Platt – A Tribute to Mel Bradford
UNCLE MEL
A Tribute to Mel Bradford
by Michael Platt
March 2, 1993
I met Mel Bradford when I came to the University of Dallas in 1978. I do not
believe he favored my coming. In an interview, the strangest I have ever
witnessed, let alone experienced, he and a close colleague asked me whether I
thought an officer could ever have a friendship with an enlisted man. In
answering I compared the errors of Conrad’s young captain in the "Secret
Sharer" whose instantaneous friendship with Leggatt risks his ship and his
command with Shakespeare’s Henry V who, because he wants to ready his men
for battle, can only cloakedly enjoy the friendship of one of them who, he
discovers, is his equal in mind and in heart (Williams). To this day, I do not
know what the real subject of Mel’s question was. And now it is buried forever.
In our early relations, I saw him most often at the mail. Mel loved mail. He used
to go over to the mail room to wait for it, get it, and bring it back. Sometimes
hours would go by between his departure and when the mail finally traversed the
200 yards to the department. What did he do with it? Was there a little room he
took it to? Were there detectors or sniffing dogs there? Who knows? A little
before noon, he would sail in exclaiming some such as "Oh, Michael, you got a
good pile today." (Wondering about those two hours, a colleague once
considered asking him, "Is it true you can steam open a letter with your
breath?")
So I can easily believe the stories about his classes, that arriving late he would
spend several minutes opening his mail, reading it, to himself, and some of it to
students, and then, during the period when he was being considered for head of
NEH, leaving class early in a bustle, with a hearty "High Ho, I’m expecting a call
from Washington." I wish the mail he read to the students had been from
Homer and the calls he expected from Dante, but I have since come to
appreciate how instructive it could be to hear him hold forth on the many fine
things he knew so affectionately. Indeed, the other day, one of my best students
told me how Mel recognized one excellent freshman, despite her quietness, and
treated her accordingly. I am very glad I got to pass on this esteem to Mel
before he died, together with my concurrence. (The founder of the University
was right when she said about judging the teaching of others, ‘Trust the opinion
of your own best students more than your own.’)
Knowing his love of mail, and noticing ads in the back of Field and Stream, I
once thought about signing him up for a service offered there, which guarantees
to stuff your mailbox, should you be a trapper in Alaska or a weatherman in
Tierra del Fuego. The thought of Mel receiving piles of worm catalogues, fish
lure offers, brochures for guns, hooks, rafts, and waders, a pile so high that he
would have to sift for his real mail, was delicious. However, one day standing
beside him at the mail, I noticed he had a copy of MS Magazine. Obviously
someone else had beat me to the joke. Somebody had signed him up for a
magazine he could not take pleasure in, unless vexation be a kind of pleasure.
But Mel couldn’t take pleasure in vexation. And he didn’t take pleasure in having
his dire insights confirmed. He was not a dyspeptic conservative. He was not
afraid of the evil he saw. I settled, in imagination, for the idea of presenting him
with a little red mail wagon. Too bad, I left the University of Dallas before I
could pull that off. Now too bad he has left life, before, at his retirement, I
might still have done it.
After leaving, I got to know him better. Some men with evident flaws can be
more likeable, and are like to be more loyal, than others with virtues they make
very evident. To me Mel waxed avuncular. No man more, I think, played the
uncle to all those he met. If Mel had met Methuselah, it wouldn’t have been long
before Methuselah was playing nephew and nodding "Yes, Uncle," and Mel –
Mel would just be playing … Uncle Mel. Mel always seemed to be approaching
70. Probably he had been approaching it since he was 21.
In any case I benefited from Uncle Mel. It was he who told me that the new
regime at the University had come to him asking, "If we get rid of him, who
would mind?" Preemptive damage assessment, I guess it was. He answered,
"For a starter, the students." Mel himself looked to the future. Knowing I was
(then) single and maybe going up to Washington, he said he would see I was
introduced to some eligible ladies. Over lunch, he discussed a few, and then
cocking a twinkle said, "Yes, Michael, Marie pays me the compliment of still
thinking me dangerous. And I love her for it." I dare say he did. He was a loving
man. And a lovable one. I remember one time I was waiting for the elevator.
The door opened. There was Mel Thumping his long thighs, he said to me,
"Michael, I got Indian blood." And the door shut. Gone in a silent flash was the
mixed blood man from Oklahoma.
Mel knew he was dramatic, that he had a profile, and that he could be spotted a
mile away. One day when I was wearing a cowboy hat, I noticed him noticing it
and said, "Yes, ever since I noticed you and Father Cain, I’ve thought that big
hats go with big souls." He liked that. And so did I.
Mel got big, he explained to me one day, through cheese. He loved cheese, he
knew he shouldn’t have so much of it, but he loved it, and so of it he did eat.
One day as he was happily and deftly extricating letters from envelopes and
separating their contents into piles, Mel waved a check in the air and trumpeted,
"Oh, Michael, its those little royalty checks that are so nice." "Do they go
straight into the cheese fund," I quipped. He smiled. I had understood him
perfectly, which he liked.
Sometimes he could be a little too big. I remember one conference on Faulkner
at which Mel behaved as if everything had to pass his way before it reached
anyone else, like a pickup basketball game in which no point counts unless its
brought out beyond a line. Thoroughly frustrated with that, after one session, I
got in my car to take a drive., but there was Mel beaming at me: Would I be so
kind as to take him on a little tour of where he had started teaching? (We were in
Annapolis.) Would I be his chauffeur? Yes, of course, I would. As we
approached the little apartments where he and Marie had lived, the mystic cords
of memory unwound (he would flash at that allusion, I know). "There, there it
is. See that little hill. Douglas used to roll down it." He smiled. And then, he
purred, "Michael, Marie and I started out here. We were a thousand miles from
her parents, and a thousand miles from mine. Michael, that is the right distance
to start out a marriage in."
Obviously he loved his wife. I remember one time stopping by his house. I
knocked on the door. "Come in" I heard. I came in, and there he was. In a
corner of the living room, perched on a stationary unicycle, there was Uncle Mel
peddling away. I believe he had his cowboy hat on, but the mystic magnification
of memory may have added it. Let it stay. However magnified Mel was in life,
he was such as to bring on more later. Anyway, he knew he was a sight. Did he
know I was seeing Babar riding a unicycle in a circus? Probably he did! So
cocking me one of his whitesoftheeye glances, he said, "Michael, Marie tells
me that she does not wish to be a young widow, and I wish to please her."
Today’s world is filled with Olympic dreamers, health faddists, to say nothing
of nutritional bores, and health police. I believe there are very few of us who
exercise for a better reason than Mel Bradford did. Not for himself, for his
looks, for his health, or for his life, except as these might be dear to someone
dear to him.
That’s a good reason to exercise, because it is a good reason to live, and live he
did, so that we who knew him are the better for it. The man who can leave such
good stories behind, stories to enjoy about him, and stories of his own
enjoyment of good things, has done something good. I, for one, am very
grateful to him.
Michael Platt, Friends of the Republic