Bradbury Norton Robinson, Jr. was a college football player for St. Louis University who threw the first legal forward pass in American football history. He was also a physician, nutritionist, and conservationist who was among the first to warn of the dangers of using DDT in agriculture.
After Robinson's birth in Bellevue, Ohio, and while still a toddler, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where Robinson's father, Bradbury Norton Robinson, Sr. (1842–1924), became general baggage agent for the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad. The senior Robinson spent most of his adult life working for railroads. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he served one year as a sergeant in the Union Army before moving for the first time to Missouri in 1862 to participate in the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City.
Before the young Robinson was old enough to attend school, the family moved again to Baraboo, Wisconsin, to be near his mother's family. Robinson's mother, Amelia Lee Robinson (1856–1930), was born in London, England, and moved with her parents to the Baraboo area in 1878. Robinson was raised in Baraboo, a place he later joked was "made famous by the Ringling Brothers Circus...and myself." The Circus was founded the same year that Robinson was born.
Robinson was a sixth great-grandson of Mary Bradbury (1615-1700), a convicted Salem witch who escaped execution.
He was a first cousin four times removed of Bradbury Robinson (1752-1801) – a great-great-grandson of Mary Bradbury – who fought for the patriots at Concord in 1775. As of 2022, eight generations of Robinson descendants had included a male named "Bradbury" in honor of the Concord minuteman.
On September 5, 1906, Robinson threw the first pass in a game against Carroll College (Wisconsin) at Waukesha. Jack Schneider was the receiver for the Blue & White (St. Louis would not adopt "Billikens" as a nickname for its sports teams until sometime after 1910).
Because Robinson was St. Louis' premier passer as well as a standout runner and the team's principal kicker, he was the first triple-threat man in football history, although that term would not be used regularly by sportswriters until the 1920s.
The power teams of the East, who dominated the attention of national sportswriters in the early 1900s, were slow to adopt the forward pass. However, the 1906 Blue & White squad under coach Eddie Cochems (1877-1953) built its offensive strategy around what was then a newly legalized play.
Robinson and Schneider practiced running "pass routes" in the months leading up to the 1906 season. Their passes were not the awkward heaves typical of the era, but overhand spirals that hit the receiver in stride. Robinson credited his uncanny ability to throw long and accurate passes in part to a crooked little finger on his throwing (right) hand that was the result of a childhood injury. The finger imparted a natural spiral to his tosses.
In his memoirs, Brad Robinson recalled that he and Schneider pushed their coach to emphasize the pass. And, according to archives at St. Louis, Cochems (coke-ems) didn't start calling pass plays in the Carroll game until after he had grown frustrated with the failure of his offense to move the ball on the ground.
In that historic 1906 game, after an earlier Robinson-to-Schneider attempt fell incomplete (which resulted in a turnover to Carroll under the rules at that time), Cochems called for his team to again execute the play he called the "air attack".
Robinson took the fat, rugby-style ball and threw a 20-yard touchdown pass to Schneider. The play stunned the fans and the Carroll players. St. Louis went on to win, 22-0.
Decades later, in interviews with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ed Wray (1873-1961), Robinson gave Cochems the credit for creating the St. Louis offensive scheme that resulted in the Blue & White cruising to an undefeated (11-0) 1906 season in which they led the nation in scoring, annihilating their opponents 402-11.
The highlight of the season was St. Louis' shocking 31-0 thrashing of Iowa. Writing in his book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, which was published posthumously in 1994, College Football Hall of Fame coach David M. Nelson (1920-1991) reports that "eight passes were completed in ten attempts for four touchdowns" in the Iowa game. "The average flight distance of the passes was twenty yards."
Nelson continues, "the last play demonstrated the dramatic effect that the forward pass was having on football. St. Louis was on Iowa's thirty-five-yard line with a few seconds to play. Timekeeper Walter McCormack walked onto the field to end the game when the ball was thrown twenty-five yards and caught on the dead run for a touchdown."
