6. MONUMENTS - Lydia Moss Bradley and What We Make of Loss
6A
You are listening to the sounds of Middle America.
Brett Conlin “Good Old Days”
I first met John in a filthy townie bar. He was a heavy-set, unassuming young man dressed in black. He stood at the front of the bar on a small stage plucking a six-string and singing a subdued mix of covers and originals.
But, I wasn’t there for the music. I was there for the beer.
I had a miserable job next door doing graphic design during the second shift for businesses like Rural King and Tractor Supply. The work was mind-numbing. This town was feeling smaller than ever, and my girlfriend was quickly growing disinterested in our once fresh and exciting relationship.
The dive where John sang served some food, but my dinner times there were mostly alcohol-fueled departures.
As this dinner hour continued on, I noticed that John wasn’t just a talented singer. He had taste. His covers were the choice picks of a connoisseur, and his originals were earnest and insightful.
When he left the stage to take a short break, I made it a point to tell him how much I had enjoyed hearing him sing. It had felt like the perfect escape from this town and my humdrum life. To my surprise, John smiled politely and replied, “Thanks, Wendell. I enjoy your band too.” Then he poured me a free beer from behind the bar.
As it turned out, John was the place’s cook. When his kitchen shift ended, he found that the owners would let him drink for free as long as he could sing songs into the night. One can safely say that John sang for a lot of long hours at that place.
Soon after that first night, my co-worker invited me to go see John’s rock band, which he described as, “the real deal.”
I don’t remember a lot about this second night. The show was in the back of a dingy pizza place. It was sparsely attended, with maybe 20 people through the door. John’s band was decent enough, sloppily working their way through a set at the end of the long room. They were definitely more aggressive sounding than anything I had been listening to, but there were enough indie influences in there for a nerd like me to feel at home. I picked up their hand-packaged CD and took it away for additional listens.
The band had a devastatingly honest sound. Holding recordings in hand, I was finally plugging into the details of John’s stories: his heartbreak, his substance abuse, his depression, his suicidal urges. And, it was beautiful. John was beautiful.
My co-worker had been right. This band was the real deal. They did a small tour out west and started to tighten up. Meanwhile, I was listening to their CD on repeat along with much of the local music scene. Their explosive and emotionally raw performances began garnering them some attention, and they soon acquired a deal with a small indie record label.
Meanwhile, my life as a home body with a desk job and a steady partner was quickly going to hell. Due in no small part to my own confidence issues, I no longer trusted my girlfriend. Working at a computer all day was causing debilitating pain in my hands and wrists. The drinking habit I had picked up in my time performing my own music was showing no signs of slowing down.
With my life in a place where every aspect of it felt like a costume I had put on, John felt real. When I heard him perform, I was transported. I was at ease. He could sing to the heart of me. We became close friends.
I had found that I couldn’t yet live the domestic life that my parents wanted for me. I quit my job and hit the road. The mini-van and my bandmate Dominic were all the home that I wanted. The rest of it could burn.
John and his band were also feeling this town closing in. While riding the high of their recent signing, they chose to head west and make a new home in the mountains. An entire posse of friends followed, and our local DIY music scene took a bad hit.
As it turns out, this crew of folks had included many important musicians, promoters, and artists from the area. While it gave John’s band immediate infrastructure and hype in their new home, it left some of us here scrambling to imitate their success.
Scouts Honor “Ballad Of The Blind Man”
6B
Lydia’s limited education was provided in the neighboring Mrs. Campbell’s fireplace-heated log-home kitchen, the children gathered squatting on the floor or sitting on crude wooden stools. They hand-crafted their own supplies of quill pens and inks. Their primary reading material was the Bible.
At home, Lydia learned to be self-sufficient: churning butter, spinning yarn, curing meats, and constructing clothes, bedding, and carpets. Even on her wedding day, her groom’s suit was created by her by hand out of aprons and old dresses.
