Robert J. Grady

**Visitation will be from 12-1:00 PM on Saturday, December 6, 2025 at St. Ann Catholic Church, 323 North Van Buren Street, Stoughton, WI 53589 with a Mass of Christian Burial to follow at 1:00 PM. Bob will be brought to his final place of rest with full military honors at St. Ann Catholic Cemetery immediately following Mass.**

Robert “Bob” J. Grady of Stoughton died on November 23, 2024 at the age of 89. He was born March 24, 1936 at St. Mary’s Hospital. He grew up in Madison and graduated from Edgewood High School in 1954.

Bob attended a year of college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and had managed a shoe store for a while before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in February 1957. He served in the Navy for 6 years and was discharged February 1963 as a Personnel man, First Class. While in the Navy, he served aboard the USS Regulus and the USS Rehoboth where he participated in the 1958 atomic tests at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific. He finished his enlistment at the Naval Training Center at Great Lakes, IL.

After leaving the Navy, Bob worked in many different jobs and moved around the state of Wisconsin a few times before planting his roots in Stoughton. He finished his many careers working in maintenance at the Rosewood Apartments, where he was also a tenant for many years, and would return to visit every Tuesday morning for coffee even after moving out.

Bob enjoyed over 25 years as a Boy Scout Leader in Thorp, Rice Lake, and Middleton. He bowled in several leagues and enjoyed participating in many USBC tournaments, and coached youth bowling for 8 years. He collected over 100,000 pop tabs for the Children's Hospital. He took great pride in his Irish heritage and loved reminiscing of his travels to Ireland. He was active in many church and social groups and loved spending time in good company.

Bob is survived by 3 children; Michael (Ruth) Grady, Timothy (Beth) Grady, and Kelly Grady; 5 Grandchildren; Sarah, Marinda (Mike), Michael, Jacob and Jyllian (Tim) and 9 great grandchildren; 3 stepdaughters; Carrie Schulz, Kelly Wrase Searle, Jennifer Wrase Maier; 11 step-grandchildren; and 5 step-great grandchildren. He is further survived by his sister; D’Ann Malloy; 2 brothers in law; Jay Janowak and Mike Janowak; and two nephews; Evan (Bonnie) Malloy and Evan (Ericka) Malloy.

Bob was preceded in death by his wife Mary Grady; his first wife Shirley Grady; parents James Grady and Elizabeth (Doyle) Grady; a brother in law Jim Janowak; a granddaughter Madison Searle.

Visitation will be from 12-1:00 PM on Saturday, December 6, 2025 at St. Ann Catholic Church, 323 North Van Buren Street, Stoughton, WI 53589 with a Mass of Christian Burial to follow at 1:00 PM. Bob will be brought to his final place of rest with full military honors at St. Ann Catholic Cemetery immediately following Mass.

Cress Funeral Service

206 W. Prospect St., Stoughton, WI 53589

608-873-9244

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The Life Story of Bob

I was born right here in Madison, at St. Mary's. I should have been born on St. Paddy's Day, but I was stubborn, so they sent my mother home and I was born a week later.

My folks were divorced when I was less than a year old, and my sister and I grew up with our mother. The summer before first grade, a chest-x-ray showed that she had a spot on her lung. The doctors wanted her to go to the sanatorium at Lake View. She says, "What am I going to do with my kids?" I was in first grade, and my sister was in fourth. My father was in Madison-we'd see him on our birthdays-but he was remarried and they weren't going to take us. One of mother's friends had in-laws in Richland Center who said they would. So, in November of first grade, I got packed up and moved to Richland Center to people to I'd never even met before. But they were good. They took us to Catholic School every day, even though they weren't Catholic. They took great care of us. We were there almost two years, and in that whole time, we saw mom twice.

This was during World War II. I can remember the scrap-metal drives, and the paper drives, and the victory gardens. All of that stuff. The air-raid wardens. Boy, in Richland Center, they were really strict. I remember we were listening to radio one night-Mr. Gabriel Heatter followed by Mr. District Attorney. The little light on the dial was orange. We had the curtains pulled, but the air-raid warden knocked on the door. He could see the glow of that orange light through the curtains. He said, "Either turn the radio off or tape that over."

When my mother finally got well we went back to Madison. We were living on the corner of Broom and West Washington Avenue on VJ Day. I was nine. I was riding my scooter down West Washington Avenue hill, and all of a sudden the church bells began to ring, and sirens went off. West Washington was packed from the Capitol to the railroad tracks in ten

.minutes. Some of those cars sat there for a week-people just forgot where they'd left them. People were dancing in the street, on the car hoods. Everybody just celebrated. That night, the lights went on in the Capitol dome for the first time in four years.

