Dr. Homer Leslie Bradshaw
“A scholarship fund was recently created to honor the memory of Dr. Homer Leslie Bradshaw, a long-time resident of Sinking Spring, for graduates of Peebles High School. Dr. Bradshaw was an educator; he retired in 1985 from Ohio University in Athens, where he worked as a Professor of Psychology,” reports the People’s Defender.
Bradshaw was a member of the 1878th Aviation Battalion, building landing fields in the Pacific for the B29s that would carry the atomic bomb to Japan and would hasten the end of the World War II. After the war, he enrolled on the GI Bill at Ohio University, where he graduated in 1952 Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. degree. He later attended Ohio State University where he received an M.S. degree and Ph.D. in psychology.
Upon completion of his doctorate, Bradshaw joined the psychology faculty at Ohio University in Athens, where he pioneered work and training in Educational Psychology. He retired in 1985 with the rank of Professor from the Psychology Department.
“Homer was an educational psychologist, and did a great deal of work in developing testing techniques for primary schools,” explained Jay Parsons, a close friend, whom Dr. Bradshaw considered family. “He worked with all of the schools in the Ohio and West Virginia area.”
“His commitment really was to public schools, so when he retired, he actually tutored or mentored some kids from Peebles – kids who were having some learning problems,” said Parsons. “His heart really was with those kids, and with those schools. We thought it was an appropriate gesture that we set up this scholarship in his name at Peebles High School.”
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“We met for the first time in the city of Hue, central Vietnam in 1962,” Parsons recalled. “My not-then-wife and I were volunteers with a group like the Peace Corps, teaching English in the girls high school and boys high school in the old imperial city of Hue. One Sunday, we went to church at the military compound, and there was an attractive young couple sitting up in front of us. We went up and introduced ourselves, and it turned out to be Homer and Joan Bradshaw.”
“They had recently arrived in central Vietnam as advisors to the government,” he continued. “They were alone, had no children, they had a big apartment that was paid for by the university, and they had access to the commissary services of the U.S. military, so they had things like booze, peanut butter, Cheerios – things we couldn’t get at the local market.”
Read more at “Scholarship fund created for Peebles grads in memory of Dr. Homer Bradshaw” in the People’s Defender.
See “University Community Remembers Dr. Homer Bradshaw, Psychology Professor Emeritus and Alumnus.”
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