—-what stories you might discover when you knock on a stranger’s door.

One summer night in Columbia when I was a college student selling encyclopedias door-to-door—a job that convinced me I was not meant to be in sales—an old man named Brooks Bradley answered the door.

I sold no encyclopedias that night.  Instead, I spent my time in his living room listening to him tell me stories.

He told me he was the oldest printer in the state. He showed me his commission as a Kentucky Colonel.  (Many years later, I joined him in that, uh, distinguished group.)

I wound up talking to a man who used to run steamboats on the Osage River as far upstream as Warsaw; today there are two dams and two big reservoirs below Warsaw. Nobody can take any kind of a boat upstream on the Osage anymore, at least not past Bagnell Dam at the Lake of the Ozarks.

Bradley’s family was an old family in Columbia.  He told me of the day his grandfather almost murdered General Odon Guitar, one of the city’s most famous residents. Guitar had been a Union officer and the Bradley family was on the Confederate side.

He told me he dreamed of writing a book someday called, “Pre-eminent Sons of Bitches I Have Known.”   I read his obituary in the paper a few months later. I still have it. I don’t think he ever wrote the book and to this day I wish I had a recorder that night.

The other day I decided to see if he had left any writings of any kind behind.

I found a January, 1914 copy of the magazine Typographical Journal that listed “W. Brooks Bradley, age 29 years; at trade fourteen years; learned trade in Rockport, Mo; has also worked in Pleasant Hill, Harrisonville and Warrensburg, Mo.”  He was applying for membership in the Typographers Union.”

I don’t know if the house where I spent that memorable evening was at 810 Sandifer Street, but that’s where he and his wife, Mae, were living when the census taker came round in 1940 and found them living with their 20-year old daughter, Dorothea.

I have run across one other record that includes a Brooks Bradley story.  A monthly magazine, Confederate Veteran (published “in the interest of Confederate Veterans and Kindred Topics”), from October, 1923, has him asking for some help.

An inquiry comes from Brooks Bradley, of Fayette, Mo., for some information of a soldier buried in that community, Richard Benedict, of Virginia, who went into Missouri in 1864 to secure recruits and information, and while there was taken ill and died. Mr. Bradley is very interested in securing the record of this soldier, as he and a few friends wish to erect a monument at the grave, which is on the old Bradley farm.

The following is taken from a newspaper story of this long forgotten soldier:

“In a neglected grave on a farm some seven miles northwest of Columbia (Mo.) rest the remains of a Confederate soldier whose tragic death is still remembered by a few Boone County people. The name of this soldier was Benedict, a commissioned officer of the Confederate army, and his business in this part of the country was to secure recruits. The county at the time was overrun with Federal commands.

“While on this mission, Benedict was taken sick, and, to keep his whereabouts a secret, he was placed in a camp on what was then the William Wade farm. In the same camp was a wounded soldier, Andrew J. Caldwell, now a resident of Columbia, who had been shot in a sharp skirmish on what was known as the John Fenton Ridge.

“So completely was the county overrun by Federals that it was almost impossible to give Benedict’s body a decent burial. An attempt was made to secure a suit of gray for burial purposes, but this was impossible. During the night his body was removed to the residence of James Boyce and prepared for burial. James Bradley made the coffin, and the immediate neighbors gathered and conveyed the body to its final resting place. In passing through this old deserted graveyard to-day, a close observer will find a plain, flat rock upon which is inscribed the word ‘Benedict.'”

Mr. Bradley is a young man and the nephew of a Confederate soldier. He writes: “My grandfather raised the first Confederate regiment in Boone County, Mo. He was a sort of preacher and sent out a call to meet at the church. Going into the pulpit, instead of preaching a sermon, he read the ‘Ordinance of Secession.’ At the conclusion, they all sang the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The old church yet stands as a shrine of democracy, and he is buried there. The monument marking his grave reads: ‘Here lies buried a Hardshell Baptist and an Unreconstructed Rebel.'”

Oh, how I wish that old printer had been more of a writer.