Michael Stowe Bradley Sr.

Michael Stowe Bradley, Sr., of Johnson City, TN, passed away on Wednesday, August 26, 2026. He was 80 years old. Mike, as friends and family knew him, died peacefully at Roanoke Memorial Hospital with his family by his side.

Mike was born in Asheville, NC, to Rachel McCaffrey and Donald Winfred Bradley. As a boy, he lived primarily with his maternal grandmother Kate Cole McCaffrey and brother Sam Easterby. Raised Catholic, he attended the Basilica of St. Lawrence, St. Eugene’s School, Gibbons Hall, and Asheville Catholic High School.

After graduating from North Carolina State University, where he studied Physics and played Freshman Basketball, Mike worked as a Computer Systems Engineer for Olin Cellophane in Pisgah Forest, NC. While at Olin in 1972, he met the love of his life, Virginia Durham. Mike and Virginia married in 1973 and celebrated 53 years together earlier this year.

In the early years of their marriage, Mike’s education and career took the couple around the country. In Chapel Hill, NC, he graduated at the top of his UNC MBA program. A job with a high tech engineering company brought them next to Dayton, OH, but there he also took his initial plunge as an entrepreneur and started Dynatronics, an electronic games company, inventing and marketing Bridge Master, the first electronic bridge game. The company eventually landed a feature on the cover of Lord & Taylor’s Christmas catalogue. In Dayton, OH, Mike and Virginia also became parents with the birth of their first son, Michael Stowe Bradley, Jr., in 1976.

The family next moved to Lubbock, TX, where Mike worked as a vertical market product manager for Texas Instruments and their son John Lawton Bradley was born in 1978. A position for Mike as a sales and marketing manager for Texas Instruments in Johnson City, TN, brought the family back closer to Mike’s roots in Asheville. Their son Patrick Durham Bradley was born in Johnson City in 1981.

Succumbing to the entrepreneurial itch again in Johnson City, Mike started a series of companies–Cimtek, Cimtek-Thomas, Cimtek Medical, and finally Projexsys–focused on software systems technology for industry. In those years the Wall Street Journal carried many of Mike’s reports on new plant trends.

Opportunity then called: From 2002 until 2008, Mike was President of Wonderware, turning it into a global industrial software powerhouse with software used in one-third of the world’s industrial plants.

In the end, Mike was most proud of the life that he and Virginia made together, raising their three boys and eventually delighting in their eight grandchildren, for whom he became a world-class Gramps. With his family and friends, Mike shared his love for music–despite being proudly tone deaf–as well as basketball, golf, fishing, politics, and eventually genealogy, which became a genuine passion as he methodically built out a family tree extending back into the 1500s and encompassing some 13,000 ancestors.

The family’s cabin on Wautaga Lake became Mike’s true happy place. There he spent many quiet hours with Virginia as well as many much more boisterous times with his children and grandchildren taking boat rides, playing board games, and discussing everything from politics to the nature of the universe late into the night around a roaring fire.

Mike and Virginia lived in Johnson City for over 45 years before relocating to Roanoke, VA, to be closer to family in early 2026.

Mike is preceded in death by his parents, Rachel McCaffrey and Donald Winfred Bradley; his beloved grandmother Kate Cole McCaffrey; and his brother Ransom Kellogg Bradley.

Mike is survived by his loving wife, Virginia; their sons, Michael and his wife Charu, John and his wife Rebecca, and Patrick; and their eight grandchildren, Elijah, June, Paul, Hannah, Aniela, Joseph, Michael, and Jude, as well as his brother Samuel Cole Easterby and a host of beloved cousins, nieces, and nephews.

There will be a visitation on Thursday, September 17, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at Groce Funeral Home (1401 Patton Avenue) in Asheville, NC. Family remarks will take place at 12:30 p.m. A funeral mass will be held that evening at 5:30 p.m. at the nearby Basilica of St. Lawrence (97 Haywood Street).

Internment will follow on Friday, September 18, at 11:00 a.m. at Riverside Cemetery (53 Birch Street, Asheville, NC).