By Carmen Cuthbertson, Board Member, ImagineIF Libraries of Flathead County
Jim Bradshaw’s love of books began in the tiny public library of Old Hickory, Tennessee, a company town for the Dupont plant where Jim’s father worked all his life.
“My grandmother said that my dad, as a child, always had a book in his hands. He was always reading,” Jim’s daughter, Julie Sherrick, said in a recent interview at ImagineIF Library in Kalispell.
Motivated by the GI bill’s promise of a college education, 17-year-old Jim enlisted in the Army and spent two years in Korea. After his discharge, he enrolled at Tennessee Tech and became the first person in his family to graduate from college.
History, Foreign Affairs, and Government turned out to be his passions. Upon graduation, and by then a married man, Jim went on to get a Master’s degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He entered the foreign service, and the young family traveled all over the world.
“Whenever we would come back to the US we’d stay with my grandparents in Old Hickory,” Julie reminisces, “and we would always go back and visit his childhood library and the librarian, Mrs. Latimore. Even I remember her name, because she was a very important person in my dad’s life. He must have spent a lot of time, afternoons after school, just hanging out in the library.”
Jim’s work involved setting up American libraries in places as far-flung as Rangoon and Mandalay, Belgrade, Hong Kong, Warsaw and Athens, which he stocked with quality reading materials on everything from science to art and music. Over time, Jim accumulated a personal library, as well.
“He had several thousand books that he carted around from foreign post to foreign post,” Julie recalls. “My mother, who was a very good housekeeper, complained about having to dust the books. At least twice a year she would dust all the books, and it would take a very long time.”
After numerous foreign postings interspersed with teaching stints at the US Army War College and Tufts University, Jim retired from the foreign service, and he and his wife moved back to their native Tennessee.
As her parents advanced in age, Julie begged them to move closer to family, but her dad at first refused. “He moved to Kalispell only because my mother insisted that they were getting too old to be in the big house by themselves. He was 80 when they moved here, and immediately, of course, checked out the library. He was amazed beyond belief at this library. They had this huge interlibrary loan connection with university libraries, public libraries all over the country. I think the library really eased the transition for him.”
A year after moving to Kalispell, Jim suffered a heart attack. Thanks to excellent care at Kalispell Regional, he recovered. “The fact that he walked back and forth to the library after his heart attack was a huge thing,” Julie says. “It really did keep him fit. He would get up, have breakfast, and go off to the library with this big tote bag from LLBean, their biggest one, with really sturdy canvas handles, and he would carry that back and forth to the library every day.”
After a fall in 2019 Jim needed a hip replacement, and both he and his wife got COVID-19. They could no longer stay in their home on Woodland Avenue, and it fell to Julie to get the house ready to sell: “Dad had a basement full of books, thousands of books, that I had to deal with. He was lying in his hospital bed with COVID-19, having had hip surgery, and I said, Dad, we’ve got to kind of thin out your books, you don’t have a lot of space here. He said, well, ok, I want this book and here is where it is. He probably gave me the titles of four or five hundred books. He knew exactly where they were in his book room.”
After their rehab, Julie found apartments for her parents at Buffalo Hill Terrace, where she daily supplied her dad with reading material. “He would have a list of books ready, and I would go pick them up. I wasn’t allowed to go into Buffalo Hill at that time, so I had to leave them on the table in the entrance, and he would pick them up. It was a very isolating time, and it was great to have the library books there for him every day to look forward to.”
In March 2022, Julie’s mom passed away, and her dad followed on June first of this year. He told his daughter that he wanted to leave money to the library, and also agreed that people should make contributions in his memory.
Julie recalls her dad’s instructions about his personal library: “The week before he died – he knew he was dying – he was at the hospital and he said, I want you to call Tony [at the library] when I’m gone and get him to come over. Dad cared what was going to happen to the books. They were his friends. They were like people to him.”
“[Kalispell librarians] Susan and Tony came and packed up every single one of his books, and also his maps. These were his most precious possessions, and I was so grateful that they were willing to treat these items with such respect. They had meant so much to my dad.”
Jim Bradshaw’s rich life of reading, traveling, working, and teaching began in a small public library in Tennessee, and ended among daily supplies of books from ImagineIF in Kalispell.
Kalispell’s ImagineIF branch is grateful to Jim for his faithful patronage and donation to the library, to his daughter Julie for sharing his story, and to all those who made donations in Jim’s name. MSN
