Harold C. Bradley photographs, circa 1901

Harold Cornelius Bradley was born in 1878 in California, the grandson of medical missionary Dan Beach Bradley. He received his doctorate in Physiological Chemistry from Yale and was hired as a junior professor in the Biochemistry and Physiology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1906, where he stayed until his retirement in 1949. He went on from his junior professor status to found and chair the university’s Physiological Chemistry Department. He met and married his wife, Mary Josephine Crane (1908-1976), daughter of Chicago industrialist Charles Crane, at the University of Wisconsin, where she was an undergraduate. They had nine children.

Bradley took a great interest in student life on campus and sponsored programs that promoted “integrated education,” which entwined extracurricular life with academic pursuits. One of Bradley’s most significant contributions to student life grew from his love of skiing and the outdoors. In 1926, he founded the university’s recreation club, the Hoofers. Bradley was a founding member and director of the Sierra Club.