“The fabric of him was love,” said Tre Bray, on the night his father Abby was inducted, posthumously, into the Brookland-Cayce Education Foundation’s Educators Hall of Fame.

Abby Bray’s birthday was Feb. 2, 1957. He was inducted on Feb. 2.
And there was a lot of love for Bray, who taught at BC, in the room at Seawell’s Thursday night. Abby Bray’s brother Joey and another son, Chris, were at the ceremony, too.

Emcee Sen. Nikki Setzler called Bray a friend and predicted it would be hard to get through the program without his emotions showing. And he was right. Setzler said all of Cayce and West Columbia knew him.
Others choked back tears when Lynn Summer, Bray’s friend and colleague at Brookland-Cayce High School, played a message Bray left her shortly before his death from cancer in 2013.

NFL Offensive Lineman Dakota Dozier, who played football for Bray at BC, recollected how Bray gave him the keys to his truck and told him to go to Lizard’s Thicket and get some chicken noodle soup on a day he was walking the halls of the school, feeling bad. “I felt way better,” Dozier said.

He also grieved aloud when a photo was shown, with Bray in it, of Dozier signing a college scholarship letter to go to Furman.

“It hurts when you lose people,” Dozier said. But he said he knows Bray “is looking down on us.”
“I wish he could still be alive to see me drafted” into the NFL.” Dozier said.

Setlzer told of other parts of Bray’s life.

He said Bray who grew up on the Cayce Avenues would peer through the fence as a kid, dreaming of the day he could don the Maroon and Black for the Bearcats of Brookland-Cayce.
He also said Bray was a two-time heavyweight fraternity boxing champ at USC. Bray came to teach at BC in 1991. He coached girls basketball before becoming football coach at BC and athletic director.