Francis A. Brady
Francis A. Brady, who died at his home in Cleveland August 30, 1907, was known to a host of Cleveland and Ohio citizens and especially in railroad circles, where for years he was a dominant personality both as a business man and as one to whom the welfare of his fellow workers and associates was always a matter of the deepest and most vital concern.
He was born at Carbondale, Pennsylvania, December 8, 1842. At the time of his birth there were only a few miles of railway track west of the Alleghany (sic) Mountains. His own life spanned most of the great development in the transportation system of the West. When he was nine years of age his parents moved to Cleveland, and he gained only the minimum of education. At the age of twelve years he found employment as a newsboy selling papers and other commodities on trains running out of Chicago. An experience which with most boys would have been only an opportunity to earn a temporary livelihood until something better presented Francis A. Brady converted into a real opening of a broad life work. At the age of sixteen he had charge of all the newsboys operating on the trains out of Chicago. In 1860, at the age of eighteen, having returned to Cleveland, he engaged in business with the Olmstead Brothers, who controlled the news business on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway. Some years later he engaged with the Cleveland Omnibus & Carriage Company, now the Cleveland Transfer Company, as solicitor, and shortly afterwards was promoted to general manager. He was with that concern for sixteen years, and did much to build it up and make its business profitable.
He resigned to become general yardmaster and agent of the old Atlantic & Great Western, now the Erie, at Leavittsburg, Ohio. To these duties and responsibilities he gave fifteen years and then was appointed general manager of the coal and ore traffic department of the Erie Railroad, with headquarters in Cleveland. Altogether he was with the Erie Railway Company for twenty-seven years. His last position was with the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, and he attended to the business nearly every day until the spring of 1907, only a few months before his death.
While he was identified with railroading and transportation at a period when the majority of his associates and subordinates were much given to intemperance, he was himself a stalwart advocate of prohibition and a prominent figure in church matters. In the years while he was located at Leavittsburg he and Francis Murphy started a temperance movement among railroad men. Mr. Brady arranged to the financial end of the movement, and he and Mr. Murphy fitted up a railway coach, which stood on a sidetrack at Leavittsburg and in which temperance meetings were held, largely attended by railway men. That was one of the important initial steps in a movement which even during Mr. Brady's lifetime had gone so far as to make railway men as a class one of the most temperate and moral among the various groups of industrial workers in the country. He was also an active churchman, and for many years had membership in the Franklin Methodist Episcopal Church. While living in Trumbull County he was president of the Trumbull County Sunday School Association. He was a Knight of Pythias, and while in Cleveland exercised much power in the republican party. At one time he was chairman of the Republican County Central Committee. From every point of view he was a clear-cut, honest and splendid citizen, and is well remembered for these qualities and also for his exceptional physical manhood. He was unusually strong physically, and in his younger days very athletic.
Mr. Brady married for his first wife Miss Frances Ada Rickard, who died in 1897. In 1902 he married Adatoel Hedges, who survives him. All his children were by his first marriage. Three of the daughters who survived him have since passed away, Mrs. Frederick A. Tilton, of Detroit, who died there in November, 1917; Mrs. Cara G. Klinite, who died in Cleveland in 1909; and Ida, who died at Cleveland in 1908. The children still living are: Harry S.; Francis A., who is connected with the Mason Tire & Rubber Company of Cleveland; Mrs. George W. Taylor, of Leavittsburg, Ohio; Mrs. Arthur J. Neubauer, of Detroit, and Mrs. W. J. Mooney, of Lakewood.
From Cleveland - Special Limited Edition, The Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago & New York, 1918 v.1