Terwilliger Trust Scholarship Fund

Created by Jack and Ruby Terwilliger, this scholarship is for Laytonville High School seniors who plan to attend vocational schools, community colleges, or four-year colleges or universities. Awardees are selected for their prior academic performance (a minimum 3.0 grade point average is required), their potential for academic success, and their community service. 

TO: All Laytonville High School Seniors applying for scholarships. This brief story is intended to relate to you, the background on how and why the following scholarship was spawned: The "AIN'T NOTH'N EVER BEEN GOT THAT AIN'T BEEN WENT OUT AFTER, Jack and Ruby Terwilliger Laytonville High School Scholarship Trust Fund.''

Hi. I'm Bill Bailey, long time Laytonville resident and the President of Bailey's, a national and international mail order business that sells products primarily to people who work in the Forest Industry. Over the years, if you've seen one of our mail order catalogs, on page 2, you saw that I always write an "introductory letter" to our customers, and for most all of the past 31 years we've been in business, at the top of that page, there has been a quotation...identical to the one above, which was originally written by Gordon W. "Jack" Terwilliger. Jack's quotation and Jack himself, as well as his wife Ruby, has had a lot of influence on how I've lived my life and the point of this letter is to introduce myself and to give you a brief history of Jack and Ruby, who, not long before their deaths, decided to leave their life savings to L.H.S. graduates, via college scholarships. The reason I'm involved is that I was distantly related, by marriage, to Jack and Ruby and, also, I was chosen by them to be the Executor of their Estate Plan, their Living Trust. 

My family moved here to Laytonville in 1946, because my dad, Galen Bailey, was commissioned by a large lumber company, to build and run a sawmill up on Spy Rock, a nearby location. I was four years old at the time and my sister was five and my little brother, Kenneth was not born until 1950. In 1951, my mother unex-pectedly died due to a mistake made at a hospital during an operation. Our family's lives were literally turned upsidedown by this event. Not long after my mother's death, my dad remarried a lady who'se name was Audrey Dean, and she became my siblings and my step-mother. Audrey was a half-sister to Jack Terwilliger; this is how I became a nephew to Jack and Ruby Terwilliger.