Her father, Zeally Moss, had been a captain in the Revolutionary War. These were the days of the early American settlers. Child mortality rates were extremely high, leaving us with no real knowledge of how many siblings Lydia lost before their reaching adulthood. We do know that Lydia was only 4 when her sister Mary, who was 20 years her senior, died from consumption.
While Zeally had started the family’s western movement with a plantation, including two slaves, near present day Winchester, Kentucky, the family eventually moved north to the newly-formed state of Indiana, leaving the plantation and slaves behind. Their new river-town home in Vevay is where Lydia was born and raised. And, before his passing at the age of 79 to Lydia’s 23, Zeally passed along a knowledge of the real estate business that Lydia would cultivate for the rest of her life.
A commonly told anecdote describes Lydia as a teenager. She had been gifted a colt by her father. She then raised, groomed, bridled, and sold the horse for 40 acres of land. Lydia smartly cleared the timber on this land herself and sold it to a sawmill owner named Tobias Bradley.
Tobias’ primary education came in the form of a teenage position as a store clerk for a local judge. Using what he learned, he then opened a flatboat business on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. This business expanded into what became the sawmill.
It’s said that Tobias grew to admire the young, motivated woman that he found in Lydia. The couple eventually married and combined their lands, along with an inheritance of 100 acres from Zeally Moss and $1000 in gold from Lydia’s maternal grandfather, Gregory Glasscock.
Two years after the wedding in 1839, Lydia gave birth to their first child, Rebecca Bradley. Sadly, this would be the only child that Zeally would meet before his passing in that same year. And sadly again, Rebecca would only live to the age of 6.
Two more children, a girl and a boy, were born before the family’s move in 1847. The couple decided to make a home where I would make mine over a century later. They made the move to follow Lydia’s brother Captain William Moss, who was finding success with shipping along the Illinois River. Despite Tobias’ desire to move back to Zeally’s former home of Kentucky, Lydia had held out and convinced him to make their home further north.
While this new home did bring them financial prosperity, the hardships of life in early America failed to subside. Personal tragedy was a near constant companion. Within the first year here, both of their children passed on. As it turned out, the couple lost all 6 of their children before adulthood.
Then in 1867, Lydia’s husband Tobias Bradley was killed in a horse and buggy accident, just 3 years after the couple lost their last living child, Laura, at the age of 14.
Scouts Honor “Call And Response” 1st verse and chorus
6C
Part of the beauty of John’s music and performance was the sense of danger. There was something volatile there. The band changed up their bassist, and their sound only got dirtier. Any vulnerability present on that first hand-packaged CD was now fading. Their second recording was a sharp turn straight into all that is brooding, menacing, and dark.
National magazines started to pay attention, and one publication released a shocking interview detailing the band trading sexual favors for cash to get down the road. This seems like the type of thing that would make some people turn away from a band, but to me, their brutal honesty about all of who they were and what they were living made me simply respect and love them more. They went where the rest of us wouldn’t dare. They lived the life that most feared. There was no shame.
Rumors ran rampant about John and his band. Heavy drug use, public nudity, and beyond. The band fully embraced the stories and all of their intentionally sinful imagery. They marched into the shadows of society with arms wrapped around each other and their community.
I knew them as some of the most caring and giving people that I had ever known. Stranded in California in the midst of my first ever continuous 3-month tour, we sat with multiple days off and nowhere to go.
That’s when we ran into John and the gang. They saw their Midwestern brothers and they took us in. They gave us smiles and laughs and love that felt like home in this strange and unfamiliar place. With zero notice, they added us to their tour dates. We now had food, places to sleep, and the biggest crowds of the tour.
John’s substance abuse eventually became too much for even the chaos that was life in his band. He was forced out and the band continued on without. I’m sure it was an extremely difficult decision at the time, an attempt to keep the boat afloat, but the loss of John’s influence was felt. The music was never the same.
In the years following, John had a couple more bands, but they weren’t able to acquire a comparable level of audience appeal. His substance abuse worsened.
Amidst all of this, he had to have a major surgery done. The result left John unable to keep food down or eat without pain. He carried it well, softly smiling to all that shared their time with him, but the effects of this pivot wore at his insides.
