Jacqueline "Jacquie" Bailey Cole

Jacqueline “Jacquie” Bailey Cole, a lifelong artist, pioneering art teacher and devoted grandmother, died Oct. 3, 2026, at Sunrise Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. She was 92.

Jacquie was born in 1933 to Keith and Thelma Bailey and grew up in Flushing, Michigan. Her father was a banker, hardware store owner and insurance broker, and her mother was an avid gardener and a talented cook. Her brother, Bob, seven years her senior, became an architect, and she looked up to him her entire life. She loved her hometown and attended all 13 years of school in a single building, for a time just a block from home. Along the way, the family moved from town to a gentleman’s farm in the country, where she began raising horses. She graduated in 1951.

She spent two years at MacMurray College, a women’s college in Jacksonville, Illinois, which she chose for its horseback riding program, then transferred to Michigan State University, graduating in 1955 with a degree in interior design. She married Fritz Russell and worked briefly in the family hardware store before earning a master’s degree in art education from the University of Michigan.

Jacquie was one of the first art teachers for Flushing Community Schools, and for a time the only one. She spent many days driving from one rural schoolhouse to the next, a few of them one-room country schools, before the district consolidated into five modern elementary schools in the 1960s and 1970s. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married landscape architect Bill Thomas, and they welcomed their son, Troy. Bill died six years into their marriage.

While teaching at Central Elementary School, she met its principal, Dr. K.C. Cole. They married in 1979 and dubbed their new chapter “R Nu Life,” an exciting fresh start for them both. It came with a bigger family, too: K.C.’s children, Jeff, Gregory and Caroline, and their children, and his many sisters and their families across the West. K.C. was a Montana native, and getting to know everyone meant many summers on the road, weeks of fun adventures and decades of Cole family reunions. They canoed and sailed, played tennis, skied downhill and cross-country, and even took a course in hot-air ballooning. Every car trip turned into hiking, camping and horseback riding in national parks across the country. They spent a week on a windjammer cruise off the coast of Maine and made two trips to Europe, all of it captured on home video, much to Jacquie’s chagrin.

Jacquie retired in 1987 after 30 years of teaching art, and the travel continued year-round. She and K.C. moved from Flushing to a home near Sugarloaf Mountain, outside the small town of Cedar in northern Michigan. There they took up golf, which quickly became an almost daily passion and led each of them to a coveted hole-in-one, just two months apart. Jacquie got hers first, and eight years later she made a second. They both also enjoyed volunteering and serving their community in many ways.

Art was never just her job. She moved through textiles in the 1960s, leatherwork in the 1970s, and stained glass in the 1980s and 1990s, always returning to drawing, sketching, watercolors and oils. Norman Rockwell was her favorite artist. In later years she made and collected greeting cards of every kind, with a special love for Christmas.

She was thrilled when Troy and Gina started their family, and she was at the hospital the day their son Zach was born. In 2009, she and K.C. bought a condo in Edmonds, Washington, to be closer to Zach and his brother, Cam, splitting their time between Edmonds and Cedar. Summers brought “summer camp at Grandma’s condo,” when the boys walked all over Edmonds with her and stopped each week at Edmonds Bakery for snickerdoodle cookies.

She was a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church wherever she lived and enjoyed her social clubs, including Lamplighters, and her dominoes league. She was also a staunch Republican, a devotion she inherited from her father. Artistic, witty and a loyal friend to many, she will be deeply missed.

Jacquie is survived by her son, Troy Thomas (Gina LumAng); stepdaughter, Caroline Obert (Keith); stepdaughters-in-law, Shirley Cole and Maria Cole; grandchildren, Zachary, Cameron, Shani, Shannon, Keely, Greg, Angela and John; 10 great-grandchildren; nieces, Debbie Love (Robert) and Anne McCauslin (John); nephews, Kirk Bailey (Dianne) and Brian Bailey (Jeri Lynn); and 11 grandnieces and grandnephews.

She was preceded in death by her parents; brother, Robert “Bob” (Patricia) Bailey; husbands, Fritz Russell, Bill Thomas and Dr. K.C. Cole; and stepsons, Gregory and Jeff Cole.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the American Cancer Society.