"Cochems said that the poor Iowa showing resulted from its use of the old style play and its failure to effectively use the forward pass", Nelson writes. "Iowa did attempt two basketball-style forward passes."
"During the 1906 season [Robinson] threw a sixty-seven-yard pass... and... Schneider tossed a sixty-five yarder. Considering the size, shape and weight of the ball, these were extraordinary passes."
Brad Robinson was also a standout in baseball and track and field for the Blue & White.
Robinson earned his bachelor of science and his medical degree at St. Louis in 1908.
From 1908 to 1910 he practiced surgery at St. Mary's Hospital, one of the two Mayo Clinic hospitals in Rochester, Minnesota.
On March 7, 1910, he married Melissa Louise Mills, a strikingly beautiful St. Louis girl, who tragically died just four years later from a "wasting" affliction, leaving Robinson heartbroken.
Their only child, Bradbury N. Robinson, III, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Like his father, he would play college football, wearing number 51 as a standout receiver for the University of Minnesota from 1931 to 1933. According to the Michigan Centennial History, Brad the third was a member of one of the All-America squads in 1931-32 and played on the All-East team at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago in 1933. After graduation, he went into the radio advertising business and spent some time as a color analyst on college football broadcasts. One job had him supplying color commentary for radio broadcasts of college football, working with a play-by-play partner by the name of "Dutch" Reagan.
Upon the United States' entry into The Great War, Brad Robinson, Jr. entered First Officers Training Camp at Ft. Sheridan and won his commission as a captain of infantry on August 15, 1917. He was then assigned to the command of Company L, 340th Infantry Regiment of the 85th Division. He was sent overseas in July 1918. In France, he became an instructor at the Inter-Allied Tank School in Recloses, until his battalion was ordered to the front on November 1, 1918, ten days before the Armistice.
Dr. Robinson elected to stay in France to pursue post-graduate work in 1919, when he met Yvonne Elisabeth Marie Robinson (1898 - February 19, 1966, in St. Petersburg, Florida), while both were students at the University of Bordeaux. Yvonne was the elder daughter of businessman and renowned landscape painter Louis Dewachter (who painted as Louis Dewis). While Robinson spoke hardly a word of French, Melle Dewachter was fluent in English. A whirlwind courtship ensued and the couple were married on August 12, 1919, in Paris. They had seven children: Lois, Nadine, Richard, Janine, Yveline, Jacqueline, and Corrine.
The growing family found itself moving from one European city to another as Dr. Robinson continued clinical studies across the continent from 1920 to 1926 as a surgeon on the staff of Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming. Cumming had been ordered to Europe to study the sanitary conditions of the ports to prevent the introduction of disease into the United States by returning troops. He inaugurated a plan for the medical inspection of immigrants abroad in the principal countries of origin. Dr. Robinson played a role in both programs.
After returning to the United States, Dr. Robinson located to St. Louis, Michigan in 1927, where he opened The Robinson Clinic in 1935 and where he twice served as mayor.
Dr. Robinson was an advocate of naturopathic and holistic medicine and a frequent author on medical matters. He cited refined sugar as particularly bad for the diets of his patients.
In 1947, Robinson became one of the earliest to warn of the dangers of using the pesticide DDT in agriculture. This was a radical view at the time, since, beginning in 1944, DDT had been researched and manufactured in St. Louis by the Michigan Chemical Corp. (later purchased by Velsicol Chemical Corp.). DDT had become an important part of the local economy.
It would be 15 years before the dangers of DDT would be the subject of Rachel Carson's 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring. DDT's use in agriculture would be banned worldwide in the 1970s and 80s.
The Gratiot County, Michigan Landfill just outside of St. Louis, in which some of the chemicals from the DDT-producing plant had been disposed, became a Superfund site in the 1970s and DDT was still a persistent pollutant in the nearby Pine River 70 years later.
Dr. Robinson died in Florida in 1949 from complications following routine surgery. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brad Robinson was inducted into the St. Louis Billiken Hall of Fame in 1995 and into the Baraboo (Wisconsin) High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022.
