Who is this Robert E. Brown?
Ontologically, of course, that is an excellent question. But on a more mundane level, one can make headway in answering it. Robert E. Brown, AKA Bob, shown here in the Summer of 1997 throwing out the first pitch for a Syracuse SkyChiefs AAA baseball game, was born in Oswego, New York, on January 9, 1947 (missing by one sharing a birth date with Elvis Presley, getting instead Richard Nixon, which makes one recall a strange meeting between the two of them. Oswego, famous for sunsets and snowstorms, may have framed his mental outlook--of course, there's the old hereditary argument, too. He spent a relatively uneventful childhood-well, there are some stories, but...--attending the elite (at least it thought of itself as elite) Campus School, and then Oswego High School, whence he graduated in 1965 with much more interest in Dylan, the Byrds and the Rolling Stones than in anything curricular.
He went on to attend the State University of New York College at Oswego, taking the correct road on a parental offer of either a new Mustang (remember, this is 1965) or a more expensive college. Bob has, surprisingly, for him, nothing bad to say about SUNY Oswego, in fact feels that it was capable of offering truly excellent undergraduate education for those looking for it.
Apart from sunsets and snowstorms, Oswego is also famous for its number of bars per capita, and undergraduates took full advantage, as did Bob. He still maintains that some of his most intersting literary and philosophical conversations took place in bars in Oswego in the 60's. Uh-huh. He, of course, did some other stuff too, like helping with programming (including a notorious booking of The Doors for a freshman orientation concert on the eve of the release of the "Strange Days" album), writing for the college newspaper, and along the way he managed to found a fraternity, Delta Chi Omega. Although he started college as a chemistry major, he graduated in 1969 with a B. A. with Honors in English.
1969, for those who don't remember, was a difficult time to be out of college. Graduate school was not draft-deferred, neither were most jobs. Bob's choice of graduate schools dwindled as his 1-A status made it hard for him to say where he'd be by their deadlines (Saigon?), and on Sept. 15 he took off for the University of Iowa, mostly because Iowa just said show up, no deadline. He regretfully left his college girlfriend behind; she reciprocated, soon taking up with a Psi Phi named Larry. Anyhow, the "choice" of Iowa was fortuitous, since it's a great university and a purely wonderful state, and in the Fall of '69 Bob got his first at-bats with the Iowa Writers Workshop softball game, then played behind the fieldhouse. Unfortunately, the first stay in Iowa was to be short--with the draft edging in, and his 194 status in the draft lottery (does anyone remember the draft lottery?) being uncertain, he started looking for a teaching job, one of the few occupational deferments still being offered. He barely finished out the semester.
Where Mr. Brown (his Hornell persona) landed was in the pretty former railroad city of Hornell, New York, in the southern tier. He taught high school English, and only recently found out via searching for the Hornell web site that he co-directed with the amazing Ron Quinlen the actor Bill Pullman in his high school play, "Don't Drink the Water." He liked Hornell, even thought about staying, but a 4-F made graduate school again possible, and he listened to its siren song, thinking (more the fool, he) that college teachers would be more respected and have more challenging students than high school teachers. I mean, where did he think college students came from? Cabbages? Hello? Anyway, the result was:
Bob returned to Iowa City in the Fall of 1972, and had relatively smooth sailing with a mind unencumbered by the draft. Well, there was the ever unpleasant Angelo Bertocci, but no big deal, and he got an M. A with Honors in 1973. Undecided about whether to stay at Iowa for the Ph. D. or move on, he spent a year back in:
Everyone is entitled to one off-line year. This was Bob's--managing a pensioners' apartment hotel, the Welland, built in 1859. He learned a lot of plumbing tricks and wrote parts of a really lame novel. He thought of going to Harvard for the Ph. D., but they unbelievably wouldn't credit the Iowa Masters (one had to take their Masters' comprehensives, regardless of another Masters degree). So in the end, he headed back to Iowa City, wiser in a few regards but not in most of the ones that mattered. I mean, by then he'd even sold off much of his vinatge psychedelia. for God's sake--items he'd spend decades getting back again. This seems indicative of his psychological (not -delic) state at the time. The year is 1973.
