Lucky are the children who experience a teacher who inspires, stimulates, and engenders life-long learning skills. They can be found in large, well-endowed city schools and small rural schoolhouses. By all accounts George and Mary Alice “Sis” Bradt provided that experience to the students at the three-room Elgin School.
George Morris Bradt, Jr. was born in Havana, Cuba in 1913. His American parents, George and Alma Bradt, were living in Cuba where George, Sr. was the publisher and owner of the Havana Post. The family returned to the United States after George Sr.’s death in 1919. George graduated from the University of Arizona in 1937. He met Mary Alice Cochrane, born in Illinois in 1913, in Tucson. She and George married in the early 1940s and lived in El Paso, TX for several years where George was stationed in the Army and “Sis” taught elementary school.
George and Sis returned to Arizona to teach as a team, emphasizing learning by working on projects that involved plenty of time outside the classroom, and teamwork. Their teaching style fit best in rural settings. From 1954 to 1960 they taught at the two-room Sopori School near Arivaca. George noted: “It was a regular state school and everything was standardized, but we were free of supervisors and superintendents. Wherever we taught we had a school museum…we collected insects, and hiked out into the country.” [Arizona Daily Star, 5/4/1994].
Photo courtesy of Bowman Stradling History Museum
The Bradts began teaching at the Elgin School in 1963 and numerous newspaper articles document the popularity of their approach. “They are naturalists who utilize the whole wide outdoors as their classroom. To them, a nature trail is as important to the development of a child as is an arithmetic book. Math becomes more than an abstract formula when the entire class hikes a mile and puts a geometry lesson to work to determine the height of a majestic cottonwood tree.” [Arizona Daily Star, 5/13/1957]. Students collected insects and reptiles. Gay Moss noted: “My mom did grow tired of all the lizards in the freezer.”
One memorable project was making a film about the 1871 battle between the Apaches and Lt. H. B. Cushing. Many ranch horses had their tails trimmed for the Apache warriors’ wigs. “The end result was a 45-minute documentary on 16 mm color film…” [Arizona Daily Star, 5/3/1968]. Jamie Hedgcock remembers, “Another movie we made was when George took me and a couple of other kids from Sonoita up into Gardner Canyon to watch a flash flood come down the wash after a rain on Mt. Wrightson. I had a scene where I looked into the camera and said, ‘Goodbye cruel world!’ and then jumped off the side of the wash bank. I remember the Bradts would show the movies at the Elgin Club to the parents and that scene got quite a few laughs.”
When sixth-grader Juan Padilla found mammoth bones in the Babacomari Creek he knew to leave it undisturbed and immediately went to George Bradt to report his discovery. George contacted the University of Arizona which sent a team to excavate and preserve the fossil. [Tucson Daily Citizen, 5/3/1968]. Marty Lycan, who spent only one year at the Elgin School, recalls the profound effect George Bradt had on him: “[W]e built a relief map on the school property and everyone in the class built a model of their house to scale to place on the map. In that way he taught us geography and the system of townships.”
In 1974 the Arizona Historical Society honored George and Sis with the AI Merito Award for years of teaching Arizona history to children in neighborhood and rural schools. [Tucson Daily Citizen, 2/20/1975].
After their retirement they lived in the Nogales and Green Valley area until the early 2000s when they moved to Silver City, NM. Sis died in 2005, age 91, and George died in 2007, age 93.
Alison Bunting can be contacted at alisbunting@gmail.com.