{"id":1344,"date":"2025-07-03T21:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T04:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=1344"},"modified":"2025-10-02T10:32:41","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T17:32:41","slug":"r-w-bradford-in-memoriam","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/r-w-bradford-in-memoriam\/","title":{"rendered":"R.W. Bradford, in Memoriam (2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>R.W. Bradford was the founder, owner and editor of <\/span>Liberty<\/span>, a libertarian and classical liberal magazine that existed from 1987 to 2010. I wrote this for the issue of December 2008, one year after he died.<\/span><\/em><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 I last saw Bill Bradford on December 7, 2005, the night before he died. I had not seen him since May, when he had come to Seattle for treatment of a cancer he thought was not terminal. By late July I could tell from his description over the telephone that it probably was. I didn\u2019t say so and neither did he, though he talked about the future of the magazine if he didn\u2019t make it. We talked several times more over the phone, but I didn\u2019t think it was urgent to take the half-day needed to go to Port Town\u00adsend. Then suddenly, it was.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 The Bill I visited on December 7 had aged 30 years in so many weeks. The cancer had got him. He was slumped in an easy chair, his neck no longer willing to hold up his head. He spoke only occasionally, as if he were at the bottom of a mineshaft. I sat next to him and talked. By and by I asked if he was following me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u201cYes,\u201d<\/i> he whispered. \u201cKeep talking\u2026. Fascinating.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0He had used that word on the phone a month before. Fascinating<\/i>. Bill had lost the energy to do much more than listen, but the world still fascinated him. It could even annoy him. At one point, someone was talking about the sluggish service in the local restaurants, and Bill broke in with an ominous whisper,\u00a0\u201cPort Townsend\u2026 Get used to it.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Pretty soon my conversational bucket emptied out, Bill\u2019s sister Barbara took over, and Ross Overbeek and I went for some Thai food. We returned with boxes of Padang beef and chicken krapao, and all present tucked into the victuals except Bill. I began thinking of the man \u2014 not the ghost sitting across from me, but the Bill I remembered.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In February 2003, I had gone to see him. It is a two-hour trip from Seattle, crossing Puget Sound by ferry, and Hood Canal, which is not a canal, by pontoon bridge. I arrived at Port Townsend, the home of Bill and Kathy and Liberty<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bill and Kathy had been born in the Midwest. They had moved to the Evergreen State in the \u201980s, partly because it had no income tax. They had chosen Port Townsend, and antique town that was home to a pulp mill, a ferry to Whidbey Island and shops for the tourists. It is the sort of town that holds writers\u2019 workshops and votes Democrat.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In the late 19<\/span>th<\/span><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>century, Port Townsend had been a customs stop for sailing ships. Promoters had envisioned a city, but they had put it on the wrong side of Puget Sound for rail connections to the East, and after the Panic of 1893, its exciting future had gone extinct. In the 1980s, Bill and Kathy bought a red brick office building that had been held by Jefferson County for 70 years for non-payment of taxes.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 The building\u2019s door was unmarked. Up a wooden stairway was a second unmarked door, behind which was\u00a0Liberty<\/i>. Bill was not community-minded and did not want to be bothered by boosters. He did not like the local government. He told me of a run-in with the town\u2019s historical commission, which had authority over his historic building. Bill wanted to build a shed on the roof, and the commission did not want him to build a shed on the roof. Well, God rest his soul, Bill did not like public servants.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0That night, I had stayed up with him until 1 a.m., talking about the bureaucrats, libertarian foundations, Republicans, fund-raising letters, some of the stars in the\u00a0<\/span>Liberty<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>constellation \u2014 Victor Niederhoffer, Richard Kostelanetz, and so on. Besides running\u00a0Liberty<\/i>, Bill was in the coin and banknote business, and he was delighted when I said I had bid on eBay for national bank notes. Bill had a couple of shoeboxes of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0On the second floor of\u00a0<\/span>Liberty\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>offices was a bedroom where I snored while Bill edited copy on the floor below until 6 a.m. He worked at night, he said, because nobody called him on the telephone. He loved good talk \u2014 ideas, arguments, political gossip. He had to seclude himself in order to get his work done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On Sunday morning I awoke alone. After going out for coffee, I poked around among the high shelves of unfashionable books. Bill had bought the library of Isabel Paterson and hundreds of other volumes. His practice regarding books was the opposite of mine, which is to have one set of bookshelves and to admit a new volume only after displacing an old one. He kept them all. He had everything from Ludwig von Mises and H.L. Mencken to Faustino Ballve \u2014 books I knew by reputation and books I had not seen in 20 years. I could have spent the whole morning peeking into his books, but the sunlight slanting through the high windows told me it was time to work.