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Before he ever sold a garage door, Ralph A. Bradley flew a B-24 Liberator over the Pacific. Serving in the 13th Air Force, 370th Bombardment Squadron as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, Ralph flew 41 missions and said he would have flown more if given the chance. Asked once why he chose to fly, he answered simply: "Because I wanted to fly. I loved to fly from the first time I flew." Asked about his most memorable moment of the war, his answer was different: "Coming back home to the United States."
After the war, Ralph and his wife Sophia moved from Pueblo, Colorado to Chicago. In 1947, Ralph began selling and installing garage doors as a distributor for the Tilt-A-Door Company of Detroit, which made a one-piece, lightweight aluminum tilt-up door. It was the start of a family garage door enterprise that has spanned three generations.
In the 1950s, Ralph and his partner Frank Shray began manufacturing raised-panel redwood doors under the Chieftain brand. The Chieftain name carried a twofold meaning for the family: recalling the Colorado city where Ralph and Sophia began their lives together, and also representing a leader and voice of a community. Ralph's Chieftain doors were unlike anything else on the North Shore: sheets of redwood carved and assembled so that when the door rolled up, not a single vertical seam was visible.
Through the 1960s, Ralph sold doors for the Chicago Door Corporation in Skokie and briefly managed a region for the Crawford Door Company. In 1968, his eldest son Ralph Jr. officially joined him, and in 1969 his daughter Carol Bradley came into the business, taking charge of contracts, letters, invoices, waivers, and all administrative operations. Around 1970, Ralph moved to Raynor Northshore Door Corporation in Glenview, and in 1972 his son John Sr. came into the business too. Then, on April 19, 1973, Ralph created Raynor Door Company, which operated out of 1735 Chestnut Street in Glenview.
It was a true family endeavor. Sophia Bradley, Ralph's wife and the mother of Ralph, John, Tom, and Carol, kept the books as the company's accountant from 1973 to 1990. When Sophia stepped back, Carol took over the accounting in 1990 and carried it until 2001, when she left the business and moved from Illinois to Nevada. For nearly three decades, the women of the family ran the financial heart of the company.
Sophia and son John brought a sapling from the family's Edgebrook home and planted it in front of the Glenview shop; over the next fifty years the tree grew into a towering shade tree that still stands today.
As the North Shore client base grew, Ralph moved the company to 1653 Winnetka Avenue in Northfield, a property he first leased, then bought five years later. The Bradley children still remember the day they moved in: the entire first floor was covered in vending machines left behind by the previous tenant.
Raynor Door Company and the Bradley family have now served the garage door needs of Chicago and the North Shore for 79 years, and recently celebrated 50 years at their Northfield home at 1653 Winnetka Avenue, directly across the street from New Trier West High School.
