THE BOXES
Each week Carl Bradford collects 125 carry-able boxes, breaks them down, stacks them to fit in his little car, and brings them from the Marian Fathers in Stockbridge to Housatonic. Volunteers there pack food into the boxes for families in South County. Supermarket boxes, he says, are too big for one person to carry one up a flight of stairs. He got into the food box gig as a result of his book collecting gig for the Stockbridge Library’s annual summer book sale fundraiser.
Carl has been doing the box gig for so long he can’t remember when it started.
At some point years ago he also started picking up neighbors and taking them for their weekly shopping at the People’s Pantry in Great Barrington. Or for a ride to Kimball Farms, if needed.
Carl Bradford is 87 years old, and volunteering has become not an occasional task, but an ingrained habit.
People don’t ask him to help anymore, but rather, “These days I ask them.”
Carl has been giving back in some form or other in the Berkshires for well over 50 years, nearly as long as he’s been here in Berkshire County. He thinks the Stockbridge Congregational Church has probably gotten the lion’s share of his attention in that period, where his work has ranged from washing dishes to serving as Moderator, Trustee, and Chair of the Church Council. He was vice president of the Stockbridge Golf Club for five years, after working through all the other possible positions.
Fundraising is his speciality,and among the headlines there was the capital campaign undertaken while on the Stockbridge Library board, which raised nearly $4,000,000.
EARLY LIFE AND COMING TO THE BERKSHIRES
Restlessness clearly suits Carl Bradford. He’d lived in 17 different places by the times he reached that age himself, because his father worked for RCA — the record company — as a troubleshooter, and was sent into poorly-producing territories to whip them into shape. Carl went to prep school in Ohio and to Lehigh for college, got an MBA at Wharton, and spent half a decade at an insurance firm in Philadelphia.
He next moved to Montpelier, Vermont, and worked for National Life, and it was that job which planted the seeds of Carl’s move to Berkshire County. While at a conference in Texas he happened into conversation with Dick Whitehead, who ran administration for Berkshire Life.
A few weeks later came the call, then the job and the move to Lenox. He’d end up staying at Berkshire Life for more than forty years.
PROGRESSION AS A PHILANTHROPIST
Bradford’s professional life made his philanthropic life possible.
He’d spent years training salesmen to become sales managers, and watching them fail. He references the “Peter Principle,” named after Laurence Peter, who developed a business rule of thumb that people will continue to get promoted until they land in a job they’re not equipped for, and will remain at that ill-suited level. Being good at selling, for instance, tells you nothing about whether a person can manage.
Bradford proposed the inverse of the Peter Principle to his own company: if the skills are different, why couldn’t a man who was good at developing and managing people learn to sell?
They let him try out this approach, and he built a successful sales operation with no sales background, essentially as a franchise.
The most important aspect of the work was that he was free to make his own hours.
“I could do what I wanted when I wanted. They just judged the results.”
This flexibility is what made his extensive volunteering work possible.
When asked about the first project he did as a volunteer he recalled a wildly successful fundraiser sometime in the mid-70s at the former Brodie Ski Area, where he put on a rodeo that raised six figures.
BERKSHIRE TACONIC COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
Bradford made an enduring contribution to the region’s charitable landscape through the central role he played in the early growth of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. He was the first Berkshire County resident on the board and the first chairman as well, back when the foundation was a small Northwestern Connecticut-centered entity that had been jump-started with a million dollar donation.
In 2002, coming off the Berkshire Taconic chairmanship and looking for a new project, he and long-time friend Bronly Boyd got talking one day.
“We were talking,” recalled Boyd, “about the the big fund they had in Sheffield [the Eagle Fund] and Carl asked me if Berkshire Hills had an endowment. I said, ‘Actually, I don’t think so.’ He said, ‘Well, if you want to, we could start one.’”
The BHRSD school committee approved the idea.
The two of them took a $10,000 incentive grant and started the Berkshire Hills Fund for Excellence to support the students and teachers of Berkshire Hills Regional School District, with the funds raised meant to pay for the things a public school budget can’t and won’t cover, and the application was — and still is —open to teachers, parents, students, or community members, anyone with a workable, meaningful, student-centric idea with big impact.
In those early days Carl talked the president of Berkshire Bank into matching that initial $10,000 grant, and they he secured another $10,000. Fundraising has mostly grassroots, with committee members asking friends and connections for small donations and someone occassionally giving a larger gift of $5,000 or more. [Full disclosure: I served on the BH Fund for Excellence in the mid-2000s.]
Grants from the fund range from about $500 to $3,000 and have supported a very wide range of projects, with a very limited summary including visiting artist residencies for Muddy Brook Elementary, a poetry unit for 7th graders, Greenagers’ outdoor programming, Flying Cloud’s Chemistry and Art unit for 5th graders, Community Access to Arts programming for Special Education students, and Literacy Network’s First-Generation College Support program at Monument Mountain Regional High school.
The assets of the Berkshire Hills Fund for Excellence are now up to about $450,000.
Boyd says his friend’s special gift is a comfort asking people for money when it’s a cause he believes in himself. “He likes to help people…..He’ll tell you his flaw is he doesn’t know how to say no.”
FAIRVIEW HOSPITAL
If you ask Carl Bradford what volunteer work has been most meaningful to him, he’ll answer without hesitation. Fairview Hospital. He served fifteen years on that board, and would be serving still, but the State Attorney General’s office eventually stepped in and reminded him of term limits.
He started at Fairview back around 1990, when the hospital was losing a million dollars a year, which, for an entity of its size was not a loss to easily absorb. The head of Berkshire Health Systems approached him about a merger, which, to many, sounded like a dirty word. They were afriad that Fairview would be swallowed, that a small hospital in Great Barrington would become a satellite of Pittsfield and lose its identity. That, thankfully, is not what happened.
Fairview has not only maintained its identity, it’s grown to become a critical access hospital serving all of South County, and is now in the process of building on a substantial addition.
Thirty-some years on, there are people alive here because of our local hospital, but very few of them know the name Carl Bradford to thank.
Offering rides, packing food and books, organizing fundraisers and chairing committees is all good work, but also nothing special around here. It’s safe to say that Carl’s newest volunteer task, however, is a rare thing.
THE ORATORY
Truth is, Carl feels bad about taking so many boxes from the Marian Fathers, and thought he ought to give something back to them, too.
In a building on their hilltop property on Prospect Hill, there’s a room called the oratory. It is the place where candles are lit for the named dead, for whom requests arrive from all over the world. Today there are one thousand candles in the oratory. One thousand candles that need lighting.
And so, every Thursday morning, an 87-year-old Protestant walks alone around a Catholic sanctuary and lights one thousand candles, one at a time, each representing a lost loved one whose memory he helps to keep alive.
Wonderful story!