William (Will) John Brown married Q.B. Vick, the daughter of a Texan. John P. Vick was Q.B's father who lived in Gonzales, Texas. Q.B. and Will Brown had a son Walker Vick Brown born in 1902 in Lockhart, Texas and Walker is my father. Q.B. had small breasts and was not able to nurse the baby Walker. A black woman with large breasts and surplus milk nursed Walker from birth through the age of five. After four years of marriage Will left Q.B. because in her words, "I wasn't woman enough for him."
Will visited his son Walker on weekends. One day Will drove his son to town in a horse and buggy to get him a haircut. Will kidnapped his five year old son Walker. John P. Vick, Walker's grandfather, sent detectives to find and bring back the boy. They were not successful. Will had taken his son below Texas into Mexico. The boy learned to speak Spanish with a strong Texas accent. He learned how to enjoy eating spicy foods cooked by the Mexicans. His father introduced him to the colorful people of Northern Mexico. Will became bald headed while in Mexico.
Will moved back to Texas and took his nine year old son to live with Walker's Aunt Maggie Crawford in Sweetwater, Texas. Maggie made him return a pocket knife he found in the street. She said nothing was worth keeping unless it had been earned. She said, "Whoever lost the knife might come looking for it."
At age eleven my dad went to work on a train traveling back and forth between Austin and Galveston, Texas. He was called a "candy-butch". He sold candy and gum and learned to be a salesman. He also shined shoes to earn money. He learned to love selling while mastering simple math and making change for the candy he sold.
World War One started and Walker tried to enlist at age fifteen. He was turned down by every branch of the service because he was too skinny. He stuffed himself with bananas to gain pounds but failed to make the minimum weight. Out of patriotism and the need for adventure, my dad joined the merchant marines as a cabin boy working in the galley. One of the first ships he worked on was an oil tanker steaming from Texas to New York. He became sea sick during the first storm, and the cook made him throw up in the same bucket without emptying it. After that first terrible experience he was never seasick again.
Walker Brown sailed on many oil tankers in the rough waters of the Gulf of Mexico below Texas. He claimed some of those waters had the roughest seas in the world. Those seas are now known as part of the Devil's Triangle where many ships and airplanes have been lost.
Dad told me he was on the lookout for German submarines. He sailed the world for six years on many vessels including American oil tankers, tall sailing ships, English and Dutch ships, and Chinese Junks. Once during a storm, his friend was lashing down life boats on top of the captain's cabin. A huge wave crashed over the ship and tore the man loose from the top of the cabin. He was washed overboard. This meant certain death to a seaman because in those days, sailing ships did not turn around to save anyone. There was not a chance to save people in a storm. Immediately after being swept overboard, a new wave swept back from the other direction and washed his friend back onto the ship. The young sailor grabbed the railing and lived. Another time Walker stood on the deck of a tall ship when a huge wave stretched him out like a flag as he held to a cable. The cable cut into his hands making them bloody and they were sore for many days.
Walker asked questions and studied on the ships. He learned to cook, to do algebra, geometry, and celestial navigation. In order to navigate a ship, these tools were needed. A good timepiece, a sextant, and the World Almanac. Sightings were taken on heavenly bodies. With these tools and a map, my dad could tell exactly where he was in the middle of the ocean or anywhere.
In foreign lands Walker sat on a curb watching people pass hoping to see his mother. He learned to understand and speak foreign languages in Europe and to gamble with Chinese in the Orient. He spoke to me of the "Boot" meaning Italy. He visited Paris and the Netherlands where he had a girlfriend. Returning to her after two years at sea, he learned she was married and had a baby. He was surprised and pleased when she and her husband welcomed him into their home to visit them for a few days. She gave him a picture of herself, the baby and her husband. Walker had a noble respect for women. He was 5'11", dark tanned, handsome and polite. He always said, "Yes, ma'am" or "Yes, sir." He often wore a small mustache like Clark Gable, and his curly wavey hair was shiny black. He wore expensive polished shoes made from kangaroo hide and had his fingernails manicured.
In Haiti his captain warned the sailors to stay away from the head hunters on shore. The captain told the young men to stay out of fights. The captain said, "Any of you boys get in trouble, I will chain you and put you in the brig with nothing to eat except bread. So, behave yourselves and get back to the ship before dark."
Walker and his friend went to town and spent the evening drinking rum in a small bar. It was very dark as they walked over a little bridge going back toward the ship. Suddenly a big black man grabbed my dad and threw him to the ground pressing a steel knife down toward his face. Walker was not strong, but he grabbed the large wrist stopping the blade as it scratched his throat. The man was too big and strong for the skinny teenaged seaman. The other sailor picked up a rum bottle and smashed it over the native's head knocking him unconscious. The two seamen ran all the way back to the ship. They were afraid they would be in trouble with the captain. They did not tell anyone what had happened.