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The previous evening, I had edited the copy of a certain libertarian to the point of dismemberment. The writer was responding to another libertarian, and with more fulmination than common sense. The copy was rough, and several times I stopped and wondered if Bill had really meant it when he\u2019d told me to do whatever it needed to make it readable. I decided he meant it, and mumbled my apologies to the writer\u2019s ghost.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 Bill tromped up the steps around noon and, thankfully, he was not interested in working. He wanted to show me his wilderness land, so we climbed into his truck and fled the antique stores and world savers of Port Townsend toward the logging country of the Olympic Mountains.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Bill turned onto a dirt road off U.S. 101, through a locked gate and past some hermits\u2019 cabins posted No Trespassing. I\u2019m a city guy, and I envisioned some survivalist popping up with a shotgun and demanding to know who the hell we were. Bill didn\u2019t worry about it. From the crest of a hill, we looked down on a wild river that tumbled out of Olympic National Park and a rolling expanse of trees. \u201cThat\u2019s my property over there,\u201d he said. All green.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 We had to get to it another way, lurching down a slope toward the river. On his property nowhere could we see the whole of it. A previous owner had built a cabin but all that was left was a derelict bathtub and a tangle of rusted steel. Around it were rain-loving maples and western red cedar, not too thick because the soil was rocky, but thick enough to filter the sun. Toward the river were patches of boulders, and you could see where the river had overrun its banks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bill\u2019s property looked lush from a distance, but up close it was rough, its only natural bounty being the salmonberry, edible but not tasty. The place would be gloomy when it rained, which would be often. It was secluded, though; you might see an eagle there, or a bear. It was just the sort of place where you could step off your front porch and pop off a few rounds, which you could not do in Port Townsend.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 Bill told me Kathy was not sold on the idea of moving to their forest property. I could imagine why, starting with living in the wooded gloom. And moving his books. Anyway, there was the magazine. In the woods, he would have freedom but be too far from\u00a0Liberty<\/i>. Living there was a romantic idea, and not practical.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 I had once had breakfast with a former employee of Bill\u2019s who said he was a fine writer and editor but not disciplined with his time. \u201cBill bites off more than he can chew,\u201d the man had said. \u201cIt\u2019s an old habit.\u201d The magazine was often late, the web page was several years out of date and a promotional mailing was long overdue. Bill was always busy, but not always busy on the right things. He was a business owner \u2014 one could not imagine R.W. Bradford as an employee \u2014 but just as clearly, he needed to be managed. I imagined Kathy did a fair share of it, but I could see that Bill was not altogether manageable. Well, he was a libertarian.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 He was 55 years old that weekend I spent with him. He told me he had diabetes and said his doctor had told him to lose 20 pounds. He said he\u2019d been good about his diet, and said he knew a great place for a burger and curly fries. We went there. He was having a good time and I was, too, though I had offered to spend the day editing, and I wasn\u2019t. Bill needed an excuse to get out of the office; he looked ragged, with more gray in his hair than at the last\u00a0Liberty<\/i>\u00a0conference. He said he wondered how many years he would be able to keep going at the magazine, and that Kathy worried about his health. She was right about that, more than we knew.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Before he died, Bill told Kathy to scatter his ashes on their river property. She told me recently that she had not done it because the state wants the land for a park. Bill would not have wanted his ashes on government property.