The Mysteries of Brownie the Airline Captain

My friend Keith's father, Exline Brown, is the big man in the back row, fourth from left. The Browns lived up the street from us in Los Altos, and Brownie was a glamorous airline captain. The newsletter is from 1972, when Brownie should have been 67 years old, though his army record might beg to differ.

Thanks to several readers of my blog I've been able to gather more information about my childhood friend Keith Brown's father, Exline Brown.  One woman wrote to say her father owned a flying service and had taught  Brownie (as he was known) to fly. 

Through another site I met Tom Bailey, a former coworker of Brownie's at Hughes Airwest, who is keeping a website and archive for Airwest families. From him, I found the newsletter, above, that included the only picture I have of my lost friend's father.

Little Boy Lost Part II: A Visit to King City

The late afternoon sun casts my shadow on my friend Keith's marker as I take this photograph.

I went to visit my childhood friend Keith today. He was an adopted boy who lived just down the street from me when I was a child and was my very best friend. Then, his mother died of cancer. Then, his father remarried. Then, his stepmother wanted a new home across town. The summer they moved, he died in a swimming pool accident. He was just eleven years old.

My family and I were away on a summer vacation when it happened. We missed his funeral and we never spoke of it. I tried to go see his father, whom I also loved, when we returned from vacation, but Brownie (that's what we called this World War II-hero-turned-PSA-pilot, though his name was really Exline) couldn't come into the living room to see me. I could hear this big bear of a man crying. After that, the Brown family, no longer living near to us in the tiny world of a child, seemed to vanish from our lives.

Since I've returned to my home state, I've wanted to visit Keith's grave. I looked it up on the Internet and discovered it is in King City, where his father's family was from. His mother, Elma, is buried there too.

King City, California is about 120 miles from Los Altos, so it hasn't been easy to carve out the time to make the four-hour round trip to visit Keith. But on Friday, a really nice mechanic told me the Swedish Car flunked her California Automobile Registration Vehicle Emissions Test (aka the "smog test") simply because I hadn't been doing the correct thingee with the gas cap. Now that he had demonstrated for me what I should do, he said, I needed to put about a hundred miles on the SC to recycle her computer so she'd pass the ST.

Good chance for a Road Trip to King City. Highway 101--El Camino Real--the King's Highway--heads right down there. It began as a trail that connected all the missions founded by old Junipero Serra himself. I used to travel on that ribbon of highway quite often when I went to college in Southern California.

Across this field and to the left you can see the smoke obscuring the Santa Cruz Mountains in the distance.

It was a smokey ride south into the Salinas Valley. Down past the National Steinbeck Center and the farms and the new housing developments. The fields are green this time of year and the hills are golden. But, there is a forest fire burning in the Santa Cruz mountains and ten square miles of dense growth up there is in flames. It brought a haze to everything and you could smell it in the car.

Before you get to King City, the floor of the valley begins to rise, and you enter the edge of the foothills. A good place for a farming center. I took the Broadway exit and the cemetery was just two-tenths of a mile down the road. Broadway was a somewhat optimistic name for the main street of this little town. It was a warm, windy, dusty place on this Sunday afternoon in August.

The Swedish Car pauses near Broadway in King City, California.

I'm glad I had looked up the cemetery on the Internet and found the actual location of the Brown plots. By the time I arrived at the King City Cemetery at 4:45 p.m., the place was closed and the gate for vehicles was locked. There was no one on hand to answer questions, if a person had needed help. But, lucky for me, they keep the pedestrian gate open after hours, so I was able to park by the gate, off this dusty road, and walk in. I found myself in a lovely place.

The King City Cemetery dates back to the 1870s, and is meticulously maintained by Monterey County, California.

I looked at the big cemetery and down at my little map and wondered if it would be hard to do this thing. One of the plot maps I had printed out was very small, and one showed only the two Brown plots, so I had to merge the two in my mind, survey the territory like one of those soldiers on a map exercise, and make a sortie. I walked down one row and didn't find them, and then walked back, and just where the map said they would be, the two markers appeared. Keith and his mother Elma were buried side-by-side beneath identical grave stones.
There was a rose, in bronze, on each of the markers. I remembered, then, how Keith's mother had loved her rose garden. Brownie and his family had remembered Elma and Keith with love and grace and dignity.