He soon found himself divorced and at times without a home.
Years later, John stayed the night with my family after a show that we had both attended in town. He only had an hour drive back to his parents’ for the night but told me that he wasn’t feeling well. He had lost a lot of weight.
As for me, I had finally settled down. I married a wonderfully intelligent woman that I had met up north in Chicago. We had a child and then ended up moving back south to save money when buying a house and needing child care.
Once again shoe-horning myself into domesticity, the thought of having a friend and fellow musician stay in my home was a joy. I begged for him to stay.
He agreed, and during the conversation that followed, he told me of his desperation, his time in the hospital, the sickness in his head, and the sinister thoughts that accompanied it all. I listened and loved.
The next morning, my daughter excitedly guided John through our home garden. He smiled and laughed and followed her all the way.
Jared Grabb “Patch Of Green”
6D
When Tobias passed, it left Lydia Moss Bradley alone. This was in a time when women had limited legal powers and could not vote.
Before his death, the couple had amassed significant wealth through real estate, banking, distilling, boating, and a sawmill.
They had discussed memorials for their children and had donated land and funds to the Children’s Home in the year before Tobias had his accident. However, they decided against opening an orphanage of their own.
Lydia, seeking companionship, briefly remarried. She was careful, though, and wisely drew up one of the first prenuptial agreements. After four years, the marriage ended amiably, and she had protected the assets of the family.
While she was a woman alone in an unfair world, she was far from powerless. The self-sufficiency that she had developed throughout her life allowed her to thrive in her role on the Board of Directors after inheriting Tobias’ shares at First National Bank, now a part of Commerce Bank. Not only was she a member of the board for over 3 decades, but she served as the Director of the Board for more than 2 of those decades, most likely making her the first woman to hold this position in the United States.
Within 10 years of Tobias passing, Lydia had doubled the value of the estate to over $1 million.
Eventually, Lydia returned to thoughts of memorializing her loved ones and bettering her community. In 1877, she donated land and funding to the Society of St. Francis to build what is now OSF St. Francis Medical Center. In 1884, she founded the Bradley Home for Aged Women to care for widowed and childless women. In the same year, she funded the construction of the local Universalist Church. In 1894, Lydia helped to form the first park district in Illinois, which included Laura Bradley Park, lovingly named after her oldest deceased child.
Over all the others though, Lydia Moss Bradley believed her creation of the Bradley Polytechnic Institute in 1897 to be the greatest monument to her love for her lost family members. This institution now stands as Bradley University, with an undergraduate enrollment of over 4600 students.
According to the Chicago Times Herald, “She said she hoped the institute would be a real benefit to mankind; that it would be the means of making better men and women; that boys and girls would find in the new institution of learning an incentive to intellectual life was her ardent wish.”
Jared Grabb “I Will Always Sing For You (Middle America version)”
6E
John passed away last year. He committed suicide while in jail for multiple charges. The police had found him sleeping in a stranger’s car in a parking lot. His substance abuse over the years had caused him to burn a lot of bridges, and all of his adult life had seemingly been spent in transience. Apparently, the police had failed to see him as threat for self-harm. For this, we all suffered a loss.
Or, maybe he cleaned up. He remarried and approached the world with renewed vigor. He and his new wife again traveled the country performing music night after night. Life was hard, but life was good. But, then surgery complications led to the development of cancerous cells, causing his body to rapidly deteriorate. Within 6 months of his diagnosis, he had passed away quietly in a bed at home, surrounded by friends and family.
Either way, I lost him. We lost him. The whole world lost him. This beautiful, beautiful man.
The last time I saw John was in a co-op art space. My friend Brian and I had been on a two week tour, and it just so happened that John’s tour plans aligned with ours on the last day.
Upon entering the venue, John gave me a big smile and a hug. He was kind, patient, and engaged. Once again, I was going to get to share the stage with one of my musical heroes. And, just like it was in the American Legion halls, pizza shops, and bars in our hometown, this room felt like family.
Jared Grabb “Prison Bars (Instrumental Middle America Version)”