After Robinson's birth in Bellevue, Ohio, and while still a toddler, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where Robinson's father, Bradbury Norton Robinson, Sr. (1842–1924), became general baggage agent for the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad. The senior Robinson spent most of his adult life working for railroads. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he served one year as a sergeant in the Union Army before moving for the first time to Missouri in 1862 to participate in the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City.
Before the young Robinson was old enough to attend school, the family moved again to Baraboo, Wisconsin, to be near his mother's family. Robinson's mother, Amelia Lee Robinson (1856–1930), was born in London, England, and moved with her parents to the Baraboo area in 1878. Robinson was raised in Baraboo, a place he later joked was "made famous by the Ringling Brothers Circus...and myself." The Circus was founded the same year that Robinson was born.
Robinson was a sixth great-grandson of Mary Bradbury (1615-1700), a convicted Salem witch who escaped execution.
He was a first cousin four times removed of Bradbury Robinson (1752-1801) – a great-great-grandson of Mary Bradbury – who fought for the patriots at Concord in 1775. As of 2022, eight generations of Robinson descendants had included a male named "Bradbury" in honor of the Concord minuteman.
On September 5, 1906, Robinson threw the first pass in a game against Carroll College (Wisconsin) at Waukesha. Jack Schneider was the receiver for the Blue & White (St. Louis would not adopt "Billikens" as a nickname for its sports teams until sometime after 1910).
Because Robinson was St. Louis' premier passer as well as a standout runner and the team's principal kicker, he was the first triple-threat man in football history, although that term would not be used regularly by sportswriters until the 1920s.
The power teams of the East, who dominated the attention of national sportswriters in the early 1900s, were slow to adopt the forward pass. However, the 1906 Blue & White squad under coach Eddie Cochems (1877-1953) built its offensive strategy around what was then a newly legalized play.
Robinson and Schneider practiced running "pass routes" in the months leading up to the 1906 season. Their passes were not the awkward heaves typical of the era, but overhand spirals that hit the receiver in stride. Robinson credited his uncanny ability to throw long and accurate passes in part to a crooked little finger on his throwing (right) hand that was the result of a childhood injury. The finger imparted a natural spiral to his tosses.
In his memoirs, Brad Robinson recalled that he and Schneider pushed their coach to emphasize the pass. And, according to archives at St. Louis, Cochems (coke-ems) didn't start calling pass plays in the Carroll game until after he had grown frustrated with the failure of his offense to move the ball on the ground.
In that historic 1906 game, after an earlier Robinson-to-Schneider attempt fell incomplete (which resulted in a turnover to Carroll under the rules at that time), Cochems called for his team to again execute the play he called the "air attack".
Robinson took the fat, rugby-style ball and threw a 20-yard touchdown pass to Schneider. The play stunned the fans and the Carroll players. St. Louis went on to win, 22-0.
Decades later, in interviews with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ed Wray (1873-1961), Robinson gave Cochems the credit for creating the St. Louis offensive scheme that resulted in the Blue & White cruising to an undefeated (11-0) 1906 season in which they led the nation in scoring, annihilating their opponents 402-11.
The highlight of the season was St. Louis' shocking 31-0 thrashing of Iowa. Writing in his book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, which was published posthumously in 1994, College Football Hall of Fame coach David M. Nelson (1920-1991) reports that "eight passes were completed in ten attempts for four touchdowns" in the Iowa game. "The average flight distance of the passes was twenty yards."
Nelson continues, "the last play demonstrated the dramatic effect that the forward pass was having on football. St. Louis was on Iowa's thirty-five-yard line with a few seconds to play. Timekeeper Walter McCormack walked onto the field to end the game when the ball was thrown twenty-five yards and caught on the dead run for a touchdown."
"Cochems said that the poor Iowa showing resulted from its use of the old style play and its failure to effectively use the forward pass", Nelson writes. "Iowa did attempt two basketball-style forward passes."
