle “for his honesty, his wisdom, and consistent commitment to bipartisanship.”

FILE – Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., Rep. Jim Wright, D-Texas, Rep. John Brademas, D-Ind., and Stephen Solarz, D-N.Y., stand on the steps of the House of Representatives following a vote, Aug. 2, 1978, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Duricka, File)

9/11 investigations

Hamilton was a small-town lawyer known for his exploits as a high school basketball star when he first won election to his southern Indiana congressional seat in 1964 at the age of 33.

With his thick glasses and calm, deliberate manner, Hamilton rose to become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees and a Democratic leader on international relations before retiring from Congress in 1999.

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His reputation as an evenhanded moderate had Capitol Hill leaders turn to him for some of the most tumultuous matters facing Washington. But he also faced criticism that he was not aggressive enough in pursuing allegations of wrongdoing by Republican administrations.

Hamilton was tapped in 2002 as vice chairman of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks commission. That group spent 20 months investigating the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people when 19 hijackers flew airliners into New York’s World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.

He presented a united front with the panel’s Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, through its clashes with the George W. Bush White House and its lobbying efforts for changes to the U.S. intelligence system.

The commission found that both the Clinton and Bush administrations had failed to grasp the gravity of terrorist threats and took actions so feeble, they never even slowed the al-Qaida plotters.

“The fact of the matter is, we just didn’t get it in this country,” Hamilton said when the commission released its report in 2004. “We could not comprehend that people wanted to kill us, they wanted to hijack airplanes and fly them into big buildings.”

FILE – Reporters hold up tape recorders as Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., makes comments on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Dec. 18, 1986. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook, File)

Iran-Contra committee

Hamilton gained national prominence in the mid-1980s with his selection as a co-chairman of the congressional Iran-Contra committee, which investigated the Reagan administration’s diversion of profits from Iran arm sales to help Nicaragua’s Contra rebels. The panel’s report found that President Ronald Reagan created an atmosphere at the White House in which subordinates felt free to skirt the law and Constitution.

“There was too much secrecy and deception,” Hamilton said at the time. “Information was withheld from the Congress, other officials, friends and allies and the American people.”

Hamilton, however, was able to gain little Republican support for the committee’s work. then-Rep. Dick Cheney, a top Republican on the Iran-Contra committee, called the report a political document that selected only the most damaging evidence against the Reagan administration.

Hamilton was considered as a possible vice presidential running mate both for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992, but they decided against picking the nontelegenic congressman from a Republican-leaning state.

Born April 20, 1931, in Daytona Beach, Florida, the son of a Methodist minister moved with his family to Evansville, Indiana, as a child.

Hamilton went on to college at DePauw University and attended Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, before graduating from Indiana University’s law school in 1956.

FILE – Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, left, and Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., chairmen of the Senate and House select committees on the Iran-Contra affair, confer as the group continued hearings on Capitol Hill, in Washington, May 8, 1987. (AP Photo/Lana Harris, File)

After Congress

After serving in Congress, Hamilton continued with his interests in foreign affairs and congressional reform as director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. He also spent time as a faculty member at Indiana University, which in 2018 named its School of Global and International Studies after Hamilton and longtime Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who died in 2019.

Hamilton and his wife were married for 58 years after meeting while students at DePauw. Nancy Hamilton died in 2012. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Volmert contributed from Lansing, Mich. Davies is a former Associated Press Writer.

Argentina requests extradition of Maduro from the US on crimes against humanity charges

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By SERGIO FARELLA, Associated Press

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — An Argentine judge on Wednesday requested the extradition from the United States of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by the U.S. military last month and now faces federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine in New York.

The inquest from Argentina, whose judges have aggressively pursued human rights abuse cases beyond its borders, accuses Maduro of having committed crimes against humanity in overseeing a harsh crackdown on protesters and political opponents as president.

“The urgent translation of the international request and the documentation attached thereto is hereby ordered,” said the warrant, which was signed by Argentine federal judge Sebastián Ramos and seen by The Associated Press.

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Plaintiffs include Venezuelans who suffered torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance, among other abuses, at the hands of Venezuelan security forces and intelligence agents.

The case, filed in Buenos Aires in 2023 by human rights organizations representing the victims, relies on the principle of universal jurisdiction, a legal concept that allows for the prosecution in Argentina of anyone from any country who commits crimes like genocide or terrorism anywhere in the world.

