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Join our Team and be Proud to Prouty in 2009!
An Interview with Dave Bradley -- The Bradley Bunch Team
Q: How did the Bradley Bunch Team get started?
DB: The Bradley Bunch Team is in its third year, and was formed primarily to recognize the importance of teams in making The Prouty so successful –- both in fundraising and in participation.
My senior partner and mentor, Jack Stebbins, was the first significant individual fundraiser in the early years of The Prouty. He turned his fundraising list over to me in 1989 and for the next 17 years, I was the largest individual fundraiser. For most of those years, there were no official teams, and even when teams started getting organized, I was content to think in terms of what I could accomplish as an individual rather than how to capitalize and build upon my success through “team-building.” However, in 2006, I was “dethroned” by not one but two rivals, both of whom happened to be leaders of official teams. And at that point, I realized that being part of a team was a means of amplifying what I had been doing as a solo Prouty participant.
Q: How has the team done?
DB: I am very pleased and humbled by what our Bradley Bunch Team has accomplished. In our first year, we were shown on the Prouty web page as being in first place for two days following the cut-off date (five days before the event), but officially we ended in second place. We ended up raising over $55,000 as a team with 62 members. In our first two years -– 2007 and 2008 -– we have raised well over $100,000.
Q: Why be part of a team?
DB: Let me quote from a report I sent to my contributors after the ride in 2007. “Being part of an official team for the first time in the 20 years I have done the ride has really added a big, new dimension to the experience. It is just great to feel part of an enthusiastic team of family, members of my law firm, old and new friends (and a handful of people who signed up online whom I still haven’t met), and to get caught up in the friendly competition among the teams.... I now believe that the key to the continuing success of this event will be more and bigger teams.”
Q: Who are you looking for to join your team?
DB: That’s easy. Everybody and anybody who would like to join us. We are all-inclusive. We want to have all ages and abilities. The only qualification is a desire to take part and a willingness to meet the fundraising minimum. We strive to have participating team members in every one of the events, from the 5k walk to the Century bike ride, and even in the Prouty Ultimate (back-to-back centuries over two days).
Q: Isn’t the team name a little egocentric?
DB: Yes, it is, and I’m a little sheepish about it. But the people who helped me organize the team thought it was a good counterpoint to Susan Wright’s team, "The Wright Stuff.” For those who are old enough to remember the TV series, the name was intended as a wordplay on The Brady Bunch.
Q: Didn’t you have a connection with Norris Cotton, the man the Cancer Center is named after?
DB: Yes, Norris Cotton was technically the senior partner of the law firm I joined in 1965 although he had been serving in the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate since shortly after the firm’s founding in 1946. Jack Stebbins, whom I mentioned before, was also one of the founders. Cotton withdrew from the firm in 1966 when another partner of the firm, the recently deceased Bill Johnson, ran for the other U.S. Senate seat, because Cotton felt that was required to maintain his neutrality in the contested primary election.
Shortly thereafter, Senator Cotton offered me a job on his staff in Washington, but by then I felt too deeply entrenched in the practice of the firm.
The Cancer Center is named after Senator Cotton because as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he was primarily responsible for obtaining the government grant that created the Cancer Center.
Our law firm today traces its ancestry to the firm of Cotton, Tesreau, and Stebbins.
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