Bradley was born in 1905 in the Colorado frontier town of Canon City. His father, Jack Bell, was a large handsome man in a cowboy hat, who didn't look all that sure of how to hold his baby boy. As it turned out, he wasn't that good at holding a wife either, and Bradley's parents divorced when the boy was about four years old.

One of the photographs of Canon City shows father being tended by a nurse, so the family was well enough to do. He had a step-sister, Catharine, from his mother's first marriage to Robert Jewett Mercur.

Following the divorce, Catharine the elder moved her family to Denver, and it wasn't long before she found a third husband, Robert Meade Van Deusen. As soon as Van Deusen's divorce was final, Catharine and Robert eloped to a neighboring state that permitted remarriage immediately.

The family were in the newspaper in the normal ways - father as a child dressed up as a Mexican bandit; Catharine in the whirl of graduating school.

Father was 14 when his mother bought a property in Granby Colorado that became known as The Van Deusen Ranch. But this marriage, though lasting longer than Catharine's earlier ones, still ended, and Catharine ran the ranch as a guest house and tea house. The property now lies beneath a dam created lake.

Childhood pictures of father show him as relatively well-to-do and happy. The family home was a log cabin with a large library and a fairly standard collection of pets. Catharine's father, Brig.General Henry L. Burnett, had been one of the special judge advocates at the Lincoln Assassination, and Bradley was frequently to be found, when not dressed as a cowboy, in small military uniforms.

Bradley was close to his mother and corresponded with her until her death in 1934.

It's likely that Bradley was not in touch with his father since one of his military papers says that his father was shot to death. Whatever confusion reigned could have come from a slice and dice of the story of Jack Bell in the silvermine shootout, or perhaps someone had passed on the information that a John C. [not E.] Bell had been shot to death by his partner. Whatever the reason for their separation, it seems incredibly sad that Bradley's father actually lived until 4 years before Bradley's own death.

Because so many of the military records held by the government burned in a large fire, Bradley's military career has to be pieced together from multiple sources. He shipped out of San Francisco Presidio for Manila in 1924, at the age of 19, as part of the occupation force following the Phillipine insurrection. He was also stationed in China, and returned to the Presidio in 1926. In 1927 he was based in New York at Ft. Slocum, a small island close to New Rochelle. By 1928, he had been assigned as an instructor in the Military Sciences Department of the University of Chicago ROTC. Yes, Virginia, there really was a University of Chicago Cavalry. Their horses were stabled west of the campus near Cottage Grove, and there were discussions about the young men wearing their spurs to dances. It was at the University of Chicago that father met Jean, my mother.

They married in 1934 and spent most of the next 10 years in New York, with a slight detour to Manesquan New Jersey to conceive me. During that time, Bradley worked mostly as an ROTC rifle instructor at schools such as Xavier and New York University. With mother's encouragement, he took the exams and moved up in rank. He was proud of his rank, proud of his responsibilities, and proud of his work.

The happiest years of Bradley's life were those that he spent in the service. Like many another man, the army had been Bradley's life. He was bred to it and he loved it. And he loved teaching young men. There was a romance and natural drama to the life of a warrior who imagined dying someday beneath a foreign sky. Even if they dreamed on the streets of New York City, where the likeliest death would come from being run over by an automobile.

Bradley lived huge. He and his friends drank, emoted and loved life with every fibre of their being. He had very close friendships with men he had known from the beginning of his military career. Their lives would weave apart and back together and it was all part of the life of the warrior.

Wherever Bradley went, he was able to create a circle around himself of people who could enjoy life as intensely as he could, himself. During his time at the University of Chicago, it was the clan that formed around his newspaper column, The Whistler, with himself as The Blind Tiger. In New York, it was a literary circle in Greenwich Village that partied out of his apartment. It was a life that he loved. Unfortunately, it was not a life that his wife could love.

When Bradley met Jean, he was 23 years old and she was barely 17. His character was already formed and hers was not. She was an artist and a dreamer, passive by temperament and free only in her mind. He was the fire that attracted, though her common sense told her to beware being burned. From almost the beginning of the column in which Tiger courted her, she held herself back. But she had become for father the personification of the romance for which he lived his life. He courted her passionately and, in the end, she pushed away her fears of being overwhelmed by this larger than life man and secretly eloped during a visit to New York. It took her four months to have the courage to tell her parents what she had done.

Many of mother's qualities were as bright as father made them in his mind. Like him, her mind was clear and sharp and reached far beyond the common run of thought. She was as kind and as good, as principled and as caring as he imagined her to be. Her laughter was as quicksilver as her mind and, even today, it's hard to remember her voice without the laughter that constantly underlied it. But what she wasn't was a lady on a pedestal. She was as passionately a mother as father was a husband. Father brought her negligees and took her to nightclubs. What mother wanted were groceries and an evening without his circle of friends dominating her home. She could do without the drama. For father, life was drama.

Throughout the entire ten years of their marriage they never fought. They should have, of course, but they didn't. Perhaps if mother had been less passive, she could have made him see her needs. But even when he knew he had done something she didn't like, it was still life on the stage. He would take out his military sword and threaten to fall on it. Her part in the play was to take the sword away. One day she reached her limit, and took herself away. There was no warning. As they stood on the platform waiting for the train that he thought was taking her for a visit to her parents, something in her attitude suddenly made him nervous and he begged her not to go. But she had made the decision and she wouldn't turn back. Though father didn't know it then, his marriage was over.

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I was only six weeks old when mother decided to leave father. She said that they had never fought and it was clear he had no idea that she was even thinking in terms of a separation, much less a divorce. He thought she was taking the children to visit her parents. She was really trying to find a stable environment where she felt her children would be safe if anything happened to her. She was a mother first and a wife second. As her child, I can feel the pain father must have felt, but I never doubted the great love that she had for me.

Two years after mother left, Bradley retired from the army with the rank of Major. But without the routine and limitations the army had brought, the drama that had been his life turned to tragedy. He traveled the world for awhile, then settled down in St. Augustine Florida, carving leather in the Old Town. The letters that he wrote to mother in those years, begging her to come back, were cries for her to save him from himself. But mother couldn't save herself, and so she had no strength to give him.

A diabetic and an alcoholic, father went from VA hospital to VA hospital. And the letters from his army friends showed that their lives were turning out as badly. His best friend, Bob, following a fight with his wife, shot himself. Father, at least, let nature do it for him. When father died, he was not yet 50 years old.

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I was raised knowing that father was a poet and, from the time I was an adult, I've searched for his work. I knew that he had published at least one book which mother had given to Frank Lloyd Wright and to Robert Frost when she had interviewed them for her school paper. I knew that father had published, or perhaps only written, at least one poem in a Philippine dialect. But everything I did to find his writing had been fruitless.

It was only after developing more skills in poetry searching by reason of my search to prove that father's 4th great grandfather, Major Henry Livingston, Jr., was the author of Night Before Christmas, that my husband and I were able to find father's poetry column. Through my genealogical research I've discovered the rather surprising information that, besides most of my male ancestors being named Henry, writing poetry was a very common trait among them. Father's 6th great grandfather, Governor Lewis Morris of New Jersey, wrote poems about being governor. Another of father's 6th great grandfathers, Sydney Breese, wrote the poem that still adorns his tombstone in Trinity Churchyard in NYC.

But it was father's poetry that compelled me as the way into the head of a man I desperately wanted to know. An article on father written by one of his friends from University of Chicago describes a knapsack filled with his photographs and writing. The image frustrates me beyond imagining. If anyone has any suggestions that might lead me to any other pieces of father's work, I would most gratefully appreciate the leads.

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