NAHANTÂ —Â Families wading at Canoe Beach in Nahant made the perfect backdrop for the seaside reception at the Northeastern Marine Science Center honoring environmentalist couple Polly and Larry Bradley.Â
Polly Bradley, who helped found Safer Waters In Massachusetts in 1985, said oddly enough, she had never seen the ocean until she traveled to the Pacific coastline at age 16. “And now I’m trying to protect the Atlantic,” she laughed.
Though Polly Bradley stepped down at SWIM president years ago when she passed the title to Vi Patek, SWIM volunteer Patty Flint, also Northeastern University’s director of Development and Interdisciplinary Science Initiatives, said the Bradleys were never formally thanked for their work keeping Nahant waters clean. On Tuesday evening, an intimate group of Northeastern scientists and Nahant residents gathered to honor the couple and Flint presented them with a seaglass-covered plate, with a plaque expressing Northeastern and SWIM’s gratitude for their countless hours.
“There is no more respected person in Nahant as Polly,” said Nahant resident Jim Walsh. “She’s just extraordinary. She was always the one people turned to.”
When asked why she feels so strongly about clean beaches, Polly Bradley said it’s always been her desire to have her children, her grandchildren, and other people’s grandchildren to have clean water to play in, though she started protecting the ocean long before she ever had grandchildren.
SWIM Co-founder and Selectman Michael Manning said Polly Bradley’s knack for communications was instrumental in a series of lawsuits from 1985 to 2000 against abutting cities and towns who wanted to forgo secondary treatment for sewage that would be piped into the ocean.
Manning said because of SWIM’s work back then, “the water is clearer, there’s less algae ”¦ and the water is a whole lot clearer all the way around.” But the message of environmentalism continues to work in Nahant, said Manning. “It awakened a lot of environmental thought around town as to how we do any number of things, but certainly the way it affects the ocean in particular,” he said.
Northeastern Marine Science Center’s Geoffrey Trussell and Dean of Science Murray Gibson credited Larry Bradley with the center’s location at East Point. During SWIM’s battle for cleaner coastlines, Manning said Northeastern’s scientists worked to back the organization’s case with scientific facts.
In his speech thanking the university, Larry Bradley said Northeastern had always worked with SWIM to provide “the facts behind our endeavors.”
But even as the Bradleys humbly admitted they were never alone in their advocacy of clean waters, Walsh piped in to insist otherwise. “No one could get 400 people out at Town Hall like Polly,” he said to the group as the sun began to set. “And she struck fear into the hearts of people who would think otherwise.”
