Meredith Bradford died on April 13, 2024 at her home in Truro after a brief battle with complications from bladder cancer. She was 80.
Born in Boston on March 23, 1944 to Dr. Martin L. “Brad” Bradford and Alice “Tommy” Bradford, Meredith was the second of their five children. A descendant of Gov. William Bradford of the Mayflower, she and her family visited Truro for a week every summer, as her father’s family had done since the early 1900s, riding to Truro on the train. In the 1950s, her father and a few friends built summer cottages on the bay side.
From the early ’60s to the mid-’70s, Dr. Bradford and his best friend and Truro neighbor “Shep” Shepardson became co-owners of a tuna boat. The Toja was docked in Wellfleet for most of the summer, but they kept a slip in Provincetown for August when the tuna fishing was hot.
The Toja was one of the top private boats, fishing alongside Charlie Mayo’s Chantey III and Bobby Woods’s Dixie. They competed and won prizes in the Cape Cod Tuna Club’s annual tournament and won three Governor’s Cup trophies (two for tuna, one for a striper) for the largest fish of the season caught in Massachusetts waters. The largest tuna they caught weighed 841 pounds.
In 1972, Meredith was on board the Toja IV when “throwing out a couple casts” on what was supposed to be a brief outing including her toddler daughter and two-week-old son resulted in her hauling in a 500-pound tuna.
Known as Merry, Meredith was raised in Sharon and graduated from Sharon High School in 1962. She was an excellent student, an athlete, and captain of the varsity cheerleading team.
Following her graduation from Cornell University in 1966, Meredith drove to California in her VW bug and remained there for the next 30 years. A true hippie, Meredith was as devoted to protesting the Vietnam War as she was a lover of freedom rock. She attended countless concerts, including the legendary 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Meredith was the first wife of Artie Mitchell of the Mitchell Brothers’ Film Group (MBFG) and the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. She worked alongside Art and his brother during MBFG’s early years of adult film production and the establishment of the theater. She later joined their legal team.
Meredith was pregnant with their third child when MBFG’s groundbreaking pornographic feature Behind the Green Door (1972) had a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival. MBFG and the film’s star, Marilyn Chambers, were propelled to international fame when it came out that Chambers was the model mother on the Ivory Snow detergent box.
Scores of court battles followed, which created precedents that shaped the First Amendment’s definition of obscenity in adult entertainment, as well as copyright protections against piracy (including the FBI warning on films and videotapes).
Meredith divorced Artie and immediately began night school at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif., earning her law degree and passing the bar in 1980.
Hired after graduation by San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, she would later branch out on her own to better accommodate her duties as a single working mother. During her legal career, she worked on many of MBFG’s First Amendment cases, filing briefs with the Supreme Court and arguing before the California Supreme Court, won a controversial judgment against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept., and championed many an underdog client pro bono, particularly single parents. She was known to give free divorce services to friends, often as a belated wedding gift.
Returning to the East Coast in 1998, Meredith enjoyed the last 25 years of her life in semi-retirement at her home in Truro next to her parents’ old cottage. In the past decade, her talents as a seamstress were featured on her niche Etsy site, Zesty Wear, where she sold over 1,000 custom-fitted baby-blue terrycloth beach rompers (as worn by Sean Connery’s James Bond in Goldfinger).
Her greatest joy, however, was being a grandmother, making treks on Southwest Air to visit her growing brood in California. Alongside her Aunt Judy, Meredith was also a fixture at annual blues festivals in Maine and New Hampshire each summer.
Meredith’s family and friends remember her for her wicked sense of humor, her expansive creativity as a muralist and visual artist, her many published letters to the editor (including in Rolling Stone), her profound love for animals, and as a steadfast defender of progressive politics, ever decrying the culture of corporate greed.
Meredith is survived by her children: Liberty Bradford and husband Barry Caldwell of Los Angeles, Storm Bradford of Marin, Calif., and Mariah Bradford and husband Andy Kirk of Walnut Creek, Calif.; foster children Jasmine Mitchell of Sonoma, Calif. and Caleb Mitchell and wife Dr. Michelle Robello of Martinez, Calif.; and her five grandchildren and three step-grandchildren (Saoirse, Gavin, Dagny, Ryder, Fisher, Natalie, Camilla, and Keanu).
She is also survived by her aunt Judith Bemis of Kingfield, Maine; brother Mark Bradford and wife Carole of Oyster Bay, N.Y.; sister Prudence Hay and husband John of Wellesley; sister Beth Bradford of Sandwich; dozens of nieces, nephews, and cousins; a deep bench of decades-long dear friendships; and her devoted cats, Miffy and Monkey.
She was predeceased by her sister Jennifer Clark of Truro.
Donations in Meredith’s memory may be made to Sharon High School Boosters, Alcoholics Anonymous (General Services Office), or the Local Journalism Project in Provincetown.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary, published in print on June 13, erroneously listed the author as staff writer Tom Recchio. It was written by a member of Meredith Bradford’s family.