"During the 1906 season [Robinson] threw a sixty-seven-yard pass... and... Schneider tossed a sixty-five yarder. Considering the size, shape and weight of the ball, these were extraordinary passes."
Brad Robinson was also a standout in baseball and track and field for the Blue & White.
Robinson earned his bachelor of science and his medical degree at St. Louis in 1908.
From 1908 to 1910 he practiced surgery at St. Mary's Hospital, one of the two Mayo Clinic hospitals in Rochester, Minnesota.
On March 7, 1910, he married Melissa Louise Mills, a strikingly beautiful St. Louis girl, who tragically died just four years later from a "wasting" affliction, leaving Robinson heartbroken.
Their only child, Bradbury N. Robinson, III, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Like his father, he would play college football, wearing number 51 as a standout receiver for the University of Minnesota from 1931 to 1933. According to the Michigan Centennial History, Brad the third was a member of one of the All-America squads in 1931-32 and played on the All-East team at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago in 1933. After graduation, he went into the radio advertising business and spent some time as a color analyst on college football broadcasts. One job had him supplying color commentary for radio broadcasts of college football, working with a play-by-play partner by the name of "Dutch" Reagan.
Upon the United States' entry into The Great War, Brad Robinson, Jr. entered First Officers Training Camp at Ft. Sheridan and won his commission as a captain of infantry on August 15, 1917. He was then assigned to the command of Company L, 340th Infantry Regiment of the 85th Division. He was sent overseas in July 1918. In France, he became an instructor at the Inter-Allied Tank School in Recloses, until his battalion was ordered to the front on November 1, 1918, ten days before the Armistice.
Dr. Robinson elected to stay in France to pursue post-graduate work in 1919, when he met Yvonne Elisabeth Marie Robinson (1898 - February 19, 1966, in St. Petersburg, Florida), while both were students at the University of Bordeaux. Yvonne was the elder daughter of businessman and renowned landscape painter Louis Dewachter (who painted as Louis Dewis). While Robinson spoke hardly a word of French, Melle Dewachter was fluent in English. A whirlwind courtship ensued and the couple were married on August 12, 1919, in Paris. They had seven children: Lois, Nadine, Richard, Janine, Yveline, Jacqueline, and Corrine.
The growing family found itself moving from one European city to another as Dr. Robinson continued clinical studies across the continent from 1920 to 1926 as a surgeon on the staff of Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming. Cumming had been ordered to Europe to study the sanitary conditions of the ports to prevent the introduction of disease into the United States by returning troops. He inaugurated a plan for the medical inspection of immigrants abroad in the principal countries of origin. Dr. Robinson played a role in both programs.
After returning to the United States, Dr. Robinson located to St. Louis, Michigan in 1927, where he opened The Robinson Clinic in 1935 and where he twice served as mayor.
Dr. Robinson was an advocate of naturopathic and holistic medicine and a frequent author on medical matters. He cited refined sugar as particularly bad for the diets of his patients.
In 1947, Robinson became one of the earliest to warn of the dangers of using the pesticide DDT in agriculture. This was a radical view at the time, since, beginning in 1944, DDT had been researched and manufactured in St. Louis by the Michigan Chemical Corp. (later purchased by Velsicol Chemical Corp.). DDT had become an important part of the local economy.
It would be 15 years before the dangers of DDT would be the subject of Rachel Carson's 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring. DDT's use in agriculture would be banned worldwide in the 1970s and 80s.
The Gratiot County, Michigan Landfill just outside of St. Louis, in which some of the chemicals from the DDT-producing plant had been disposed, became a Superfund site in the 1970s and DDT was still a persistent pollutant in the nearby Pine River 70 years later.
Dr. Robinson died in Florida in 1949 from complications following routine surgery. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brad Robinson was inducted into the St. Louis Billiken Hall of Fame in 1995 and into the Baraboo (Wisconsin) High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022.
