By TOM KELLY
Editor and Publisher

John Bradley tells the story with the wit and gleam in his eye of a true Texas wildcatter. His thing is not drilling, but logging, in the piney woods of North East Texas, at the outer fringe of the pine timber belt that stretches across the Southern Gulf Coast from the Atlantic ocean to, well, just a few miles west of where he operates one of the sharpest independent logging outfits around.

As John told the story, sitting in the conference room of his made-over country house office building at the south edge of Jefferson, Texas, he was working for his father, the now retired but still active 82-year-old James Bradley, in 1971-72. Markets were "really bad," he said, and "we were pretty broke."

Equipment was what they could scrape together, and their "mechanization" was mainly a worn-out John Deere tractor with a bad radiator.

"We kept a five gallon bucket at every creek crossing, and we'd stop and pour water in it to keep it from burning up," John said, laughing heartily in retrospect.

"One day, I was out in the woods trying to get some logs out. I looked up, and here came a truck from Blackstone Equipment, carrying a brand-new skidder," John said.

Thunderstruck, John said, "Daddy, we can't afford that. You know we're plumb broke."

In a show of confident bravado, the elder Bradley said, "Shoot, son, we don't have to make a payment for thirty days!"

It's been that kind of a career, working from one tough job to another, through ups and downs - and now, he's king of the hill, running a sure-enough big operation, respected for innovative forest management and logging methods, keeping on top of market issues, political encroachment, and obviously having a whale of a good time with life. It's that kind of attitude, making light fun of the hard times, and seriously knowledgeable about the complex issues of his craft that makes you like John Bradley as if you'd known him all your life, from the first handshake.

John got an early taste of the logging life in the summer of 1956, when he was eight years old. He went with his father to Chama in northern New Mexico, where there were trees to cut in the mountains around the Carson National Forest, just spitting distance from the Colorado state line.

John's recollection is that it was punishing work, in the rugged mountains about due north of Santa Fe and Los Alamos, that in his Texas vernacular were "as steep as a mule's face."

"We all went broke," John said, and left in the middle of the night headed back to East Texas and flat country. But the misfortune did not break father James Bradley's spirit. "When we worked, we worked our rears off, and when it was done, we all played," John recalls. That attitude has continued.

As happens to every young boy, when John was asked somewhere around fourth grade, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" John didn't hesitate. A logger, he said. Surely not, his sisters said. Oh, yes, he said. A logger. And after school, including a business degree from East Texas Baptist College in Marshall, logging it was.

The East Texas forest industry went through a cycle similar to North Louisiana, with the coming of sawmills, which shut down by the 1940s, followed by farming and cattle raising. Trees have since grown up in many of the old abandoned fields, and most of the timber land in that area of Texas is owner by non-industrial private owners. That makes for a different approach to logging and forest management than in many areas further south, and in Northern Louisiana, where a larger portion of lands are owned and managed by the major companies.

The Bradleys were in front of the wave of mechanization in logging, with the first shear, and some of the first knuckleboom loaders.

"It's a miracle how we kept from getting killed," in adapting many of the machines coming out in the early days, John Bradley said, describing several near-misses. These are a far cry from the modern machines his crews use now, equipment that has been engineered to handle the production needs of modern logging and product manufacturing, safely and comfortably.

Early in his career, John began buying timber and land that became for sale, and plants superior seedlings on about 1,000 acres of his own now. Additionally, he contracts with private forest land owners to log and manage their timber lands according to their needs.

In the forest industry, "Change is the only constant," he says. The mills where trees are sold buy and manufacture according to market demands of the moment, and unless the logger is prepared to turn on a dime, and deliver the product that is wanted, he will lose money.

Accordingly, Bradley operates a system of total communications between his logging, trucking, and business office operations. The office maintains contact with mills, trucks, and logging crews, via a network of telephone, cell phones, fax, internet, and mobile radios. If the office receives word that the mill in Texarkana is not taking material of a certain type, "and you've got five trucks on the road headed to that mill, you've got to turn them around immediately, or you lose," John said.

Equipment operators in the woods can be notified immediately to modify the cut, and switch to the length or dimension the mill is buying.

"We make up to five separations of pine and four of hardwood logs in the woods," John said, and the outbound trucks are loaded to meet up-to-the-moment demands.

Bradley Contracting, Inc., prepares for planting while cutting, using the shear to "mow" the site of brush and ready it for mechanical replanting.

John and his wife Myrna have a son, Adam, who is a senior forestry student at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. Myrna's mother, Mrs. Marjorie Meadows, works in the office operation, and their son-in-law, Michael Olivas, runs the computerized business systems which are integral to the firm's total communication and cost accounting needs.

John is a past president of the Texas Logging Council, on the executive board of Texas Forestry Association, belongs to the Texas Landowners Council, heads the Marion County chapter of the Texas Farm Bureau, and works with the Cypress Valley Alliance, an education organization clearing house for education and environmental activities.