‘My calling’
Internationally known UCA business professor retires
Don B. Bradley III of Conway has traveled the world for his job, and he owes it all to the first business class he took in college. “Introduction to business kind of changed my life,” he said.
The almost 71-year-old Bradley retired from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in December after 33 1/2 years as a professor of business and marketing. He was also executive director of the Small Business Advancement National Center.
His father owned a photography studio in Indiana, and Bradley started selling pictures when he was 14, he said. That also fueled his interest in small businesses.
Although he is known internationally for his business acumen, Bradley was a standout on his Fort Wayne, Indiana, high school’s state championship track team and started his career as a coach.
“I think some of his records are still standing,” his wife, Jan, said as the couple sat in the living room of their home with the glow of Christmas lights all around.
They went to separate high schools in Indiana, but the couple met at a Methodist church and started dating. When they went to separate colleges — he was at Bowling Green State University in Ohio on a track scholarship, and she was at International College in Fort Wayne, Indiana — “I wrote her every day,” he said. They married when he was 21; she was 19.
They will have been married 50 years on June 4, and as a surprise, they plan to take their grandchildren and three grown children to Disney World in July.
It was his family’s future that Bradley said he was thinking about when he changed from coaching to teaching business.
He had a double major in health and physical education and business, and he started as a football and track coach in an Indiana high school.
Bradley volunteered at Vincennes University in Indiana as a coach and taught business and marketing. While he was there, he was working on his master’s degree in business at Indiana State University in Terre Haute and completed the degree in 1971.
At Vincennes, he was successful with
the Distributive Education Clubs of America — which is now marketing education, he said — and three students were national officers in one year and multiple students were national champions in the competitions.
“That kind of launched my career in the business end,” he said. “I’ve always been a very practical teacher. I think part of the reason we did so well, I really zeroed in on the fundamentals of business.”
He wasn’t much older than his students, and some, just back from Vietnam, were older than him. Bradley went to Longview Community College in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, as a track and cross-country coach. Then Bradley was offered a fellowship to teach at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and he and his wife packed up their three kids and moved.
“I taught there while I was finishing my Ph.D,” he said.
He was then hired as a business teacher at Western Kentucky University.
“They asked me if I would help with track and cross country,” he said. He agreed to after he finished his dissertation. That was the end of his coaching career, not counting the years he spent as a volunteer men’s and women’s softball coach at First United Methodist Church in Conway.
“In coaching, you were always on the road, especially at Western Kentucky,” he said. “It was very, very time-consuming. Moneywise, the money was in teaching business, not coaching.” Plus, Bradley was kneedeep in research.
He was teaching banking courses while he was at Western Kentucky, and he left the university to become a bank president. That position was short-lived.
Bradley had taught a summer workshop at the University of Central Arkansas, and he was contacted about a job there. He started at UCA in 1982.
“I left the banking industry and got back into teaching, which I missed. Students keep you young,” Bradley said. “It was a good experience being a bank president, but I really think my calling was teaching.”
At UCA, he and Homer Saunders, professor of management, started the Small Business Advancement National Center, which was authorized by an act of Congress.
Former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, chairman of the Senate’s Small Business Committee, saw to it that money was appropriated to start the center.
“It’s the only thing at UCA actually started by an act of Congress,” Bradley said.
“We were one of the leaders in the country in the use of the Internet, actually a dial-up system,” he said. “Then when the university got hooked up to the Internet, we got switched over to the Internet. I thought the new way was to counsel businesses on the Internet. We became one of the leaders in the world in the use of Internet in business.”
Bradley started a weekly newsletter that is now emailed to 89 countries. He said that helped him become the president of the International Council for Small Businesses in 2011-12.
“I got to travel the United States; I got to travel the world. I’ve talked to banking and finance people from Taiwan [and other countries].”
He also received the Wilford L. White Fellow Award, the highest award given by the International Council for Small Businesses, at a conference in Dublin, Ireland.
Because of his international contacts, Bradley has been sought after as a speaker and teacher throughout the world.
He’s been to places such as New Zealand, Ireland, England, France and the Netherlands as a consultant for small businesses and to teach classes.
“I think the biggest thing is that I helped them in the small-business area. If they’re going to grow, even in the more-developed nations, the growth is in small business.”
He was in Egypt in 2011 when the Arab Spring broke out.“In the morning I got out, they had to pay $100 to a cab guy to get me from the downtown hotel to the airport. People were still rioting,” he said.
Bradley said that what started as college students peacefully demonstrating got out of hand.
