Originally from Mascot (Knox county), Tennessee, Charles L. Bradshaw served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant during World War II. He was a member of the mathematics panel at Oak Ridge in the 1950s, the branch chief in the Computation Laboratory of ABMA-NASA, the deputy director of the Computation Laboratory of MSFC-NASA, and director of the Computation Center at Vanderbilt University. He and his wife, Loyce, reside in Lebanon, TN.