Walker began signing his name using initials, W.V. Brown. At age seventeen dad received word a boiler blew up and killed his father Will Brown at a ship yard in Corpus Christy, Texas.
Walker made First Mate before he quit sailing at age twenty one. At that time he received the property his father had willed to him. The will included twenty acres of cotton land in Lockhart, Texas where dad had spent time from age nine to eleven. The land has a running creek with oil in the water. In 1935 Dad sold the land to his Uncle Charles Brown for one thousand dollars so dad could buy a business in Anaheim, California. I visited the site in Lockhart in 1993 and noticed several oil wells next to the property.
I visited two of Walker's cousins living in a convalescent hospital. One was a bright lady almost ninety who remembered Walker and his father, Will. She said, "Walker was a rascal who was always getting in trouble. He used to climb up on the bales of cotton and jump off. He wasn't allowed to do that. In those days the men didn't have much entertainment. For a good time the boys and men would can a dog. They tied a can to a dog's tail and watched him run. That's how they had fun."
Walker and his mother Q. B. Vick Babb were reunited by a lawyer in Phoenix, Arizona who read the will after Walker was twenty one. Walker learned he had a half sister and brother, Vonnie and Vick Babb. Dad helped them by sending his mother money regularly until the two half siblings graduated high school.
Walker worked in Phoenix as a barber where he met my mother Alberta Wyatt. Walker was popular. With several barber chairs empty he often had customers waiting for him to cut their hair or give them a shave. He used a strait edge razor and knew how to keep it sharp. Alberta later said he was a very good salesman.
Alberta said, "He talked and sold each customer on how great a job he was doing while cutting as he pleased, not as they instructed him. They liked him. The girls in town thought he was cute, and my sister told me about him. We met the day he gave me a haircut."
They married within weeks. It was the middle of the roaring twenties. Walker had a new car, played pitcher on the town baseball team, and he shot in the low eighties playing golf.
Alberta said Walker was not good at fixing his own cars but he learned to repair sewing machines. He had quit the barber business because the hair was getting in his lungs making him sick. He said, "I learned to be a salesman the hard way. I would go with a salesman and hide under a porch where I could listen to his sales pitch. I learned to sell by listening. I learned to fix things by taking them apart and laying out the parts in order. That way I knew how to put them back together right. I am proud of fixing a man's grandfather clock the jewelers said couldn't be repaired. I took it all apart, cleaned and oiled the parts, and when I put it back together it kept perfect time."
In 1934 Alberta and Walker Brown moved from Phoenix, Az. to Anaheim, California with their four children Edith, me, Vicky, my brother two years younger than me, and Teddy two years younger than Vic. Within three years Tommy and Ron were born in Anaheim. Dad opened the Singer Sewing Machine shop in the middle of town. Later he took Uncle Walt Reinhardt as a partner and gave him 40% of the business.
Once Dad and Uncle Walt went fishing from shore, casting from the slippery kelp covered rocks north of Laguna Beach near Corona Del Mar. Walker threw the line with a heavy sinker and bait out past the breakers to the seaweed where the water was deep. He hooked a small perch and was winding it in when a larger fish struck the perch and was hooked also. Dad fought the fish until he felt tired. Then Uncle Walt took over for twenty minutes. Walker took back the pole and finally landed the big fish onto the slippery rocks. The fish had fought for an hour. He showed the fish to other fishermen but nobody could identify it. It was three feet long and perhaps was a giant halibut. It was as long as my four year old brother Tommy.
Walker always walked fast and drove full speed in his little 1936 mini sedan Willis. One morning he ran out and jumped in the car. It was parked in front of our house at 1011 E. Broadway. Three year old Tommy stood on the running board holding the door handle. He wanted to kiss Daddy good-bye but was too short to see in the window. The car had no muffler and you could hear the motor a mile away. Dad took off going thirty miles an hour with the little boy's bathrobe flying in the breeze. Luckily a neighbor saw this and chased them down with his car and nobody got hurt. Sometimes dad drove Mom, Edith, Johnny, Vicky, Teddy, Tommy, and Ronny in the little car going to the beach. He drove seventy miles per hour. four of us boys sat on the back seat, and dad sat in front with Edith while Mom held baby Ron. When we came to a big dip in the road our stomachs turned over. It was as much fun as a roller coaster ride at the Long Beach Pike amusement park.
Dad worked hard almost every day at his Singer Sewing Machine store next door to the Anaheim Theater on Center Street. When he walked down the street we ran to keep up with him. I never saw him stroll. He was always in a rush. His Texas accent was there when he spoke Spanish, but his knowledge of Latin and German languages helped him in business. The folks who were Jews were fooled into thinking my dad was Hebrew. When I walked down town everyone said hello to me because we six kids all looked alike. If they knew one of us, they thought they knew us all.
