When Holton F. “Brownie” Brown died the other day, at 79, he got some lovely obituary notices from Fred Rasmussen in The Sun and Antero Pietila on Facebook.
Pretty good for a fellow who always looked as if he’d been scraped up from a Bawlamer street corner and found himself, against all odds, planted in the heart of The Sun’s sometimes-snooty newsroom.
He was there for decades. He had a high school education (Baltimore City College) and some military background (Air Corps), but he dressed like an unmade bed, and he found himself surrounded by Ivy League graduates who talked of their “careers” and dressed like tax accountants.
And yet in some way, he was the heart of the paper’s newsroom, because he was real Baltimore, working class, scruffy, feeling slightly out of step with the slightest signs of pretentiousness.
And he was settled in for the duration, not looking to make his quick mark here so he could further his career on some bigger, more prestigious paper.
At the first flurry of snowflakes outside The Sun’s newsroom, you could hear Brownie, rushing about, declaring, “It’s the White Death.”
The cry was somewhere between a warning and a parody, a first-alert meant as comic relief: “Don’t worry,” the cry implied, “we’ve got this thing in hand.”
Brownie gave off that kind of vibe: Whatever the catastrophe of the day, we can handle it here at The Sun. We’re pros, and we’ve been through this before.
And that’s what made his presence a kind of contradiction. He never wrote anything that landed in the paper. He was a kind of the “World’s Oldest Copyboy.”
But in conversation, he was textured and insightful, and he knew history and folk lore, especially Baltimore’s. He handled the phones in The Sun’s newsroom and took overnight copy. He’d been around the block a few times and knew a real story when a hint of it arrived.
In Brownie’s time, The Sun’s newsroom was fat and filled up with people. At its peak, there were more than 400 reporters, editors and photographers there. Today, as newspapers around the country fight for survival, The Sun’s newsroom is reportedly down to 80 people — for now.
But its new owners, the Alden venture capital outfit, are known for their bottom-line approach to journalism. Cut costs by cutting human beings from their livelihoods.
Today, there wouldn’t be room for a fellow like Brownie. There’s barely room for anyone who cares about news, or about Baltimore.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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