Bradbury Norton Robinson, Jr. was a college football player for St. Louis University who threw the first legal forward pass in American football history. He was also a physician, nutritionist, and conservationist who was among the first to warn of the dangers of using DDT in agriculture.
After Robinson's birth in Bellevue, Ohio, and while still a toddler, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where Robinson's father, Bradbury Norton Robinson, Sr. (1842–1924), became general baggage agent for the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad. The senior Robinson spent most of his adult life working for railroads. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he served one year as a sergeant in the Union Army before moving for the first time to Missouri in 1862 to participate in the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City.
Before the young Robinson was old enough to attend school, the family moved again to Baraboo, Wisconsin, to be near his mother's family. Robinson's mother, Amelia Lee Robinson (1856–1930), was born in London, England, and moved with her parents to the Baraboo area in 1878. Robinson was raised in Baraboo, a place he later joked was "made famous by the Ringling Brothers Circus...and myself." The Circus was founded the same year that Robinson was born.
Robinson was a sixth great-grandson of Mary Bradbury (1615-1700), a convicted Salem witch who escaped execution.
He was a first cousin four times removed of Bradbury Robinson (1752-1801) – a great-great-grandson of Mary Bradbury – who fought for the patriots at Concord in 1775. As of 2022, eight generations of Robinson descendants had included a male named "Bradbury" in honor of the Concord minuteman.
On September 5, 1906, Robinson threw the first pass in a game against Carroll College (Wisconsin) at Waukesha. Jack Schneider was the receiver for the Blue & White (St. Louis would not adopt "Billikens" as a nickname for its sports teams until sometime after 1910).
Because Robinson was St. Louis' premier passer as well as a standout runner and the team's principal kicker, he was the first triple-threat man in football history, although that term would not be used regularly by sportswriters until the 1920s.
The power teams of the East, who dominated the attention of national sportswriters in the early 1900s, were slow to adopt the forward pass. However, the 1906 Blue & White squad under coach Eddie Cochems (1877-1953) built its offensive strategy around what was then a newly legalized play.
Robinson and Schneider practiced running "pass routes" in the months leading up to the 1906 season. Their passes were not the awkward heaves typical of the era, but overhand spirals that hit the receiver in stride. Robinson credited his uncanny ability to throw long and accurate passes in part to a crooked little finger on his throwing (right) hand that was the result of a childhood injury. The finger imparted a natural spiral to his tosses.
In his memoirs, Brad Robinson recalled that he and Schneider pushed their coach to emphasize the pass. And, according to archives at St. Louis, Cochems (coke-ems) didn't start calling pass plays in the Carroll game until after he had grown frustrated with the failure of his offense to move the ball on the ground.
In that historic 1906 game, after an earlier Robinson-to-Schneider attempt fell incomplete (which resulted in a turnover to Carroll under the rules at that time), Cochems called for his team to again execute the play he called the "air attack".
Robinson took the fat, rugby-style ball and threw a 20-yard touchdown pass to Schneider. The play stunned the fans and the Carroll players. St. Louis went on to win, 22-0.
Decades later, in interviews with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ed Wray (1873-1961), Robinson gave Cochems the credit for creating the St. Louis offensive scheme that resulted in the Blue & White cruising to an undefeated (11-0) 1906 season in which they led the nation in scoring, annihilating their opponents 402-11.
The highlight of the season was St. Louis' shocking 31-0 thrashing of Iowa. Writing in his book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, which was published posthumously in 1994, College Football Hall of Fame coach David M. Nelson (1920-1991) reports that "eight passes were completed in ten attempts for four touchdowns" in the Iowa game. "The average flight distance of the passes was twenty yards."
Nelson continues, "the last play demonstrated the dramatic effect that the forward pass was having on football. St. Louis was on Iowa's thirty-five-yard line with a few seconds to play. Timekeeper Walter McCormack walked onto the field to end the game when the ball was thrown twenty-five yards and caught on the dead run for a touchdown."
