Skipper of Wakefield hoped to be farmer
But left agricultural college to enter Coast Guard Academy, wife reveals
Cdr. Harold Gardner Bradbury, skipper of the 24,289-ton Navy transport Wakefield, formerly the $10,000,000 luxury liner Manhattan, had early aspirations of becoming an agriculturist, his wife said today at their Brooklyn home, 169 Columbia Heights.
Cdr. Bradbury, born in Maine, attended Oregon Agricultural College, Corvallis, Oregon, for a year before heeding the call of his country, he switched to the United States Coast Guard Academy at New London. He graduated from the academy in 1918 and has been an officer of the Coast Guard ever since.
Returned to Academy
In 1927, he commanded the destroyer Tripp and in 1932, the destroyer Davis. He returned to the Coast Guard Academy in 1933, teaching navigation there for the following four years. Then he commanded a ship off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and went to St. Louis, where as the Chief of Staff to the Coast Guard District Commandant, he helped coordinate the lighthouse service with the Coast Guard.
Returning to sea, he commanded the Coast Guard cutter Shoshone and making trips to the Aleutians, was in charge of the Bering Sea Patrol in the first half of the summer of 1940. He decommissioned the Shoshone at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, from which the vessel went to Great Britain under the terms of the Lend-Lease agreement. Then he went into the transport service for the Navy, and commanded one other big vessel before the Wakefield.