Dad had little sense of humor. One April fools day I replaced his coffee can in the cupboard with one filled with dirt. He didn't even say anything about it or ask who did it. But when he wanted to punish me he used a wide double razor strap to whip me. It made a lot of noise but didn't do any damage. He always said it hurt him worse than me. I never heard him swear or act crude. We didn't learn any dirty jokes from Dad.
Before World War Two when I was ten years old, dad bought a car from St. Boniface Catholic church. It was a big car, and Dad thought it would do nicely for his big family of eight. The car was a dark green shiny twelve cylinder limousine. The seat cushions were a type of gray velvet with a soft knap. There were two rings on the side walls that held bud vases for flowers. The two back seats held six people, and there were two jump seats that faced backwards in front of the back seats. Two sliding glass doors separated the front from the back seats for privacy, and speakers in the back were radio controlled so you could speak to the driver.
Dad was proud of the 1929 Lincoln Cadillac, and he made sure we kept it clean. He drove us around in the car for a few weeks and found out it burned up too much gas. He got 35 miles per gallon in his tiny Willy car and probably only 6 mph with the new limousine. But if we had kept the car, it would be worth a million today.
When my sister Edith was sixteen, he let her go out with a boy on a date. They came home and parked in front of our house after ten at night and we were all in bed. Dad peeked out the window and saw them talking in the car. After a few minutes he went to the door and called her to come in immediately. My sis was embarrassed but knew her dad cared about her. Dad was a Victorian.
Edith was a popular singer and tap dancer in Orange county. She had her own radio program in Santa Ana called Edith Browne Sings. Dad sponsored the show and Mom used some of us kids to read a script Mom wrote about the six Brown kids. It was a sit com before television became popular. We always seemed to have some of my mother Alberta's relatives living with us. Times were hard during the great depression, but I never heard W.V. Brown complain about sharing his house and food with Mom's sisters and their kids. When they needed work, Walker gave them jobs. He was also fast on the trigger when it came to paying the check or helping out a hobo by giving him work in exchange for food.
Walker was active in the Masonic Temple. He served the Y.M.C.A. as a Friendly Indian leader teaching seven year old boys. He taught his six children to fight with boxing gloves. He said we should not start fights, but to never back down from one.
After supper dad listened to his radio turned on loud to drown out noise from us kids. Alberta said he would ruin his ears. He listened to short wave radio. Hitler spoke German and Mussolini Italian, and dad said he understood them.
At age thirteen I was practicing pole vaulting in the back yard when my eleven year old brother Vic did something to annoy me. I socked him on his arm and made him cry. Dad was watching and he called me over and shocked me by punching me on the arm. He had never used a fist on me before. "Now, you know what it's like!"
Dad had always allowed us to use the pecking order system to settle disputes. Up until then I had believed I was doing the right thing when I bossed my brothers. After Dad socked me, I decided to stop being a bully who had to keep his younger brothers in line. I decided to let them alone and just be a brother. The next time I saw Vicky do something wrong like smoking a cigarette, I let him alone. Dad wanted peace, but after Pearl Harbor, he tried to join the Navy. They told him to stay home and raise his family. He took the rubber floor mats out of his car and donated them to the scrap drive to help win the war.
Dad and I volunteered as airplane spotters in a tower working Sundays from midnight to dawn. We spotted planes together. I learned to drink coffee and to drive his little Willy car. We almost became friends. Dad was too Victorian to be a friend to his sons. He was an example.
Dad kept smoking cigarettes even after his doctor said they were killing him. He became ill at age forty one. He spent a year in bed giving me my first experience caring for the sick. I learned about bed pans, laxatives, and morphine. He suffered from heart congestion that caused lymph edema. He stored water in his entire body. They called it dropsy and his belly and legs swelled to double their normal size. Mom used a sterile needle to puncture the skin on the front of his thighs to cause the clear fluid to weep. Cloth towels and rags were used to sop up the tissue fluid. Mom washed the towels and we used them over again. She nursed him at home, and Edith helped. Mom did not hire a private nurse. It was an exhausting year for her, and it prevented Edith from using the scholarship she had won to attend college.
One Sunday morning, the day after dad finally gave in and let the preacher baptize him, he spoke to my sister Edith. He told her, "Don't worry, everything is going to be all right."
That afternoon he told her his pain was gone and he felt relaxed and peaceful. Then, he died. I felt guilty not to have been there. I was at the movies. At his funeral I noticed many of his friends from his men's club crying. I hoped they were not feeling sorry for us. I knew we would make something of ourselves. Mom wouldn't accept welfare.
At age forty three Walker Vick Brown was buried in Anaheim Cemetery.