And it's back to the UI English Department. Well, there were courses and courses, most of which have faded in Bob's mind into blissful, foggy oblivion--a Ruskin seminar where smoking was the chief activity, a Chaucer seminar where kind old Professor Paff spent most of his teaching time asleep at the helm. Good professors--Jack Grant, John McGalliard, Florence Boos--and bad. Bob got out with as little course-work as possible, maybe even an Iowa record, but made up for it with an onerous dissertation, the 460-some page and several pound Dickensian Allegory: the Dynamics of Abstraction. Some fellow students became big names--Jane Smiley, T. Boyle--most didn't. But the big thing during these years wasn't the academics (is it ever?), but the experience of Bob's adopted second state, the Grant Wood landscapes, the beautiful summer evenings with fireflies in cornfields, the little county fairs, the charming people. And then there was the sanity-saving Iowa Writers' Workshop softball game, high-quality user-friendly softball, originally played behind the fieldhouse, later in City Park, finally at Brown Street field, also known as Happy Hollow Park. The season ran from spring thaw, early April, maybe even March, to past Hallowe'en, when sunset would end the second game with temperatures in the 40's. But it was grand--Bob remembers one hot July day in maybe 1977 or 1978 when seven games were played. Alas, the game seems not to exist any more. But between his first at-bat in 1969 and his last in 1983, Bob logged a lot of memories. He bagged his Ph. D. in 1979, tried an MBA program and found it arbitrary, oppressive and capricious, dropped out of it--he'd never even dropped a course before--and then after some odd jobs including a weird stint with Westinghouse Testing, decided to give teaching one last go, which leads to:
A teaching job, Assistant Professor, at the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls--a good little school in a very pretty college town. He taught composition and a few lit classes. Probably the most interesting bionote of this time is that his then-wife and his good friend Scott Cawelti were in a folk-singing group (the Winter-Ridge Handy) with the then Dean of the Business School, Bob Waller, later to be famous as romance novelist Robert James Waller. About the wife, the less said, the better; as one of his students once wrote:
Unless as very last resort,
Avoid the girls from Davenport.
The bottom line from Cedar Falls, though, was that Dr. Brown (his Cedar Falls persona) had had it with teaching--he liked the good parts of it a lot, but the mediocrity that bogged the middle, let alone departmental politics, were too much, so he commuted to Iowa City for a year in search of a degree in Library Science.
MLS accomplished (a 3rd degree from Iowa--George Gallup has 4), Bob returned to Oswego because of affection for the family house (1871) and barn (1869), which would have otherwise been sold. He tided himself over by ghost-writing parts of Health Care Administration: A Managerial Perspective, Lippincott, 1984, and amused himself, in contrast, by working on a novel that he is just now getting around to trying to move. I expect, especially if you are an agent or publisher, he'd even let you have a look at a part of it. But even if you're not one of the above, he'd hope you'd enjoy it. In 1984 he began working for Onondaga County Public Library, first in Reference, then as Head of Interlibrary Loan and Collection Management, then as Head of Petit Branch, finally as Administrator for System Support Services. Eventually the OCPL experience came to an end reminiscent of a movie scene involving an escapee, a fast moving car, a hairpin curve, an oil slick and a big old oak tree--you toss in the moonlit night for atmosphere.
