----- Original Message ----- From: Cheryl Jones<mailto:[email protected]> To: Lee Stevens<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 8:10 PM Subject: A more complete bio for Evelyn, by her daughter
What a life! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Note: The family is not planning a memorial service but will have a private scattering of ashes. Martha wonders if it would be appropriate for a small amount of ashes to be placed in a cave?] This from Evelyn's daughter, Martha Adams. Evelyn W. Bradshaw, 95, passed away on January 29, 2011, at St. Mary's Hospital in Richmond, VA. Until being diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2006, she had lived a very active life as a member of the National Speleological Society, the Battlefield Sierra Club, Fredericksburg PC Users Group, and a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). She was also a Girl Scout leader, a Democrat, and a member of the League of Women Voters, AAUW, an astronomy club, and the ACLU. After graduating cum laude from Radcliffe in 1937, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee during WWII and, after the war, for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in China, where she met and married John C. Bradshaw, Jr., who died in 1962. She worked for the Virginia Beach School Board, Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Law of the Sea, and the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund. She had three children:James A. Bradshaw, M.D., who predeceased her; Katharine B. Dwyer of Reno, Nevada; and Martha B. Adams, of Glen Allen; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. My mother had written a couple of bios, one inspired by a local newspaper series in circa 2001, and another from 1995 when she was running for a position on the NSS's Board of Governors.Following is the essence of those bios: She was there....Armistice Day 1918. Did she really remember? People celebrated the coming of peace. But, as President Woodrow Wilson warned, "Only a peace between equals can last. It must be a peace without victory to last." A native New Englander (born in Maine).Majored in Mathematics at Radcliffe. She explained that a science major had to do all that "lab stuff." Humanities majors had all that reading and research. But if one had any feeling for math at all, it was the easiest major.She minored in astronomy. After graduation, she spent four years at Yale University typing a manuscript written by a Swiss professor of international relations called Britain and France Between Two Wars. During WWII, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia as secretary to their Foreign Service Section, processing overseas workers. Outside of regular hours, cables for the AFSC were routed to her telephone and she heard the cries of help from ravaged Europe. She was also a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen and volunteered to help a professor at the Univ. of PA doing astronomy research: She counted comet trails for him. In China with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation's China Mission, she lived in Shanghai, until she asked to be reassigned and went to ChengChow to work as a secretary for a group trying to mend a dam on the mighty Yellow River that had been blown up during the war to slow the advance of the Japanese through China. Although that attempt failed when floods came before the dam was finished, the work was eventually completed. She was in China for one year, long enough to meet the love of her life, John Bradshaw, a Virginian, who was working with the British Friends Ambulance Unit. They returned to the US & settled in North Carolina, where her husband worked for Guilford College, and they had three children. She was in the choir of the Friends Meeting there. In reaction to the Little Rock case (ordering desegregation), she was one of "34 Whites Who Demanded Integration" [a front page article in the local paper reporting a letter to the local school board written by Guilford College associates suggesting the school board should integrate without waiting for a court order]. Cross burnings and angry telephone calls resulted, but her family was visiting relatives out of the state. She became President of the local League of Women Voters, and was active in the AAUW & the Greensboro Astronomy club, which took part in a research project observing migratory geese flying across the face of the moon (to find new information on migratory patterns of high-flying birds). For a few months, she worked for an over-the-counter brokerage firm. They moved to Virginia Beach "to look for a less stressful job after [John] had a cerebral hemorrhage." Besides working for the director of personnel of the School Board, she was responsible for the statistics and applications for federal funds (Public Law 874). "The City had acquired a main frame IBM computer and [she] converted what had been entirely a paper operation into punch cards." She had a huge key punch machine in her office and designed the key punch cards herself.She was there when Norfolk closed its schools rather than integrate. She talked to Norfolk parents wanting to place their children in the still open Beach schools. Then the Navy threatened to relocate unless schools were reopened, so the Norfolk school closure was fairly short-lived. She was active in the Virginia Beach Friends Meeting. She was an officer or board member with the area Human Relations Council, the ACLU, a local civic organization, and a statewide organization of educational data system operators (where, GUESS WHAT, she did their newsletter for them by bulk rate when 2 cents per piece was the rate, the first of MANY newsletters she enjoyed working on in her lifetime). And she continued to love computers all her life. She discovered caving as a Girl Scout leader (her two daughters were in her troop). The father of one of the Girl Scouts worked with a Navy Wave who wanted to cave, so the Girl Scouts went caving with her, with their first cave being "Porter's." After the Wave moved on, other Girl Scout troops in the area asked to go along on the cave trips. Annie Whittemore introduced her to OTR. Evelyn "realized cavers were fun people to do things with and she joined the NSS." She was in on the formation of the Virginia Cave Commission, later the Virginia Cave Board. After her 3 children were grown, Mom moved to the Washington DC area and worked eight years for the FCNL, a Quaker lobby in D.C., and was active in the Alexandria Friends Meeting. At the annual convention of the National Speleological Society she received the Outstanding Service Award of the Society. The D.C. Grotto chairman persuaded her to run for a seat on the NSS Board of Governors. To her surprise, she won and during the next six years traveled and got to know cavers from all over the U.S. As chair of the NSS Search Committee, she was proud that she was able to persuade Jeanne Gurnee to accept the assignment of serving as the first woman president of the organization in over fifty years. Later, she became chair of the NSS Internal Organizations Committee. Mom ended this 2001 bio with "When will the powerful realize the necessity to learn that 'War is not the answer'? Did Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jesus of Nazareth, and a host of others die in vain?" I believe that mom liked to quote the Quaker William Penn from Some Fruits of Solitude In Reflections And Maxims, 1682 when she wrote sympathy letters to people, and so I'll finish with this quote: For tho' Death be a Dark Passage, it leads to Immortality, and that's Recompense enough for Suffering of it. And yet Faith Lights us, even through the Grave, being the Evidence of Things not seen. And this is the Comfort of the Good, that the Grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For Death is no more than a Turning of us over from Time to Eternity.
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