William Otis Bradley

William Otis Bradley 1897-1986 William Otis Bradley was born in Moroni, Utah, on 2 February 1897 to James Otis and Johanna Sophia Arnoldus Bradley, the second son in a family of seven children. Otis, as he was called, came from good pioneer stock, his great-grandfather George Washington Bradley having served as the first Bishop in Moroni and also as the town president for eighteen years.  Otis worked at a local firm known as the Moroni Co-op. It was there he met and began to date Nida Hales, who, after only two years of high school had also gone to work there to help her family’s financial situation. Nida had dated many young men previous to that time, but in Otis she felt she had finally found the one the Lord intended for her. By the fall of 1918 they were dating steadily and planned to be married the next spring. But early that same fall a serious flu epidemic broke out that plagued the entire nation. It was so severe that all public gatherings such as school, church meetings, picture shows, and dances were closed down. Otis and Nida had often attended the Wednesday and Saturday night dances so were now forced to cultivate their relationship in other ways while they waited for the flu epidemic to subside—and for the ban on the temple to be lifted. The Manti Temple reopened the first week of March, and it was in that first week after the closure, on 12 March 1919, that Nida and Otis went there to be married. Their first home was in the front part of the James M. Christensen home.  Unfortunately for Nida, her marriage got off to a much different start than she had dreamed of since she was a girl. Despite Otis’s having qualified to go to the temple, he was not truly converted to the gospel. His mother died shortly after he was married, so the responsibility fell to his widowed father and his sisters to give him spiritual support in his new patriarchal calling. He floundered because of his lack of leadership sense and this deficiency   was immediately apparent to Nida when he did not “preside” over her in his new home. Each night, for example, Nida prayed alone then had to persuade Otis to pray with her—but she always had to be mouth. When Otis and Nida’s first child, a son, Ralph Otis Bradley, was born to them on 24 Feb 1920, Nida’s first concern was how she could successfully teach him to “return home” to Father in Heaven. His had been a rough delivery, which led to her prolonged sickness, requiring that she receive continuous care from her family. Ralph was a big baby and was hard to feed. Then Nida nearly died giving birth on 5 May 1921 to her second child, a girl whom they named Betsy, after Nida’s mother. Both children were born in Moroni. Otis left the Moroni Co-op and went to work for People’s Sugar Company, where he boiled sugar all day. He liked that kind of work but it was seasonal, which meant moving around from job to job in the off months. Otis and Nida bought a building lot from his Aunt Eliza Bradley just one block west of the Moroni Co-op, between her home and Otis’s father’s home. The moved from their first house in the Christensen home into a two-room lumber house they had purchased from Nida’s Uncle Alma Blackham and moved onto their new lot. They dug a basement and a foundation with a floor and were happy when they moved into their very own home. The following spring Otis was laid off at the sugar company, so he went to Salt Lake and found a position as a meat cutter, a trade he had learned from Lawrence Larson at the Moroni Co-op. Once settled, Nida also moved to Salt Lake with the children. There they rented a furnished house at 245 Hampton Avenue, across the street from Nellie Morley’s family, another of Nida’s relatives. Late that summer the sugar factory in Moroni contacted Otis asking him to return in the fall to Moroni to boil sugar for them again, so he accepted the offer and they moved back home.  They were happy to be around family again in Moroni, but shortly after Thanksgiving Otis was laid off once more, and they were out of work—again. Otis wasted no time trying to find employment back in Salt Lake but nothing was available, so he went to McGill, near Ely, Nevada, where he was able to get another job as a meat cutter. The family followed by train the following January, but they only stayed about a year in McGill because the copper ore fumes from the nearby smelter were harmful to Betsy. She could not breathe and in the nighttime it became even worse. So Nida and the children returned to their little house in Moroni, leaving Otis to fend for himself in McGill.  The first part of October 1925 the family was reunited when they all moved to Sparks, Nevada, three miles north of Reno, where Otis had secured a position with Safeway Stores. In Sparks Nida began immediately to serve in the Church, being called as a counselor in Primary the very first month. When her father died suddenly on 7 May 1927, she and the children went home for the funeral and when they returned, they found that Otis had been transferred to Safeway’s large store in Reno as manager over the entire store. It was a good career move for him.  To facilitate Otis’s new position, the family moved to Reno. But they did not like it there because the school was too far away for Ralph to walk. So they moved back to Sparks, where Ralph could walk to school. They did not have a car at the time and the small town was much more convenient. It was not difficult for Otis to get to work from Sparks because a street car went every 30 minutes to Reno and returned about as often. It stopped just a half block from their home in Sparks and one block from the Safeway store in Reno, and the fare was very reasonable. Over the next several years the Bradley family moved again and again, during which time Otis mysteriously began to distance himself from Nida and the children, even living apart from them for long periods of time. In July 1928, he asked for a transfer to Santa Barbara so moved there on his own, leaving his family in Sparks to facilitate their own move back to Moroni, where it was agreed they would go. He left for California on July 5 without even saying goodbye to his children.  