But he still hasn't given up on Iowa, entirely. Having developed a curiosity about a very small but high quality record label, IGL Records, named after the Iowa Great Lakes region, he has taken to going to Milford, Arnolds Park, Okoboji, Spirit Lake--IGL was actually in Milford--to seek information and records. In the process, in 1997 he ventured north to Fulda, MN, to research Fulda's "all-girl band," the Continental Co-ets, who turned out one of IGL's more stunning singles, IGL 105, "I Don't Love You No More" b/w "Medley of Junk." Bob takes some pride in being probably the leading non-member authority on this band, at least partly due to the fact that in the Summer of 1998 he married the rhythm guitar player, Carolyn Behr, whom he had met on the trip up to Fulda. The Co-ets are 2002 inductees in the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Arnolds Park, a special honor since they are not an Iowa band. At left they are pictured in a shot from one of their Canadian tours: left to right--Carolyn Behr (guitar), Nancy Hofmann (bass), Mary Jo Hofmann (keyboards), Vicki Steinman (drums), Carol Goins (lead guitar and vocals). Northwest Iowa is a beautiful part of the state, not unlike New York's finger lakes, and a great place for a vacation in the off season--in the summertime, it's a vacationland, pure and simple, amusement park, water slides, you name it, and now with a lesser version of the fabled Roof Garden Ballroom. In the off-season it's laid-back and holds its beaty in reserve, with maybe even a touch of melancholy. Some say, a vacation in Iowa? In a word--um--yeah.
Oh yeah, the hairpin curve thing. To keep with the driving metaphor, OCPL has steered a rather eccentric course for the past few decades. Directors succeeded each other about as rapidly as they failed. Those who thought the allowed-resignation of one following his arrest in an Albany-area men's room to be a low point, were soon to find that they were sadly wrong. Meanwhile, the OCPL Board had no use for Dr. Brown, as they made clear on several occasions. Dunno: he wrote OCPL's Disaster Plan, its Collection Development Plan, he guided the migration from a geriatric Gaylord automation system to Dynix, he designed the first OCPL website, and much of his architecture there still exists. He was maybe too outspoken, or not sufficiently deferential to a group that expects a lot of deference--this, the same group who were provided with mountains of food at a December board meeting, and chose not to share any of it with those (unlike the Director and the Board) not "at the table," making this for those of us hungry "on the outside," a spectacle rather like feeding time at the zoo. So as the OCPL auto wandered off track, Bob got out. He was lucky; NYS Tier 1 retirement had been reinstated, he had 20 years with the System, and he turned 55, just about all at once, so he played the Retirement card. He has since become Director of the Minoa Free Library in a small Onondaga County Village, where he has succeeded in more than tripling the budget, renovating the collection, adding new formats, and designing and building a new library. He does not know what the future holds, but he's uncharacteristically optimistic about life. About OCPL, well, that's another thing. He reads a lot (hence, "Beyond the "Bestsellers"), works in his garden and on his 2 vintage tractors and his 1965 Mustang hardtop, plays lots of records (yes, records, not CDs) from a collection spanning the mid 50's to the 80's (concentrating in surf, British Invasion, and, especially, psychedelia), watches the Yankees, and tries to stay out of trouble. He is sometimes beset by odd curiosities, like the recent inquiries into the great, mad 18th century poet Christopher Smart, the history of the Isles of Shoals, the bloody 1866 Fetterman Fight (Massacre) in Wyoming, but generally he stays on a pretty even keel. He enjoys travelling with Carolyn, and on a 2002 post-retirement trip they covered ground all the way from some Western enthusiasms, the Fetterman Battlefield on a high windy rise in Wyoming and the remarkable Pompey's Pillar in Montana, to the rocky shores of New Hampshire and Maine that look out on the Isles of Shoals. It can be a good life if you can get away from the leeches and find the nice, clear water. That's that.
Thanks extended for the unusually restrained write-up by Dr. Lord George DeBruce Carruthers. Lord George appears, in a less toned-down form, in Bob's novel, One Night. Lord George is not, generally speaking, a very nice man.
From here, you could check out part of a chapter of Bob's novel, One Night.
Or you could go back to the front page.
Or surf to the current "Beyond the Bestsellers" list.
Or you could e-mail Bob.