Let me begin my story with a few words about my family. They were all plan Missouri farmers, proud, honest, hardworking and poor. Desperately poor.
According to family legend, my Bradley ancestors immigrated from the British Isles sometime in the mid-1700s to Madison County, Kentucky. In the early 1800s they migrated west to what would become the State of Missouri. They settled on small, hard farm parcels in Randolph County in the central part of the state near Clark, a farm village, and Higbee a coal-mining town.
My grandfather, Thomas Minter Bradley, still in his teens, served as a private in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. When he came home, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the daughter of a poor Clark farmer. They had nine children. My father, John Smith Bradley, born February 17,1867, was the oldest.
Like all the Missouri Bradley's, my father began life as a sodbuster. But he became the first Bradley to break out of the mold. At age nineteen, and until then largely self-educated, he entered one of the rural schools near Clark. He was a quick study. Two years later he had advanced far enough to qualify as a teacher in the rural school system and about 1888 he launched his life's work.
My father was a curious blend of frontiersman, sportsman, farmer, and intellectual. Powerfully built and fearless, he was a superb hunter and shot—indisputably the best in Randolph County. A pioneer in baseball, he carved his own bats, taught himself to pitch curve balls and organized and starred on local teams. In the months when school was not in session, he usually hired out to farmers or sharecropped to earn enough money to survive. At the same time, he was an omnivorous reader and lover of books. Everywhere he taught, he encouraged his students to read and created small libraries for them.
-Omar N. Bradley (with Clay Blair), A General's Life: An Autobiography by General of The Army Omar N. Bradley
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