In the ensuing months Nida suffered in private because of the outcome of her marriage, but she constantly prayed for Otis’s return.   California did not prove to be a good venture for him, though, so he moved on and found an opportunity to cut meat in Portland, Oregon, where he ultimately opened his own butcher shop. For a while Otis sent $20 a month to Nida, from which she always paid $2 in tithing the very first thing. When her Christmas check didn’t arrive that year, however, Nida borrowed $5 from Grandpa Bradley so her family would have a Christmas. Then in May 1929 she suffered another heartbreak when a parcel post package arrived with Otis’s garments and the church books the local missionaries had given to him when they tried to reactivate him in the Church. Nida and her children were invited to go and live with Aunt Nellie Blackham Morley in Salt Lake City. During that time she visited Otis once in Portland to try to get him to come back to her, but it was no use, so she had to face the ugly reality that she was totally on her own.  After making a few modifications to Nellie’s basement, Nida set up housekeeping on a shoestring, and her cousin Doris got her a job at Auerbach’s, which enabled her to now carry some of the financial responsibility for her family. All this while Doris, despite her rheumatoid arthritis,   maintained her usual cheerful spirit, which proved to be a real boon to Nida. Life was bearable, and ultimately even enjoyable, at Nellie’s, but Nida so longed to have her family back together again. Though her husband was gone she was at least able to help pay the rent now that she had her job at Auerbach’s. But shortly after Thanksgiving Otis wrote asking for a divorce—which broke Nida’s heart. After the divorce, Otis married Ofa Anna Marts and he ended up having lived much of his adult life with her in Oregon. In Portland Otis owned his own meat market and was a great success. His son, Ralph, recalls that he had real people skills, which was partially why he did so well in his own business. Otis saw very little of his family after his divorce from Nida. Ralph was 35 years old before he had any kind of a relationship with him. Once when he was in Boise, Idaho, on a business trip he felt impressed to drive over to Portland, Oregon, to see his dad. They had a good visit and were able to get re-acquainted with each other. Years later, after his wife died, Otis called Ralph and said he would like to move back to Moroni, Utah, to live with his brother Cliff and his wife, Rhea. So Ralph sent his sons Craig and Jim up to Oregon to help with the move. There they rented a U-Haul truck and brought their grandfather down to Moroni with all his things.  Otis had bought Cliff and Rhea a home in Moroni, which he had given them as a gift, but things didn’t work out for him to live with them for very long so Otis built a small addition on his nephew Ron’s house and lived there for several years. Ralph often took two of his daughters, Barbara and Lisa, down to Moroni to see Otis and to take him to lunch. He particularly liked the food at a favorite restaurant in Ephraim. They enjoyed those trips because it gave them a chance to nurture him and show love and concern for him. And their efforts proved successful because Otis was really trying hard to become active in the Church again. He was obeying the commandments, including paying his tithing, but he needed to qualify for a temple recommend, which didn’t seem to be forthcoming.  Ralph learned that his father had been struggling with some past things he wanted to “clean up” in his life and didn’t quite know how to go about doing it. He talked to his bishop and asked for his help, but the bishop wasn’t very responsive, so nothing happened. Finally, Ralph intervened and talked to the bishop’s wife and she encouraged the bishop to move things along, which he did, and Otis finally got his temple recommend. After he moved to Salt Lake Ralph had the privilege of performing the sealing of his deceased second wife, Ann, to him in the Salt Lake Temple. (Nida, Ralph’s natural mother and Otis’s first wife, who was sealed to him initially in the Manti Temple, had that sealing canceled when she was married and sealed to her second husband, John A. Donaldson.) In Salt Lake, Ralph bought a trailer home for Otis to live in and they parked it near the Bradleys’ store so he could easily go back and forth to where Ralph’s family members worked. They all enjoyed having him around. He was, in fact, a great help to them all the while he lived there, partially because of his own past experience in business.  About the time Ralph and Mildred were called on their mission to North Carolina Otis’s health was beginning to fail so they assigned their daughter Barbara to care for him regularly during their absence. She took him “out and about” each day to run errands and tend to personal needs. Later, when she was no longer able to keep up with his physical demands, the family moved him to the Salt Lake Home on 200 North, and he lived there until he died on 24 June 1986 at age 89. After having been away from Utah and the majority of his family and friends for so many years, Otis felt blessed to spend the last six years of his mortal life “back home” again in Utah. It was only fitting that, even though he was living in Salt Lake at the time of his passing, he should be buried “back home” in the Moroni City Cemetery.  Having reconciled himself again with his Father in Heaven, his children have every reason to one day see him “back home” again in the Bradley Family Mansion, filling his own chair among the others whose hearts have been—and are still being—turned to him.