I graduated from Edgewood High in 1954, and then went a year to the university. I worked at the Union, in the Rathskeller, and at Capitol Theater, as an usher. I met a few movie stars. Lauritz Melchior, the opera star. Louis Armstrong. I met him over at the Orpheum. The ushers at the Orpheum would let the Capitol ushers in over there, and we'd do the same for them. I had a lot of fun in that year, but I was in engineering, and that was not a good fit. I didn't make it. Before I left, I took a battery of tests at the counseling center, and they said I was more adapted to personnel work-office work. That has stuck with me.

I painted transmission towers one summer, and then sold shoes in downtown Madison for

a few years. Then, in February of 1957, I went into the Navy. I celebrated my 21st birthday in boot camp.

This was after Korea and before Vietnam. I went through boot camp at Great Lakes and to Personnel Man Class A school in San Diego. Then I flew to Japan and caught my ship in Sasebo. It was a refrigerated-food ship. We did replenishment operations. My job was the captain's talker. Everything the Captain said, I repeated on our sound-powered telephones, and my voice would go all over the ship, giving his orders. I went with the Captain wherever he went.

We had all kinds of trouble one day. An ammo ship wanted to replenish food from us at 14 knots. The Captain said, "That son-of-a-gun can't do 14 knots." They said, yes, 14 knots. We were waiting for them to come alongside. They were gradually, slowly gaining on us, but about a third of the way up on our ship, they lost steering and veered right toward us. The Captain said, "All ahead flank, left full rudder!" to try to get them to pass behind us, but they ran into us twenty feet in back of our ammonia storage. Ammonia is very volatile. It didn't go off, but they bounced along our ship and took off two life rafts and sprung the deck in three places-and that deck was three-quarters of an inch of solid steel.

We were back in the States for three or four months, and I got orders to a hydrographic survey ship. It was a little ship-just 310 feet 6 inches long and 45 feet across.. We headed out to Enewetak Atoll in the southwest Pacific for the atomic test in 1958.

We started out doing surveys of the water around the atoll in preparation for the underwater blast. We'd test the depth of the water and the speed and direction of the currents at various depths. We had scientists aboard who were plotting all this information.

In the meantime, they were doing their air blasts and surface blasts. They did those early in the morning. We'd be sleeping below decks with all the watertight doors sealed, but it would still light up the inside of the ship like broad daylight. When it came time for the underwater blast, we were one of the closest ships in. I was on the starboard wing of the bridge with the Captain. We were looking straight at it. When the water column went up, it tossed the target ships around like nothing. Words and pictures can't describe the mushroom cloud. It was every color in the rainbow, roiling and roiling. Spectacular. We could see the shock wave coming toward us through the water. The Captain positioned the ship to meet it head on. It came and went past us. It shook us pretty good, because we were small, but if we'd been broadside, it would have been a lot worse.

Our job was to follow that radioactive water until it came to a potable level. We set out special radar buoys. The buoys followed the currents at different depths, and we followed the buoys. The scientists were constantly taking water samples at various depths and testing it for radioactivity. We followed that water for eight weeks. That's how long it took for the radioactivity in the water to get to a safe level.

All that time, the ship's condensers were sucking in seawater. They'd boil it, make it into steam, then cool it down to make water again. The process takes out a lot of contaminants, but I've never been able to find anything that says condensers take out radiation. But that's the water we made our coffee with. That's the water we drank, and showered in, and used to wash our clothes. When the word came to retrieve the buoys, everybody pitched in to help. One of the buoys kind of rolled into me. That's the very spot where they later took out my first skin cancer.

I've had a skin cancer a lot, and have always wondered about that radiation. All the time we were on the ship we wore dosimeters, which measured the radiation we received. That was in my medical record. But years later there was a fire in a Naval warehouse in Kansas City, and my medical records were destroyed. So they can only guess how much radiation I got. The VA and I are still going back and forth on compensation.

Anyway, our next cruise was out to Kwajalein Atoll, where we set up a missile-impact-location system. We did this by mapping the bottom of the ocean so a cable-layer could lay

down hydrophones. They put them in a pentagon-shaped area, with one hydrophone right in the middle. We would fire dynamite caps into the water, and knowing exactly where we were, they could use the sound coming over the hydrophones to pinpoint the exact location of each one. It took four months. When we were all through, they could fire a missile from California and it would land in this target area. From the sound of that splash coming over all the different hydrophones, they could tell exactly where that missile landed and see how accurate it was. We saw the first one come over and land.

After a little R & R in the States, we went back out to Wake Island and set up another range, in the same way. While we were there, a plane went down. There were two guys flying a light plane around the world. They'd landed at Wake Island to refuel and rest before they took off on their next leg, much like Amelia Earhart had done years before, but when they took off they had a problem and dumped into the sea. The cable-layer and us both went to general quarters to look for these guys. I was on bridge. We all had binoculars. We were searching the surface for people. One guy we never did find. The second guy was found.