I returned to the car, drove to the nearby Safeway, and bought some flowers. I would like to have given both Keith and his mother some roses. But the wind in King City was blowing at about 15 knots and I didn't think a bouquet of roses in a vase would last very long, at least not in an upright position. So I bought a happy yellow mum and brought it back to them.



I set the mum down and rose. And then it hit me. I had not planned it this way at all, but I had come to visit the cemetery where Keith was buried, exactly fifty years to the month from the day Keith died. On that warm August day, half a century ago this year, we lost him. It had been just the time for me to stop by and see that all was well. "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me."
II Samuel 12:23

My friend Keith, my sister Kimberly, then me (posing as usual), and, at far right, our friend Gene, on a visit to the San Francisco Zoo. Keith is waving, so we've caught his hand in motion, frozen for all time at that happy moment. I learned just recently from his death certificate that he was born in San Francisco.

King City, California, Cemetery

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Little Boy Lost: The Ghost of Best Friend Keith

My best friend Keith, at left, my sister Kim, Robin, and my sister's best friend Gene, on a birthday outing to the Fleischacker Zoo in San Francisco. They sure dressed us up in those days!

I've wanted to write about my childhood friend Keith for a long time and this week, writing about my father's remote controlled model airplane, the Sparky-K, I came across a picture of the two of us, long long ago, with my Dad. Keith was my best friend growing up and his bittersweet story has haunted my life.

Keith lived just up the street and he and I were close in age, so it was probably inevitable that we would be friends. Or, it may have been that I always felt Keith somehow needed my protection: odd for a girl to say about a boy, but I was boisterous where he was shy and we became inseparable.

His father was a big bear of a man--dashing, handsome, a man who loved to laugh and who was born with oodles of élan. He had been a fighter pilot during World War II and he was, when we were children, an airline pilot--quite a glamorous job in those days. He had the improbable name of Exline Brown, but everyone called him "Brownie." He adored me and treated me as if I were Keith's sister, the little girl he'd always wanted. Where my parents were cool and distant, Brownie was warm and affectionate. He thought up tasks for us to do and he called me Towhead.

Brownie had a Chevrolet station wagon that was two-tone red and white and he had a fishing boat he had painted red and white to match. Once, he had Keith and I help him clean his garage (it was the immaculate garage of a meticulous flier) and I remember he pointed to a bucket and asked me to take it out of the garage so he could sweep. I reached down to pick it up. It weighed more than I did! He gave me a wink. It was a bucket full of fishing weights and when I found I couldn't budge it he reached down and picked it up with one hand. No wonder we adored him.

The elephants get the most ink in this shot on the same birthday outing to the zoo: Robin at left, sister Kimberly, Keith, and friend Gene, clowning it up.

Keith was adopted. It wasn't a secret. I think Keith told me himself. His mother Elma was thin and fragile and Keith had no brothers or sisters. I remember his mother Elma as ethereal--almost the opposite of Brownie. Where he exuded happiness and good health, she looked liked porcelain--as if you could see the light through her skin and hair. She dressed beautifully every day and wore a neatly-ironed apron when she came to the door to call Keith in from play. She was very nice and loved Keith dearly, but there was a shadow over her that even a child could see. We were told she had asthma and she was often ill.

The year I was six, Elma's health deteriorated. Keith's father was often away with his airline job and Keith spent most of his time at our house with me. His mother's asthma had gotten worse, they said, and she was often bedridden. Doctors came and went. My mother asked Keith to eat dinner with us some evenings and that was pretty unusual.

One morning, the phone rang before school, also unusual. When my mother put down the telephone she looked worried. Keith and I always met on the corner to walk to school together. She took me aside.

"Keith's mother has died," she said. "Brownie called to say he would tell Keith when he gets home from school today. Please don't say anything to him. His father wants his mother to be gone before he breaks the news to Keith." Keith's mother had had lung cancer, not asthma, and though I didn't understand then what "gone" meant, I do now.

