This episode we get personal, as I reach out to my brothers to talk about our father, Floyd John Bradigan, who died just over 40 years ago at age 60. We mark the moment that all three of his sons have outlived him. It seems like an opportunity to have a discussion about our memories of this singular man, who would have been 101 years old this year.
My brothers, Bruce and Bob, at ages 75 and 73, are 15 and 13 years old than me respectively. It felt as if they were a whole different generation, and in some ways they were. But interestingly, our memories of village life with our hard-working father are remarkably consistent. We spent many hard, sweaty hours in the garden plowing, cultivating, pulling weeds and harvesting the abundant crops of asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb, corn, beans, peas and the most delicious tomatoes in the tri-state region.
If that wasn’t enough, our father also ran a mail route, drove school bus, and spent decades as the town’s gravedigger. His three sons spent many hours of hard labor in those cemeteries, with wheelbarrows, shovels, spades, lawnmowers, sickles and scythes with little to no pay. It gave all three of us a deeper sense of perspective than our peers.
It wasn’t all hard work. We had an enormous tribe of cousins to play with, and we all shared our dad’s love of fishing, hunting and sports - baseball especially. Our Bradigan tribe loved the routines and rhythms of small-town life, the parades, picnics, the great hunting and sport fishing in western New York and the rich history. It has served me well, living in Ojai, one of the country’s quintessential small towns.
Our father, a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator in the South Pacific, who served from 1941 (he signed up on Dec. 8th, 1941, putting on hold his professional baseball career, as he was playing Double A ball on a Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team in Visalia) to just prior to the Korean War. He left the service as a Major in the newly formed U.S. Air Force. We talked about our own military service — and the fact that our father was very proud of the fact that four of his six children served in the military: three of them in the Army and yours truly in the Air Force. Brother Bruce - who jumped out of the first airplane he ever flew in - served in the Army’s Special Forces, and his career was cut short when he was wounded on a patrol in Vietnam. This is the first time I've ever heard him talk about his combat experiences.
It was a deep, meaningful and also fun conversation. We did not talk about the Chinese treasure fleet, the Dulles brothers or lost metallurgy technologies.
