Pioneer teacher Dailey dies

As a teenager, Sidney Ann Dailey was a promising classical pianist who had great potential for stardom.

But her true calling was for what she felt was a much nobler cause -- teaching.

During five different decades in her native Idaho and in Las Vegas, Dailey, who was head of English departments at three area high schools, made innovations that improved educational practices.

But she never lost her love for music or the piano. For many years she played the graduation march for every high school in town at ceremonies at the old Las Vegas Convention Center. With her late husband, Jack Dailey, she wrote Rancho's alma mater in the 1950s.

Dailey died Thursday at home, surrounded by her many mementoes including a baby grand piano on which she long entertained family and other friends. She was 72.

The cause was brain cancer, her daughter, Julie Dailey Neil said, noting that her mom had lost a lung to cancer four years ago. Still, Dailey remained a cigarette smoker to the day she died.

Services for the Las Vegas resident of 43 years will be at 1 p.m. Monday at Davis Funeral Home Chapel, 6200 S. Eastern Ave. Visitation will be 2-4 p.m. Sunday at Davis. Interment will be in Paradise Valley Memory Garden.

"My mother loved the freedom that Las Vegas offered -- she loved that you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted," Neil, media director for Outback Media, said. "She was very independent and tenacious. You couldn't make her do what she didn't want to do.

"She was a women's libber from way back."

Dailey even smoked the quintessential cigarette of the women's liberation movement, Virginia Slims, which made the slogan "you've come a long way baby," an oath for equality of the sexes during the 1960s and '70s.

Clark County School Superintendent Brian Cram, who knew both of the Daileys -- an elementary school at 2001 E. Reno Ave. is named for Jack -- remembered Sidney Ann as a "character" who drew students to her like a magnet.

"She had a very human touch with her students," Cram said. "Young people were drawn to her because she really cared about them. She showed people what the human side is all about.

"People heard about her, sought her out and wanted to meet her."

After working for Rancho High from 1955-64, Dailey opened Valley High School in 1965 as head of its English department and later held the same post at Vo-Tech.

She also taught American and world literature. At Valley, she instituted team teaching, where two instructors split one class to teach different aspects of a single subject. She developed the English curriculum at Vo-Tech.

Born Sidney Ann Buchanan on Dec. 16, 1925, in Nampa, Idaho, she was one of two daughters of plumber Edward Buchanan and his wife, Ruth Ann Buchanan, who encouraged Sidney Ann to take up the piano at a young age.

In the mid-1940s, Dailey was the youngest member of the Nampa Piano Symphony.

Sidney Ann graduated from Nampa High School then got her teaching degree at the University of Idaho on May 31, 1948 -- the same day she married her college sweetheart, Jack Dailey.

Together, they taught classes at the same schools at Elk River, Idaho (1949-50), Parma, Idaho (1950-52), and Payette, Idaho (1952-55). It was at Payette High School that Jack coached future baseball great Harmon Killebrew.

The Daileys came to Rancho in 1955. They lived in North Las Vegas until 1962 when they moved to their longtime home on Sandhill Road near what was then Bond Avenue, but now is Tropicana Avenue.

Jack taught biology and history at Rancho and coached the baseball team. They went to Valley together, where he became athletic director.

Jack Dailey was killed in a flash flood at Nelson's Landing while boating there in 1974. On April 13, 1989, the Clark County School District Board of Trustees approved that a school be named after him. Jack Dailey Elementary opened in the fall of 1992.

Sidney Ann, who retired from Vo-Tech in 1982, was a member of Delta Kappa Gamma, the Nevada Education Association, the Retired Teachers Association of Clark County and a member and past president of the National Association of Teachers of English.

In addition to her daughter, Dailey is survived by a son-in-law, Russell Neil; a sister, Donna Lee Buchanan; and a grandson, John Russell Neil, all of Las Vegas.

DONATIONS: In Sidney Ann Dailey's memory to the Vista Care Hospice Patient Services, 1830 E. Sahara Ave., Suite 102, Las Vegas, NV, 89104.

archive