The Last Words He Failed to Read

Recently I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Pacific Northwest Railroad Archives in Burien (http://pnrarchive.org/) as part of the Historic Seattle “Digging Deeper” series of tours in various archives around Seattle. (http://historicseattle.org/blog).  I have a number of railroading ancestors and collateral relatives and the tour made me want to write about one tragic tale of some of my Bradley trainmen.  Today is the 87th anniversary of the events below.

My great grandfather, Patrick Bradley worked for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, as did many of his relatives, including two nephews, George Francis and Paul Frederick Bradley, brothers who were employed by the NWP, George as an engineer and Paul as a conductor.  On February 28, 1929, George Bradley was at the throttle of Engine 141, pulling a northbound passenger train.  He received orders at Hopland directing him to pull onto the siding at Largo to let a southbound freight train pass.  He likely even read those orders - when they were later found in his pocket, there was a smudge from a grease-stained leather glove on the corner as if he had unfolded the paper to read it.[1] But for some reason he ignored them.  George ran the train right by the siding, and 400 yards north of the switch, collided headlong into Engine 184 pulling a train of cars full of timber. 

George had his head and shoulders out the window while he was rounding a curve in the road, and had no time to escape from the locomotive.  He was killed instantly.  His fireman, Don Mohn, jumped before the crash and escaped nearly uninjured.[2]   Roy Landree, the fireman on the freight was killed instantly as well, as the timber from the cars immediately behind the locomotive shot forward like bullets from a machine gun.[3]  The engineer of the freight, George Cunard, was injured and died a few days later in a San Francisco hospital.[4]  Suffering minor cuts and bruises, Paul Bradley, conductor of the freight, helped remove the mangled remains of his brother, George, from the wreckage.[5]  Much of the window frame had to be cut to extricate the body.  (A picture of the wreck can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/jf6y77u)

The Ukiah newspapers indicate that George was from Willits[6] and the Sausalito newspapers indicate he lived in Tiburon,[7] some 130 miles apart.  I remember my father who was about six years old at the time of George’s passing, recounting his vivid memories of the funeral.  It seems that George had a family at each end of his rail route.  There was the first wife, Maye, at the north end and a second wife, Juanita, at the south end of the line.  Dad recollected that Juanita was in the front pew of the church while George was laid out in front of the altar.  Maye made her way to the front of the church, saw her husband in the coffin, shrieked, and collapsed to the floor.  Dad said that eventually they went on with the funeral, but I don’t remember if both widows remained for the services.  Another cousin, a daughter of George with Juanita who was almost 7 years old when her father died, remembered the sound of Maye’s clicking heels  as she made her way way to the front of the church, and she recalled that Maye sat down in the front pew next to Juanita and proclaimed “I’m the real widow here.” 

I haven’t looked for a divorce record between George and Maye.   There are a number of counties where they might have been divorced, and about a ten-year span between the birth of Maye’s second child and Juanita’s first.  But it may be that there wasn’t ever a legal divorce.  George, Maye and Juanita are long-gone and most of their stories buried with them.


[1] Ukiah Republican Press, March 6, 1929, page 5
[2] Dispatch Democrat, March 2, 1929, page 1
[3] Ukiah Republican Press, March 6, 1929, page 1
[4] Ukiah Republican Press, March 6, 1929, page 5
[5] Dispatch Democrat, March 2, 1929, page 1
[6] ibid
[7] Sausalito News, March 1, 1929, page 1