It was an awful day. For a child to keep such a dark secret from a best friend was awful. I said very little. My mother even came to school at lunchtime to see me and make sure everything was okay. It was okay. I hadn't said anything. But it was a terrible day.

And then it became a terrible year. Because Brownie was gone so much, he hired a series of housekeepers to care for Keith. And Keith was miserable and absolutely awful to all of them. He cried often and shouted at the housekeepers that he hated them--of course he hated them, they were not his mother--and he stomped his feet a lot and begged his father to come home. I did what I could to comfort him, but there wasn't much I could do. Imagine what his father must have gone through. He had lost his wife and had to work to support his son. Flying had been his life. And now it was keeping him away from the son who needed him.

After a year, Keith had what sounded like good news. His father was going to get married again and he, Keith, was going to have a new, older sister. Brownie had known the widow of a pilot friend for many years and I'm sure he felt that marrying her was a solution to the seemingly impossible problems he faced with Keith.

Keith was intrigued. He loved the idea of a new mother and a new sister. I remember Brownie and his bride going to the Caribbean on their honeymoon. They brought Keith and me back some some maracas.

But the honeymoon was a short one with Keith and his new stepmother. He wasn't used to having a sibling, favored by the new mother figure, and he wasn't used to sharing his father with this stranger. He made life difficult for himself and his family with his misery and grief.

Unfortuantely, just that year, my own mother's health took us to Phoenix for one winter school term. Keith, who had been forced to adjust to death, the absence of his father, and the addition of two strangers in his home, had now lost his best friend. In desperation, his father bought the family a new home and it became another agonizing adjustment for Keith.

So when we returned to Los Altos nine months later, Keith was no longer a neighbor. I wanted to go over and see him at his new house, but we had a family vacation planned and Mom and Dad said we could go over and see Keith when we got home.

We went on vacation. Then, at my grandmother's house in Spokane, my parents received a special delivery letter: Keith had drowned in a swimming pool accident. I remember my mother telling me and I remember how unreal it seemed. I hadn't seen Keith in ten months and I was never to see him again. There were no goodbyes. It was an impossible concept for a nine-year-old child. Keith had vanished from my life.

The funeral was over when we got home, but Brownie called and asked if I would come over with my Mom to see him. I knew Brownie loved me and I wanted to see him too. I thought perhaps he could explain this sad thing to me--I expected a lot from adults back then. The Browns new house wasn't far away but instead of letting me ride my bike, my mother put me in the car and we drove to see Brownie.

It was a pretty house and Keith's stepmother answered the door and asked us in. She served us lemonade and cookies. The house was dark. It was a sunny summer day, but all the blinds were closed and the dark room made me shiver. And then, I heard a sound I shall never forget. I heard Brownie sobbing in the next room. Big, hearty, handsome Brownie was crying. We sat and sat, but he was unable to come out and see me. Finally we went away. Brownie had not been able to leave his room.

I hadn't thought about Keith in many years when I came home one year to Los Altos during a difficult time in my own life. I was all grown up and I was getting a divorce and I was hurting. In my family, if you are hurting, you are expected to hide it. I kept it in.

One day, I reached for a book on a bookshelf in the house my parents had owned since I was a child and as I opened the book, a letter fell out and drifted to the floor at my feet. I picked it up. It was a letter from Keith that he had written to me during the nine months my family and I were in Phoenix, the year of so many sad changes for this young boy.

"Dear Robin:

We miss you. My Dad says to say "hi" to all you girls. I hope you will come home soon.

Your friend,
Keith"

How that letter got into that book and how I happened to select that book at that very time in my life is a mystery. It was as if Keith reached out to me to remind me that I had once given him my unconditional love, and that he had returned it and that it had never really gone away. Perhaps that kind of love doesn't disappear and is only transmuted.

I've thought for many years that young Keith's life had become too painful for him to endure and that his death at the age of eleven was a release for him. The letter that fell at my feet that day touched me, because it suddenly made it clear to me that my own pain was not as his had been. Mine was endurable and I would recover.

You never lose a friend like Keith. Perhaps I had only been able to help him a tiny bit long ago, but that tiny bit of love had connected us. And perhaps, just when I was in need, he had reached out to me as a way of saying thanks.





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