The other ship got a boat in the water. They went to pull him in, and he started shaking. They only got half of him. The sharks got the rest. I'm sitting there watching it through binoculars. Nothing you could do.

There were lots of sharks. We'd do a lot of our work lying motionless in the water, doing experiments and so forth. Guys would be fishing-it was just something to do. They'd catch sharks. The sharks would bite on anything. They'd bite on Styrofoam cups. The biggest shark I think was 8.5 feet long. They hung it up by its upper jaw. You could have dropped a galvanized bucket straight through to its stomach-its mouth was that big. They'd cut him up and use them for bait and catch more sharks. A pastime.

Anyway, our next assignment was setting up a range near Midway Island. We'd just fired our first test, and someone realized that there was a submarine behind us. We sent the challenge, but it didn't surface. Instead it came around to the side and aimed right at us. We were helpless. Biggest thing we had was a machine gun. We radioed to Midway for radar planes. It took them twenty minutes to get there. Five minutes before they arrived, the sub dove. We think it was Russian.

I had orders to shore duty, but we were delayed in returning to port by the submarine. So not long after, the exec came to me and said, "There's a helicopter coming. Do you want to get off?" I said, "Sure!" He said, "Be ready in 20 minutes." The helicopter came. They dropped off some papers and stuff for the scientists. Then they dropped the hook. You wrap you arms around it, and, zoop, up you go. A guy grabs you by the seat of the pants, pulls you in, hands you a can of shark repellent, and says, "If we go in, the pilot will take it on his side. Wait till it sinks and swim out the open door." I'm on a steel deck, and it's slippery. The guy on the crew has a belt about four inches wide, bolted to the helicopter.

He's not going to fall out for nothing. But that door is open. We're low altitude. I can see the sharks swimming around down there. I'm trying to find a place to hold on to, and the ship just falls away below. That was the last time I set foot on a ship.

By this time, I was already married. I'd met my wife, Shirley, on a blind date when I was home on leave after the atomic test. We corresponded. That summer, she came out to San Francisco on vacation for a week. A while later, I took some leave, went back to Wisconsin, and we got married. We had a very short honeymoon, and I flew back to ship. We'd had only fifteen days together as a married couple by the time I came back from Midway.

For the next two and a half years, I was at Great Lakes. It was good duty. I was instructing classes of reservists who would come in from training centers around the Midwest. They were personnel people. We'd teach them how to keep their records. They were civilians. They didn't know what to do with personnel records.

Shirley and I got an apartment in Waukegan. Our first child, Michael, was born at Great Lakes Naval Hospital about six months before I got out.

I've had a lot of different jobs since. I worked in the commercial-loan division at Thorp Finance, a consumer finance company. I sold paper products for a printing company and heating-and-air-conditioning units for mobile homes. I worked at a bank and at an insurance company for mobile homes. For thirteen years, I ran a trophy and sporting-goods

business up in Rice Lake. Then Shirley and I got divorced. I came back to Madison and ended up with a job doing maintenance at the apartment complex where I was living. From there, I transferred to a brand new apartment complex for seniors down in Stoughton.

I've liked all my jobs, but I guess I liked maintenance best. Every day it was a different apartment. You'd talk to lots of different people. You'd be doing different things-electrical, carpentry, plumbing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But in 2008 I had to have a knee replaced. You can't do maintenance without getting down on your hands and knees, so I was reti ed for about six years. Then I got a job with the county, working twenty hours a week in the mailroom at the Job Center out on Aberg Avenue. I enjoyed that, too, but two years ago, I had a triple bypass. Even at twenty hours a week it was too much, and so I retired for good. I was almost 80 at the time.

I was single for eighteen years after my divorce. A lot of women wanted me to marry them-I was in my forties and fifties, a very eligible age-but they weren't the right fit. And I was having too much fun. Then I met my current wife, Mary. We'll be married seventeen years come November.

I have three children: Michael, Tim, and Kelly. Kelly is handicapped from a car accident thirty years ago. She's got a brain injury. She's in an apartment in Rice Lake. She has caregivers that come in. They're down to twice a day now. They make sure she gets up and dressed, that she has food. Kelly's daughter, Jillian, comes over from Eau Claire and checks in on her. I've got five grandkids and six great-grandkids. I try to keep tabs on everybody.

I'm a people person. I guess that's one reason I'm active in a church group now. It's called the Romeos (Retired Old Men Eating Out). One of the guys came up with that name, and it's caught on. We go to a different place on the second Tuesday once a month. We just talk. Chitchat. Update. Announcements. We have a good time. I like to talk. You can always find people and talk to them and learn.

I just do people.