"Cochems said that the poor Iowa showing resulted from its use of the old style play and its failure to effectively use the forward pass", Nelson writes. "Iowa did attempt two basketball-style forward passes."
"During the 1906 season [Robinson] threw a sixty-seven-yard pass... and... Schneider tossed a sixty-five yarder. Considering the size, shape and weight of the ball, these were extraordinary passes."
Brad Robinson was also a standout in baseball and track and field for the Blue & White.
Robinson earned his bachelor of science and his medical degree at St. Louis in 1908.
From 1908 to 1910 he practiced surgery at St. Mary's Hospital, one of the two Mayo Clinic hospitals in Rochester, Minnesota.
On March 7, 1910, he married Melissa Louise Mills, a strikingly beautiful St. Louis girl, who tragically died just four years later from a "wasting" affliction, leaving Robinson heartbroken.
Their only child, Bradbury N. Robinson, III, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Like his father, he would play college football, wearing number 51 as a standout receiver for the University of Minnesota from 1931 to 1933. According to the Michigan Centennial History, Brad the third was a member of one of the All-America squads in 1931-32 and played on the All-East team at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago in 1933. After graduation, he went into the radio advertising business and spent some time as a color analyst on college football broadcasts. One job had him supplying color commentary for radio broadcasts of college football, working with a play-by-play partner by the name of "Dutch" Reagan.
Upon the United States' entry into The Great War, Brad Robinson, Jr. entered First Officers Training Camp at Ft. Sheridan and won his commission as a captain of infantry on August 15, 1917. He was then assigned to the command of Company L, 340th Infantry Regiment of the 85th Division. He was sent overseas in July 1918. In France, he became an instructor at the Inter-Allied Tank School in Recloses, until his battalion was ordered to the front on November 1, 1918, ten days before the Armistice.
Dr. Robinson elected to stay in France to pursue post-graduate work in 1919, when he met Yvonne Elisabeth Marie Robinson (1898 - February 19, 1966, in St. Petersburg, Florida), while both were students at the University of Bordeaux. Yvonne was the elder daughter of businessman and renowned landscape painter Louis Dewachter (who painted as Louis Dewis). While Robinson spoke hardly a word of French, Melle Dewachter was fluent in English. A whirlwind courtship ensued and the couple were married on August 12, 1919, in Paris. They had seven children: Lois, Nadine, Richard, Janine, Yveline, Jacqueline, and Corrine.
The growing family found itself moving from one European city to another as Dr. Robinson continued clinical studies across the continent from 1920 to 1926 as a surgeon on the staff of Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming. Cumming had been ordered to Europe to study the sanitary conditions of the ports to prevent the introduction of disease into the United States by returning troops. He inaugurated a plan for the medical inspection of immigrants abroad in the principal countries of origin. Dr. Robinson played a role in both programs.
After returning to the United States, Dr. Robinson located to St. Louis, Michigan in 1927, where he opened The Robinson Clinic in 1935 and where he twice served as mayor.
Dr. Robinson was an advocate of naturopathic and holistic medicine and a frequent author on medical matters. He cited refined sugar as particularly bad for the diets of his patients.
In 1947, Robinson became one of the earliest to warn of the dangers of using the pesticide DDT in agriculture. This was a radical view at the time, since, beginning in 1944, DDT had been researched and manufactured in St. Louis by the Michigan Chemical Corp. (later purchased by Velsicol Chemical Corp.). DDT had become an important part of the local economy.
It would be 15 years before the dangers of DDT would be the subject of Rachel Carson's 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring. DDT's use in agriculture would be banned worldwide in the 1970s and 80s.
The Gratiot County, Michigan Landfill just outside of St. Louis, in which some of the chemicals from the DDT-producing plant had been disposed, became a Superfund site in the 1970s and DDT was still a persistent pollutant in the nearby Pine River 70 years later.
Dr. Robinson died in Florida in 1949 from complications following routine surgery. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brad Robinson was inducted into the St. Louis Billiken Hall of Fame in 1995 and into the Baraboo (Wisconsin) High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022.
