Before Joe Bradshaw came to Alaska and fate dealt him a bad hand, he was a legitimate small town hero. When he died in Anchorage last month, his old hometown newspaper back in Pennsylvania headlined "Outstanding former Phantom passes."
"Joe Bradshaw, whom many consider Phoenixville's greatest all-around athlete ever, passed away on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011, at his home in Anchorage, Alaska," the Phoenixville News reported. "Bradshaw, a member of the Class of 1958 at Phoenixville, became the Phantoms' first 1,000-point career scorer in basketball."
And that was just a small part of the story of Bradshaw's younger years. By all accounts, he lived the high school life that everyone, or at least every young male, in America wants to live: Starting quarterback for three years on the local football team in a place where football in the fall matters almost as much as life itself; class vice president, captain of the track team, captain of the golf team, baseball standout and everybody's friend.
"Joe was one of the best-liked guys in our class," old friend Bob New Jr. told the News. "Everybody enjoyed being with him. He was a great friend. He was an all-around good guy more than anything else."
Joe would, by all accounts, remain an all-around good guy for the rest of his life. But that life would cease to be the storybook tale of his youth.
A golden youth, a tragic adulthood
Alaska is a land famous for the people who open second chapters on their lives and rise to glory. The late businessman and Gov. Wally Hickel might be the most famous of all. He was fond of reminding people how he arrived in 1940 with but 37 cents in his pocket, but went on to great financial and political success.
Many others, like Joe Bradshaw, pass through the state's history little noticed. Bradshaw's Alaska life went in many ways the opposite of that of his youth with the exception of the one, crowning achievement for which he labored tirelessly -- daughter Gwen. After she arrived, though, nothing would ever be the same for Joe.
A 6-foot-4 inch forward on the Phoenixville basketball team, he'd left his childhood home on a scholarship to Penn State in nearby State College, Penn. What happened there isn't clear, but Bradshaw gave up college for the Air Force after a year or two. It would appear he later came north with the military, as many do, and fell in love with the 49th state.
"Bradshaw," the News said, "operated a trophy business in Alaska and was the father of a daughter."
Seldom is so much tragedy hidden in so few simple words. The daughter, the love of Bradshaw's life, was to become the subject of Mary Katzke's award winning documentary "About Face: The Story of Gwendellin Bradshaw." The film details Gwen's search for her mentally ill mother and her half sister as she tries to put together a life with awful beginnings that left her forever scarred.
Gwen was only nine months old when her mother, Mary Clark, placed her small body in a burning campfire along the banks of Peters Creek in May 1980, and then waded into the water to try to drown herself. A firefighter picnicking nearby saved Mary. Joe saved Gwen. None of their lives would ever be the same, maybe most especially that of Joe, who soldiered on in that head-down, do-what-you-have-to-do, manly sort of way.
He did not complain. When legendary Anchorage Daily News court reporter Sheila Toomey wrote about Mary at Alaska Psychiatric Institute in 1983, Joe did not speak unkindly of her or by any indication mention the hell his life had become as he struggled to raise a badly burned daughter and pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. Joe has only a tiny role in Toomey's story.
He is identified as the man who was, for emotionally troubled Mary, "the beginning of a new kind of life." He confirms Mary's recollection that she seemed to have things under control up until a few months before she threw Gwen on the fire. And then Joe disappeared from a tale about Mary's predicament at having been caught in the neverland of being found not guilty by reason of insanity. Mary was, at the time, advocating to be sent to the women's prison at Eagle River. Three years after being sentenced to a maximum of 20 years at API for trying to kill Gwen, Mary's psychosis was -- if not cured -- at least under control.
Mental hospitals are a tough place to do time if you are sane. Mary had been doing well at API, where most of her life was tightly controlled but from which she was allowed passes to leave to visit friends and do other things until another API patient out on a pass killed four young campers in the Russian Jack Campground in 1982. API went on lockdown after Charles Meach committed four of the most horrific murders in Anchorage history. Mary was mentally healthy enough then to feel doomed by the change in policy. Toomey remembers Mary's plight as compelling. Toomey barely remembers Joe.
"Everyone involved is looking toward a better future," Toomey wrote at the time. "Gwen, now 4, was badly burned and spent three months in the hospital. She lost two fingers and her right ear. She needs more plastic surgery, but Joe says she's fine and happy although she is beginning to 'develop a sense of vanity about her scars.'"
Another Daily News reporter, Debra McKinney, picked up the narrative 26 years later in writing about Katzke's documentary.
"Gwen spent four years in and out of the burn unit at Providence hospital, her life filled with paralyzing pain and a perpetual parade of drugs," McKinney wrote. "Katzke lived next door to Gwen and her father back then, in a little house on 13th and A, with a goat and a lamb in her backyard. She was doing dishes one day when she heard a commotion and went to investigate. Kids were throwing rocks at this little 3-year-old girl. She ran them off. And that's her first memory of Gwen."
A very private man
Like Toomey, McKinney barely remembers Joe. She was shocked to learn about his storied life as a sports hero before Alaska, but then so was Katzke.
"Wow. I had no idea," she said in an e-mail from Vietnam "I'm not even sure Gwen knew. How did you come across this? I'm floored, just floored."
Katzke, in her association with the Bradshaw family, did, however, gain some insight into Joe's life in Alaska. She offered a revealing moment in an interview with the website ReelTalk.com:
QUESTION: Why does Gwen's father always rip up correspondence from her mother rather than screen the contents before giving it to his daughter or share the details he feels she could understand?
Katzke: He is likely ANGRY. He didn't ask to be abandoned with a handicapped child to raise on his own. He wasn't even married to her mom. The fact that he had to try to pay off hundreds of thousands of medical bills added to his frustration.
Joe, it would appear, internalized a lot. Landlords and acquaintances all describe him as friendly, but nobody seems to have gotten to know him well. "I talked to him a lot," said Spenard neighbor George Clark, "but not a lot of detail stuff. Joe was a pretty nice guy, but we never went into any detail."
Clark would have seemed someone with whom Joe could build a friendship. Like Joe, Clark was former military, and like Joe, he was a sports hero. Clark played hockey at West Point and is in the U.S. Army's Sports Hall of Fame. Though he graduated from the military academy in 1975, he remains the institution's all-time leading goal scorer and still ranks second in the NCAA record book for career-goals per game. Clark first came to Alaska to serve at Fort Richardson. He is now an artist who paints portraits of the state and of its people.
Most of his conversations with Joe centered around the work Joe was doing on his diesel truck. "I know that he tinkered with vehicles, and he repaired bicycles," added Joe's landlord of the past four or five years, Patricia Crofut. She described Joe as very, very private, a man who lived most of the time behind closed blinds. "It took him a long time to even talk to me," she said.
Crofut knew a little of the family history, and Clark knew none. He was surprised to learn of Joe's past struggle. Joe never said a word, though Clark had met Gwen. He knew her as Joe's daughter and "a nice lady." "Very pretty," Crofut added, and "she was really, really nice."
After Joe's death from cancer, Crofut said, Gwen came by to clean up her dad's apartment. "He was a very messy tenant," Crofut admitted, but by the time Gwen got done in his old place it was spotless.
Gwen did not respond to a request for an interview for this story left on her voicemail. And Joe's obituary in the Anchorage Daily News said only this: "Joseph Leonard Bradshaw, 71, died Jan. 18, 2011, at Providence Alaska Medical Center. No service is planned. Arrangements are with Legacy Funeral Home's Bragaw Chapel."
But on Gwen's Facebook page, there are two references to him. Both appear under the philosophy heading of "People Who Inspire Gwendellin." And both say, simply, "Dad."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.