With nearly four decades of working in the print media, broadcast and entertainment industries under his belt, islander Brian Brown has a treasure trove of entertaining stories to share. This Sunday, Brown, 79, will offer some of the most memorable ones from his 30 years of working for Time magazine in New York as the next talk in Vashon Community Care’s (VCC) Telling Stories speaker series.
“I didn’t know him myself, but when I met him, I was blown away by his stories,” said Linda Milovsoroff, executive director of the VCC Foundation. “We are thrilled to present him as our next speaker.”
The Telling Stories series evolved as a fundraising endeavor after the foundation invited Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former islander Berkeley Breathed to speak on Vashon in 2010. Many people wanted to learn more about fellow islanders, and particularly seniors, who Milovsoroff said have some great stories about their lives.
Brown, who moved to Vashon in 2007 with his wife to be closer to family in Seattle, was born in the Bronx and raised in Scarsdale, New York. An engaging gentleman with an infectious humor and energy, he has a graduate degree in American Literature from New York University and has worn many different hats over the course of his career, from teaching literature to engineering students at Purdue University and literacy students in Harlem, to editing newspapers and starting his own media company. But he began his career reporting for small papers in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.
While many of Brown’s stories from those earlier years in newspapers reflect a simpler time in the media, they are no less fascinating.
At one paper, Brown used to write up police reports and tells a story about one time when he was visiting his girlfriend, who lived in the same town as the chief of police. He had to meet with the chief the next morning and didn’t want to make the drive twice, so he asked if he could simply spend the night in the local jail.
“The chief said ‘Sure,’ and he even made me take out my shoelaces so I could have a realistic experience,” Brown recalled. “This was Greenwhich, Connecticut, which is a pretty wealthy area, so I figured the jail there would probably be pretty nice and it was. When I woke up in the morning, the chief brought me English muffins and coffee, and we did the police reports.”
With his self-imposed record expunged over the breakfast, Brown eventually moved on from small-town newspapers to become a correspondent for United Press International. He also took up freelance work writing news documentaries, worked for an NBC affiliate TV station in New York and wrote promotional material for various other NBC affiliates around the country.
Once such promo was for a Bob Hope special that was to be broadcast from a new concert hall in Indianapolis, an opportunity that turned into a career break for him.
“I had heard that the acoustics in the new venue were not very good,” Brown said. “So on a whim, I wrote in the promo that Hope himself was going to be reading, that the audience shouldn’t expect (Bing) Crosby … because you know they had that rivalry.”
As it turned out, Hope was amused.
“He laughed at that part and asked who wrote it,” Brown said. “We got in touch, and I ended up scripting most of his monologue for that show. That was fun.”
Discovering that he had a knack for comedy, Brown branched out in his freelance work. Over the course of his career, he wrote material for radio and television host Arthur Godfrey, Second City Television, and even did stand-up in some of the most well-known comedy clubs in New York.
“It was terrifying,” Brown said of his stand-up days. “But I had to test my material. Other people can tell you that what you write is funny, but you really don’t know until you’re working with an audience yourself. It gave me courage.”
Brown worked the stand-up circuit in New York for about five years, with his most memorable moment occurring during a star-studded charity telethon. As he tells it, he was scheduled to go on at around 1 a.m., after some big-name celebrities such as Robin Williams and Lily Tomlin.
“Bette Middler, who was the emcee for the event, came backstage to call me on, but she couldn’t remember my name,” Brown said. “So she ended up yelling out, ‘I’m looking for the only guy that doesn’t tell any dick jokes.’ That was great. I’ll never forget that.”
All joking aside, it was Brown’s many years working with Time-Life broadcasting and ultimately Time magazine that will provide the backdrop for his talk on Sunday. Not wanting to give away any spoilers, Brown said that he will talk about some of the famous and infamous people he met during his tenure there and offer some stories from his experiences during what he refers to as “the last great years in news magazine publishing.”
“I don’t want to get into a lecture on the issues with modern media,” he was careful to point out. “There are reasons that things are different now.”
In those years, there was no internet, Brown noted, and there was a great deal of money spent on news reporting for print media.
“There were news bureaus in every major city all over the world, and correspondents lived in the areas where their bureaus were. Editors had carte blanche to make everything the best, hiring researchers, fact checkers, cartographers, photographers, all sorts of specialists. So much money was spent on print in those days that no one can afford now.”
But Brown also believes very strongly in the future of news media.
“We’ve removed the gatekeepers, so to speak. It’s kind of extraordinary. I think it has potential and it’s exciting. I don’t want to be cynical. Who knows where we’ll be five or 10 years from now.”
Brian Brown will speak at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 9, at Bethel Church. Tickets are by donation and are available in advance at the Vashon Bookshop, Vashon Community Care or vashoncommunitycare.org. All proceeds will benefit the VCC Foundation. Brown is also a regular on KVSH radio, with a show called “Brown Briefly: Less is More, More or Less.”