After Robinson's birth in Bellevue, Ohio, and while still a toddler, his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri where Robinson's father, Bradbury Norton Robinson, Sr. (1842–1924), became general baggage agent for the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad. The senior Robinson spent most of his adult life working for railroads. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he served one year as a sergeant in the Union Army before moving for the first time to Missouri in 1862 to participate in the construction of the Missouri Pacific Railroad from St. Louis to Kansas City.
Before the young Robinson was old enough to attend school, the family moved again to Baraboo, Wisconsin, to be near his mother's family. Robinson's mother, Amelia Lee Robinson (1856–1930), was born in London, England, and moved with her parents to the Baraboo area in 1878. Robinson was raised in Baraboo, a place he later joked was "made famous by the Ringling Brothers Circus...and myself." The Circus was founded the same year that Robinson was born.
Robinson was a sixth great-grandson of Mary Bradbury (1615-1700), a convicted Salem witch who escaped execution.
He was a first cousin four times removed of Bradbury Robinson (1752-1801) – a great-great-grandson of Mary Bradbury – who fought for the patriots at Concord in 1775. As of 2022, eight generations of Robinson descendants had included a male named "Bradbury" in honor of the Concord minuteman.
On September 5, 1906, Robinson threw the first pass in a game against Carroll College (Wisconsin) at Waukesha. Jack Schneider was the receiver for the Blue & White (St. Louis would not adopt "Billikens" as a nickname for its sports teams until sometime after 1910).
Because Robinson was St. Louis' premier passer as well as a standout runner and the team's principal kicker, he was the first triple-threat man in football history, although that term would not be used regularly by sportswriters until the 1920s.
The power teams of the East, who dominated the attention of national sportswriters in the early 1900s, were slow to adopt the forward pass. However, the 1906 Blue & White squad under coach Eddie Cochems (1877-1953) built its offensive strategy around what was then a newly legalized play.
Robinson and Schneider practiced running "pass routes" in the months leading up to the 1906 season. Their passes were not the awkward heaves typical of the era, but overhand spirals that hit the receiver in stride. Robinson credited his uncanny ability to throw long and accurate passes in part to a crooked little finger on his throwing (right) hand that was the result of a childhood injury. The finger imparted a natural spiral to his tosses.
In his memoirs, Brad Robinson recalled that he and Schneider pushed their coach to emphasize the pass. And, according to archives at St. Louis, Cochems (coke-ems) didn't start calling pass plays in the Carroll game until after he had grown frustrated with the failure of his offense to move the ball on the ground.
In that historic 1906 game, after an earlier Robinson-to-Schneider attempt fell incomplete (which resulted in a turnover to Carroll under the rules at that time), Cochems called for his team to again execute the play he called the "air attack".
Robinson took the fat, rugby-style ball and threw a 20-yard touchdown pass to Schneider. The play stunned the fans and the Carroll players. St. Louis went on to win, 22-0.
Decades later, in interviews with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ed Wray (1873-1961), Robinson gave Cochems the credit for creating the St. Louis offensive scheme that resulted in the Blue & White cruising to an undefeated (11-0) 1906 season in which they led the nation in scoring, annihilating their opponents 402-11.
The highlight of the season was St. Louis' shocking 31-0 thrashing of Iowa. Writing in his book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, which was published posthumously in 1994, College Football Hall of Fame coach David M. Nelson (1920-1991) reports that "eight passes were completed in ten attempts for four touchdowns" in the Iowa game. "The average flight distance of the passes was twenty yards."
Nelson continues, "the last play demonstrated the dramatic effect that the forward pass was having on football. St. Louis was on Iowa's thirty-five-yard line with a few seconds to play. Timekeeper Walter McCormack walked onto the field to end the game when the ball was thrown twenty-five yards and caught on the dead run for a touchdown."
"Cochems said that the poor Iowa showing resulted from its use of the old style play and its failure to effectively use the forward pass", Nelson writes. "Iowa did attempt two basketball-style forward passes."
"During the 1906 season [Robinson] threw a sixty-seven-yard pass... and... Schneider tossed a sixty-five yarder. Considering the size, shape and weight of the ball, these were extraordinary passes."
Brad Robinson was also a standout in baseball and track and field for the Blue & White.
Robinson earned his bachelor of science and his medical degree at St. Louis in 1908.
From 1908 to 1910 he practiced surgery at St. Mary's Hospital, one of the two Mayo Clinic hospitals in Rochester, Minnesota.
On March 7, 1910, he married Melissa Louise Mills, a strikingly beautiful St. Louis girl, who tragically died just four years later from a "wasting" affliction, leaving Robinson heartbroken.
Their only child, Bradbury N. Robinson, III, was raised by his paternal grandparents. Like his father, he would play college football, wearing number 51 as a standout receiver for the University of Minnesota from 1931 to 1933. According to the Michigan Centennial History, Brad the third was a member of one of the All-America squads in 1931-32 and played on the All-East team at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago in 1933. After graduation, he went into the radio advertising business and spent some time as a color analyst on college football broadcasts. One job had him supplying color commentary for radio broadcasts of college football, working with a play-by-play partner by the name of "Dutch" Reagan.
Upon the United States' entry into The Great War, Brad Robinson, Jr. entered First Officers Training Camp at Ft. Sheridan and won his commission as a captain of infantry on August 15, 1917. He was then assigned to the command of Company L, 340th Infantry Regiment of the 85th Division. He was sent overseas in July 1918. In France, he became an instructor at the Inter-Allied Tank School in Recloses, until his battalion was ordered to the front on November 1, 1918, ten days before the Armistice.
Dr. Robinson elected to stay in France to pursue post-graduate work in 1919, when he met Yvonne Elisabeth Marie Robinson (1898 - February 19, 1966, in St. Petersburg, Florida), while both were students at the University of Bordeaux. Yvonne was the elder daughter of businessman and renowned landscape painter Louis Dewachter (who painted as Louis Dewis). While Robinson spoke hardly a word of French, Melle Dewachter was fluent in English. A whirlwind courtship ensued and the couple were married on August 12, 1919, in Paris. They had seven children: Lois, Nadine, Richard, Janine, Yveline, Jacqueline, and Corrine.
The growing family found itself moving from one European city to another as Dr. Robinson continued clinical studies across the continent from 1920 to 1926 as a surgeon on the staff of Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming. Cumming had been ordered to Europe to study the sanitary conditions of the ports to prevent the introduction of disease into the United States by returning troops. He inaugurated a plan for the medical inspection of immigrants abroad in the principal countries of origin. Dr. Robinson played a role in both programs.
After returning to the United States, Dr. Robinson located to St. Louis, Michigan in 1927, where he opened The Robinson Clinic in 1935 and where he twice served as mayor.
Dr. Robinson was an advocate of naturopathic and holistic medicine and a frequent author on medical matters. He cited refined sugar as particularly bad for the diets of his patients.
In 1947, Robinson became one of the earliest to warn of the dangers of using the pesticide DDT in agriculture. This was a radical view at the time, since, beginning in 1944, DDT had been researched and manufactured in St. Louis by the Michigan Chemical Corp. (later purchased by Velsicol Chemical Corp.). DDT had become an important part of the local economy.
It would be 15 years before the dangers of DDT would be the subject of Rachel Carson's 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring. DDT's use in agriculture would be banned worldwide in the 1970s and 80s.
The Gratiot County, Michigan Landfill just outside of St. Louis, in which some of the chemicals from the DDT-producing plant had been disposed, became a Superfund site in the 1970s and DDT was still a persistent pollutant in the nearby Pine River 70 years later.
Dr. Robinson died in Florida in 1949 from complications following routine surgery. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brad Robinson was inducted into the St. Louis Billiken Hall of Fame in 1995 and into the Baraboo (Wisconsin) High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2022.