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I first dealt with Bill a third of a century ago, entirely over the phone, during the silver boom of the 1970s. He was in Michigan then, in the coin business. In my journal of January 16, 1974, I wrote, \u201cI bought the bag of Canadian silver at the equivalent of $3.34 an ounce.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bill shipped me a bag of 10,000 dimes. It was not so big, but remarkably heavy. I dumped it all out on a Persian rug with a ka-WHOOSH, and started counting it. My hands turned gray with silver. After a while I compared my neat stacks of dimes with the uncounted heap, scooped it all into the bag and buried it under the house. Four months later, I dug it up and sold it back to Bill. In 1987, when I contacted him in Port Townsend about his new magazine, I told him I had been one of his coin customers. \u201cDid you make money?\u201d I told him I had made $850. \u201cGood,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bill launched Liberty<\/i> at a time when I was not much interested in libertarianism, and he managed to rekindle an affection for it. I have always liked to write arguments; for most of the 1980s I had written a business column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer<\/i>. By the early 1990s I was working at\u00a0Asiaweek<\/i>, a Hong Kong magazine for which my writing was non-argumentative and my identity invisible. I chafed under that. I was forbidden to write freelance, so I wrote for\u00a0Liberty<\/i>\u00a0under a pseudonym, R.K. Lamb, with the first article, about Hong Kong, appearing in March 1990. There followed another in 1992, and I have been in the magazine every year since. After 1993, when I came home, my articles were under my real name.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 Sometimes my friends would say, \u201cWhy are you writing for Liberty<\/i>? You could do better.\u201d Well, I liked\u00a0Liberty<\/i>. And the biggest reason was that I liked Bill. I liked his mind. He was more radical in his beliefs than I was, but he was not a hedgehog about them. He once said, \u201cYou know,\u00a0Liberty<\/i>\u00a0is a radical magazine,\u201d and I thought, yes, I suppose it is, but there was always something provisional and experimental that made Bill\u2019s radicalism down-to-earth. He tolerated my pragmatic streak. Once he even let me write an article defending fiat money, a stand he thought was terrible.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0Bill was also a businessman. Most libertarians are pro-business but not worth a damn doing<\/i>\u00a0business. Bill had a mind for it. He was not interested enough to establish a big, efficient enterprise, but with Kathy\u2019s help he did establish\u00a0Liberty<\/i>\u00a0as a going concern, keep it alive for nearly 20 years and make arrangements to keep it going after he died. He didn\u2019t float it on corporate donations, either. He was appalled at how much certain libertarian enterprises spent, and was proud that he had accomplished so much with so little.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I left Bill for the last time on December 7, 2005, telling him that he was a fine man and an important influence on my life. He nodded and waved his hand. I drove back to Seattle in the dark.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Bill was an admirer and defender of Mencken, a man who once said he judged people by whether they kept their commitments. Bill kept his commitments to me, and all the others I knew of. He paid his way in the world, including the medical expenses of his terminal cancer, which he bore without insurance. He created the libertarian movement\u2019s principal inreach magazine, and kept it lively, a bit eccentric and out of the clutches of any faction. He did not demonize his opponents. He had a vision of a world different from this one, but he found this one fascinating to the end. I liked Bill, and I miss him.<\/span><\/p>

.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0Before he died, Bill offered me the editorship of Liberty. He said he had enough money to pay me the equivalent of my Seattle Times salary for the next five years. As a young man, I would have done it. But I wanted to keep earning a salary for more than five years; I was supporting a wife and teenage son, who would soon be of university age. I liked my post at the Seattle Times, which gave me an editorial-page column every two weeks to speak to 225,000 general-interest readers, not just libertarians. It was better to write occasionally for Liberty at zero pay.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0The printed magazine died in 2010, five years after its founder did. It continued as a web page until the death of its editor, Steve Cox, in 2024.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9\ufe0f 2025 Bruce Ramsey<\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0R.W. Bradford was the founder, owner and editor of Liberty, a libertarian and classical liberal magazine that existed from 1987 to 2010. I wrote this for the issue of December 2008, one year after he died. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I last saw Bill Bradford on December 7, 2005, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1344","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1659,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1344\/revisions\/1659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}