Energy fuelled founder of warplane museum
Dennis Bradley, one of four founders of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, guided it to new heights
DENNIS JAMES BRADLEY LIVED large and flew high, piloting restored fighter planes, racing boats, raising five kids with his wife Joanne, and founding and building the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope.
He ran on a different kind of fuel, one of his sons said — high-octane.
Only father time succeeded in grounding Bradley, who died Saturday, in his 81st year, after a brief illness, with Joanne at his side.
“He was the prime founder of the museum, the driving force,” said warplane heritage CEO Dave Rohrer. “We wouldn’t be here today, wouldn’t be the largest museum of aviation in Canada, or have one of two Lancaster bombers flying in the world, without his vision and commitment and his ability to get it done.”
Bradley lived in Burlington but was born in Winnipeg, and raised in Toronto, and played football for the Mustangs at Western University; a six-foot-six defensive tackle who was drafted by the Hamilton Ticats.
What he really wanted to do was fly for the Royal Canadian Air Force, but was not allowed because of the RCAF’s
six-foot height restriction (the ejector seat won’t operate properly if the pilot’s knees can’t clear the dashboard.)
Instead he worked for the family meat processing business, eventually running it.
And he flew, earning his pilot’s licence at 24, and piloting myriad aircraft. At the same time, along with friends Alan Ness, Peter Matthews, and John Weir, he yearned to buy and restore a vintage warplane. That first plane was a Fairey Firefly, a Second World War fighter, which still appears on the warplane heritage museum’s logo.
In 1972 the four men moved the Firefly into a hangar at Hamilton’s airport and began purchasing and restoring others; a de Havilland Canada Chipmunk; Supermarine Seafire; Corsair; Tiger Moth. It was a hobby, but the operation ultimately grew into a museum beyond anything Bradley had imagined.
A fire in 1993 destroyed the original building and in its place grew a 110,000-square-foot facility that today hosts a variety of community events in addition to displaying nearly 50 aircraft, including the Lancaster bomber that Bradley was instrumental in having delivered from a Canadian Legion in Goderich, Ont. in 1979. Over the next nine years the Lancaster was restored and once again took flight; Bradley even once manned the controls.
He sold the family meat business, started the Steak Shop chain, sold that, and retired at 48 to focus on directing the museum for 20 years, where he became a father figure to those who volunteered and worked there.
“He was a large man and had quite a presence, physically and also his personality,” said Rohrer.
“You knew when he was in the room. And I always wanted to know what he was thinking.”
With Bradley’s death, all four of the original museum founders are now gone.
A celebration of life service will be held Sept. 9 at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, and his family will hold a private internment of his ashes in the fall, up near the family cottage on the Lake of Bays in Muskoka.
The cottage was his happiest spot, the place where he would fly around the lake in his Cessna 180 like most people would tool around in a motorboat. Bradley’s ashes will be stored at a little church on the lake called Seabreeze United.
When it came to water, as with planes, he did not go slow, racing high-performance boats in a career spanning 15 years, on a circuit that took him to venues from the Great Lakes to Key West, Fla., and winning an American Power Boat Association championship in 1993. Two of his close friends were killed by the high-velocity passion they shared. U.S. industrialist John Sandberg died when Sandberg’s Tsunami race aircraft crashed in 1991. And in 1977, Bradley’s fellow warplane heritage museum founder Alan Ness was killed when the Firefly he was piloting crashed into Lake Ontario during an air show at Toronto’s CNE.
But Bradley’s love of flight never waned, said James, one of his children. “I think it was the freedom ... no boundaries, seeing the world from a thousand or two thousand feet in the air.”
Six years ago he went up with his dad in a Firefly on the 40th anniversary of Bradley’s first aircraft acquisition and restoration.
The event appeared on the front page of The Hamilton Spectator, but to Bradley it was in some ways just another flight, with many more to come.
The last time was up at the cottage last Thanksgiving, when he piloted his Cessna 180 solo to Orillia for winter storage. That day, after his preflight inspection at the dock, he taxied, warmed the engine, and aimed down the lake.
Dennis J. Bradley gathered speed and was airborne, climbing, higher and higher, banking left, soaring over the quilt of fall colours below, before he headed south and the voyage ended, as always, too soon.
You knew when he was in the room. And I always wanted to know what he was thinking. DAVE ROHRER
CEO of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum