By JULIA SIMON Special to the Daily Press
(Editor's note: This is the first column featuring senior citizen women interviewed by high school students as part of their March Women's History Month project for the Santa Monica Commission on the Status of Women.) Sitting with Cece Bradley at the Saturday Farmers' Market, I felt like I was in the center of a magnetic force field. As we spoke, vendors, neighbors, friends constantly came up to Cece. “Hello Miss Cece!” “How are you doing today, Cece?”
She smiled and chatted with each of them, giving them all a big hug and kiss. Embracing two friends who had walked by the table, she said to me, “All these people are part of my extended family. My sisters and brothers come in different shapes, colors and sizes.”
Bradley was born in Boyle Heights in 1942. Both of her parents separately fled from Mexico after the Mexican Revolution and entered America from El Paso. Her father instilled in her a value of self-respect. He used to repeat a mantra to her and her five sisters, “The power is within you. Anything you want to do, you focus on it and you get it done.”
Bradley has carried that streak of empowerment throughout her life. When her son Vincent was 9 years old, he was hit in the head by a ruffian in the Pico Neighborhood. His mouth was broken and he needed stitches. Bradley was afraid for her son that this violence was going on in her neighborhood, so she went to a local meeting. This began, as she said, “my career in empowerment.”
She soon became a board member of the Pico Neighborhood Association, and became part of the neighborhood watch group that sponsored, as she says, “big education and big awareness.”
She was on the PTA, Virginia Avenue Park Advisory Board and part of Title One, a federal program that gives aid to junior high schools. Bradley became the leader because she could lead the meetings in both Spanish and English. For two decades, she worked for the registrar of voters to help those who can’t speak English.
When she was 35, Bradley realized that she wanted to go to college. At the Catholic girls high school she went to, the nuns simply didn't present college as an option. But with “the power within her,” Bradley went back to school and took classes in psychology and sociology.
“I learned what made me tick,” she said of her higher education.
After her mother died of diabetes and cancer, Bradley began participating in the breast cancer walks at the Rose Bowl. One year, simply by asking people to sponsor her for $1, she raised $1,200. And when her husband of 40 years went blind in one eye, Bradley became a translator for a non-profit organization that has eye clinics in parts of rural Mexico where she could calm patients in Spanish during surgeries. She also is a public relations volunteer at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market.
Bradley has worked for the brokerage firm, Morgan Stanley for 36 years. She calls her job her “lobby ambassadorship.”
Bradley is the embodiment of someone whose inner power shines through.
“I feel that women can do whatever they want if they want to pursue it," she said. "Look at me now. I’m the mother of the house, I’m the father of the house. I’m the woman of the house and the man of the house... (I can) take care of everything.”
Bradley appears to be someone who does kind things for others while not expecting rewards or praise.
“I live every day because I’m just passing through here," she said of her philosophy on life. "I’ll help everybody I can because that is the way I was taught. It’s an altruistic thing that we do and it’s gratifying.” (Julia Simon, a senior at Crossroads School, is the young leader serving on the Santa Monica Commission on the Status of Women. She interviewed Cece Bradley and created original artwork that will be exhibited at Bergamot Station Restaurant until March 6. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, March 4, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. For more information or to RSVP, call Women’s Commissioner Kelly Hayes-Raitt at (310) 474-5545.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 3, 2005. Read the original PDF.