University of Virginia Library

Fred Bradley

Englishman Discovers America

Profile

By RICHARD JONES

A thirty-eight year old Englishman has
spent the last eight months trying to find
America.

Leaving his therapeutic work in
London, a financially-secure Oxford
graduate named Fred Bradley has
introduced himself to an extroverted
style of life in America through

hitch-hiking. He flew to New York in
March of this year to visit an American couple
who stayed at his house in London.

Later that spring, Mr. Bradley departed for
San Francisco, where in a Greyhound Bus
station his lone suitcase was stolen. Not
discouraged, he began hitchhiking to Oregon.
"This was the first time in my life I had
exposed myself to adventure," he said.

Eating and sleeping in communes with
friends he met, Mr. Bradley was given addresses
and numbers of people he could stay with along
his journey. "Wherever I went I was given fresh
addresses," said Mr. Bradley. Continuing to
Mexico, he lived there for a month even though
the climate was too hot and humid. He said he
felt "that he was land bound."

Once again in the United States, Mr. Bradley
hiked through the South. "I liked the South,"
he said, "and the countryside very much; it
reminded me of my country. The South
contrasts greatly to the grandeur of the
mountains and fields of Colorado."

The people of the South he said "had a
greater security and belonging than in other
parts of the country where they were searching
for themselves. If was the feeling the Southern
people had for their history. It had not been
obliterated by industrialization."

Mr. Bradley avoided large cities except for
New Orleans, which he admired. "I liked the
architecture in the French quarter along
Bourbon Street."

After passing through Mississippi and
Alabama, he became involved with psychology
at West Georgia College in Carrolton. Mr.
Bradley said that the experiments there were
not dry, but involved the problems of men, and
he gave a lecture there to about fifty
post-graduate students.

Admitting that he found a lot of
conservatism and especially racism in the South
Mr. Bradley concluded, "it was a depressing
state of two races carrying on separately. Blacks
and white would sit at different tables. It was
like they had a well-mannered tolerance of each
other." He added that England had the same
problem of people integrating with the various
nationalities and races which have migrated to
England.

Mr. Bradley compared hitchhiking to
fishing. "It's watching the drivers with yours
eyes and seeing if you can arouse some
conscience in them to make them stop."

He noted that "a large number of straight
middle-aged people who want to help the youth
movement or would have been hip if they were
young gave me rides. "There were a lot of
misfits," Mr. Bradley added, "they are the
drinkers, not the smokers. I had to fend them
off a bit."

"An Englishman would benefit from being
here," Mr. Bradley said. "There are the youths
who like English rock groups and the older
people who consider England as a source of
their history."

As an example, he pointed out a time when
he was hitchhiking with a cardboard sign of a
Union Jack. He said that "a Rolls Royce passed
me and then turned back around. It stopped, a
door opened and then a man said 'I couldn't
leave an Englishman standing there!"

Mr. Bradley added that "he liked the
openness of the young society, the generosity,
the willingness to share, and a sense of
belonging to a common humanity. "They were
willing to accept a middle-aged foreigner," he
added. Viewing this generation, Mr. Bradley
commented that they "are committed to
destroying the barriers of humanity and finding
a common bond."