Argentina’s foreign ministry must now present the request to the Trump administration, which is unlikely to comply as Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores await trial in a Brooklyn jail on charges that they worked with drug cartels to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S over a 25-year period.

Even so, one of the organizations that filed the case hailed the request as an important milestone “for Argentina, for justice, and above all, for Venezuelan victims who dared to speak out.”

“Beyond this specific resolution, there remains the satisfaction of having stood up to the powerful, fiercely defending human rights,” wrote the Argentine Forum for the Defense of Democracy.

In asking the U.S. to hand Maduro over to Argentina, the warrant cites the 1997 extradition treaty between the countries and acknowledges Maduro’s recent capture.

An Argentine court first issued an international arrest warrant for Maduro in 2024. Following the U.S. military operation that ousted Maduro on Jan. 3, Argentine federal prosecutors asked Judge Ramos to request the extradition for the crimes-against-humanity investigation.

As one of just a handful of countries whose law permits the investigation of crimes-against-humanity cases beyond its borders, Argentina has increasingly taken center stage in lawsuits ranging from the torture of dissidents under Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain to atrocities committed by the military against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

President Javier Milei of Argentina, the region’s most prominent right-wing leader and ally of President Donald Trump, has cheered the U.S. military seizure of Maduro.

Olympic break arrives with Wild already thinking playoff sprint

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All was not perfect inside the visitors’ locker room in downtown Nashville on Wednesday morning, as the Wild held their final pregame skate before the NHL’s three-week break for the Olympics.

Veteran defenseman Jonas Brodin is not expected back on the ice until sometime in early March as he recovers from a lower body injury. The subsequent surgery to fix it caused him to miss the final 10 pre-break games and his chance to skate for Sweden in the Winter Games in Italy.

Two more Wild players – forward Marcus Foligno and goalie Jesper Wallstedt – missed the trip to Tennessee, staying back in Minnesota to rest as they dealt with an illness that also kept both out of Monday’s home win over Montreal.

On a more optimistic note, defenseman Daemon Hunt was back in the lineup, good to go, after missing much of the win over the Canadiens following a first-period puck to the throat.

Wild coach John Hynes, for his part, wasn’t looking past the Predators, who had split a pair of overtime games with the Wild in St. Paul earlier in the season. During the break, he tasked his players to think ahead to March and April, and the push to position themselves for what they envision as a playoff run of significance.

“We’ve talked with the guys I’d say maybe 10 games ago about having a good stretch and putting ourselves into a good position leading into the break,” Hynes said to the reporters at Bridgestone Arena. “But then also setting ourselves up coming out of the break with, whatever, 25 games left, that we’ve taken care of business. I think we’ve stayed focused and done a good job. We’ve won some games and got a lot of points in that stretch.”

The Wild faced off in Nashville having gone 7-1-1 in their previous nine games, and were buoyed by the recent return of veteran defenseman Zach Bogosian, who has missed 33 games this season, at three different times, due to injury. Bogosian played more than 16 minutes versus the Canadiens, and he was clearly happy to be back on the ice.

“I mean any time you get hurt as much as I have this year on unfortunate bounces, yeah it’s frustrating,” Bogosian admitted. “The guys supported me along the way and kept me positive. My family did the same thing, so it was a great support system for me. Just unfortunate but just work hard to get back.”

While Hynes has complimented the contributions on the blue line from younger players like Hunt and David Jiricek, he admitted that having a veteran presence like Bogosian available makes a difference in the every night lineup.

“He’s a big part of our team. He brings a big, strong, hard player to play against. He’s got a good veteran presence. He’s well respected within our team,” Hynes said of Bogosian, who has a goal and three assists in 24 games. “You respect the way he plays the game. He can help you when you have to defend hard, and his skating is an asset for him. He plays the game at a good pace, which allows him to defend well, but also break pucks out and be able to join the rush. So it’s good to have him back.”

Bogosian, 35, was the NHL’s third overall pick in the 2008 draft by the Atlanta Thrashers, who relocated to Winnipeg in 2011. He and Vancouver forward Evander Kane are the only players still active in the NHL who played in Atlanta during the league’s second of two failed attempts at a franchise there.

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