He was taking a break from working with business people in Cairo to go see the Pyramids.
“That’s something to see,” he said.
“We got back in Cairo about 4 o’clock, and police were all around our hotel. We were only two blocks from the square where all this was happening,” he said. “It started very peaceful, and as the night wore on, it was more chaos.”
When the tanks came onto the streets, he knew he needed to leave.
Jan said she had a bad feeling something might happen, and before he got to Egypt, she called the State Department to tell them his name and where he was staying.
“I just had a feeling something wasn’t going to be right,” she said.
He was on the last plane out of Egypt for a while.
“I learn you do as you’re told, and you keep your mouth shut,” he said. Bradley said women and children were “crying and carrying on,” and they were left. “My friends who were there, they eventually had to go by ground transportation to Israel and fly out of Tel Aviv.
“I went [through] seven checkpoints to get on that Delta plane. I’ve never been so glad to get to Paris in my life,” he said.
While he was in Egypt, he helped set up a small-business center at the University of Cairo.
“They still want me to come back,” Bradley said. As recently as two weeks ago, the university contacted him. “With all the problems in that part of the world, I don’t particularly want to be there.”
Bradley said he likes to believe that he got UCA and the College of Business to think of
entrepreneurship.
UCA’s entrepreneurship and innovation program is “a leader,” he said.
“We were one of the first to zero in on small business, where most were zeroing in on corporate America,” he said. “It was kind of a gut feeling as a person trained in marketing.”
Bradley said his mentors were Sam Walton and J.C. Penney, whose philosophies he read about.
Each year, Bradley takes his students to spend time with the Dallas Cowboys and the St. Louis Cardinals and Rams to learn about marketing. His students take their resumes, and many have had internships or have gotten jobs with the organizations.
He started the Sigma Nu fraternity at UCA, as well as Alpha Kappa Psi, a business fraternity.
Bradley served a number of years in the Faculty Senate, including as president.
“I don’t plan to stop working with the university,” he said. Bradley is on a committee to create the Donaghey Corridor, which is development on Donaghey Avenue.
“UCA was very good to my family. All three of my children have degrees from UCA,” he said.
The couple’s children are Angie Huselton and Donny Bradley IV, both of Conway, and Christina Relyea of Montana.
“I had a wonderful 33 1/2 years there, but there are other mountains I want to climb before I can’t climb them anymore,” he said.
He will work with Service Corps of Retired Executives as a consultant to small businesses, as part of the Small Business Administration, and he has a private consulting firm.
And he hopes to see a Regional Intermodal Transportation Authority established — a goal he’s been working toward for 25 years.
“There’s no place between Memphis and Tulsa to unload national or international cargo on sea vans,” he said. “We want to be able to unload those from a river point of view or a railroad point of view. They cost a lot of money.”
Bradley is working with private and government sources to achieve his goal.
“Little Rock has a port, but they don’t have a way to unload those sea vans. They haul everything from food to electronics — everything you see in a store,” he said. “Arkansas has been so engaged in the trucking industry … that they haven’t done much in developing the rail and water part of it.”
The quorum courts in Perry and Conway counties endorsed being a part of the Regional Intermodal Transportation Authority; the Faulkner County Quorum Court did not, Bradley said.
“I don’t think they really understand it. We’re talking 4,000, 5,000 jobs. Some don’t want blue-collar jobs; they want white-collar jobs. Right now, we want any kind of job we can get, if it’s healthy and good for the environment.”
Bradley said he is working with retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gen. Paul Revis of Conway and state Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, on the project.
“Before I die, I want to see a port out there on the Arkansas River,” Bradley said.
Rapert said he trusts Bradley as a man of “vision and wisdom.”
“If our community had more Don Bradleys, we would never have anything to worry about,” Rapert said. “He has a tremendous work ethic, truly wants what is best for our community and has volunteered untold hours to study, research and [as an] advocate for the development of a Regional Intermodal Transportation Authority that would create new jobs and greatly benefit Conway and the surrounding region.”
Despite Bradley’s vast traveling adventures, many of which his wife accompanied him on, Bradley said they want to travel more now that he’s retired from UCA.
When Bradley said four years ago that he was going to retire, his wife got him a trip to spring training for the Kansas City Royals, and they’ve been going every year since.
That’s the plan for March, to spend time in Arizona with the Royals and the Texas Rangers.
The couple have season tickets to Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, as well as Disney World.
“Even though I’ll be 71 in January, I still get on the roller coasters and still enjoy the rides,” Bradley said.