One is NOT Only

Today the sky is bright blue just the same as it was on this day 32 years ago that I said goodbye to my father. Durward Glenn Bradley was born in 1922 on a farm along Lick Creek near McAddoo Holler in Middle Tennessee the second oldest of six children. He eagerly left the farming life behind for good and went to Oak Ridge to work for the Manhatten Project during World War II where he met my mother, Tressie. She convinced him to finish college.

They took the Hillbilly Highway to Detroit after the war to work in the auto industry. They moved back to the South where he took a job in Bristol only planning to stay a couple of years. They never left. He worked as a mechanical engineer for Raytheon. I didn’t consider it odd until much later, seeing that we were pacifists at heart, that he would bring home mugs with pictures of the missiles he was helping to design on them. My personal favorite was one with the Dragon Missile, a spiky green firebreather leaping forth with its tail encircling the white ceramic cup. 

He was a part time preacher who filled in wherever needed at every little church of Christ in upper East Tennessee or Southwest Virginia. He would drag me along on these evangelical missions and make me cringe in my pew when he used something from my life to illustrate a sermon point. He apparently was scheduled to preach somewhere when I unexpectedly entered the world early on a Sunday morning and the congregration was left to have a singing service. He was proud of being a Dale Carnegie instructor and was a stickler for correct grammar. If I asked “can I go…?” he would reply, ” well I am sure you can and yes you may too.” He did not believe in long sermons either. If the regular preacher ran long with the sermon, he said that it was a rare person that had something worth listening to for more than twenty minutes. This may be why my mother recalled her first impression of him was “ornery”.

​He was the PTA president when my sister and I were at Avoca Elementary. He umpired Little League baseball and took his umpiring very seriously. He did not tolerate any swearing or flinging of bats. Classmates were fond of mocking me for his signature ​foul ball call, “no, NO, NOOOOOO!” accompanied by  very theatrical hand gestures toward the appropriate baseline. He was apparently an excellent umpire because when I was in high school he was invited and went to umpire the Little League World Series in Williamsport. I only had about two dates in high school because the boys were much too intimidated to ask out Mr. Bradley’s daughter. It did not occur to me until I was grown that as I got older he moved up to Pony League and then when I was in high school to Senior League. He knew every boy at my school it seemed. 

He taught me to drive and that was fraught with unexpected peril. On my first attempt behind the wheel driving around Avoca Elementry I got the gas and brake pedal confused and took the gutter off the corner of the school before he grabbed the steering wheel and headed us back on the right path. I was ready to hand over the keys permanently but he said, ” Go around and do it again or you will be too scared to ever try later.” I think he also thought he might be too scared to get in the car with me again so we better get it done then. The rest of the gutters and I survived the day. When a big snow came he handed me the keys and told me I might as well learn how to drive in snow when he was around to pull me out of a ditch. Years later with both of us holding back tears he handed me the keys again this time to drive to Boston for my first job after graduation at the Arnold Arboretum. I cried across the whole state of Virginia.

He was a friend to many. If you were sick and in the hospital he would come and visit you whether you were there for a short time or a year – every week he would make time to visit. He always had time to listen to old people about their life. When he and my mother became ill when I was twenty, it never stopped surprising him how devoted his friends were to him or that for over the eight years as he struggled with cancer co-workers showed up periodically with an envelope of cash they had collected. It just had written on the outside “for Brad”. When he was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy he would put a little note made from an index card on his chest saying, “”WAKE ME UP IF YOU COME TO VISIT!” because he did not want to miss a visit from friends.  After he died I received many letters from men saying they appreciated that he had been a friend and confidant to their own sons when they had no idea how to relate to their wayward teen.

He was very competitive and liked to play basketball with the teenage boys in our neighborhood. In his late 50’s he was still 6’2 and 185. These same teenage boys complained he played too rough and he and his best friend Bob needed to stop throwing elbows. They denied the foul.

He had a lifelong aversion to cats and did not reveal until very late in life that his older brother had climbed up on the porch and dropped a cat on his head that clung with all four paws when he was about 6. He did not have a sense of humor about this event even 60 years later or consider the cat was as scared as he was.

He believed in the 10 minute power nap and would sit and take a short nap every day when he got home from work. He worked two crossword puzzles a day. He reminded me that the most important thing in life is relationship. I was packing up our family home to move he and my mother into a nursing home and as I asked about different possessions he said, “Shell, I need you to understand none of that matters to me. I trust you to make the right decision. What I wish is that I worked less overtime and spent it with your mother.” 

His brothers called him “Moon” (apparently because of his keen night vision). His family called him Durward. His co-workers called him Brad. My friends teasingly called him ” Burr-head Bradley” because of his devotion to his crew-cut long after it was out of style. I called him Daddy. 

Durward Glenn Bradley September 24, 1922 – March 1st, 1988.

© Michelle Bradley Campanis 2020