100-year-old Jacksonville man says do what you love, and adventure will follow
Wesley Brown, known throughout his life as "Brownie," was born 100 years ago, during the time of President Taft. Like anyone who's made it this far, he's asked to share his secret for a long life.
He hardly pauses. "Never drink alone. Never sleep alone. Never stay up any later than you can get somebody to stay up with you."
He might also add this: Do what you love for a living.
For Brown, that came down to two things: Flying airplanes and joining the circus.
In 1927, he was 17, too young for the Army Air Corps. No problem: He lied about his age. He was too skinny, too. So the recruiter gave him 50 cents and told him to buy as many bananas as he could. Brown stuffed the bananas in him, one after the other, then was weighed again. Heavy enough this time.
In 1956, he was 46, too old, many would say, to take up the circus life. But he traveled from Jacksonville up to Wisconsin, to the Circus World Museum, and did just that. By his mid-60s, he was manager of the Great American Circus.
Both occupations are rooted in his boyhood years, before he was yet 10. That's when his family, dirt-floor poor, lived near the fairgrounds in Columbia, S.C.
Ringling Brothers would come there, and Barnum & Bailey, too. His father, a streetcar driver, knew a guy from Barnum & Bailey, and they would sit on the front porch, chew tobacco and tell stories. Young Wesley listened in, and he poked around the circuses, too, fascinated by the animals and the glamorous performers.
"That's when I got stuck," he says.
And he was a kid playing on the fairground - 8, maybe 9 - when a plane buzzed overhead, then rolled to a stop on the grass. Wesley ran up and peppered the pilot with questions.
"He took a shine to me and took me for an airplane ride one afternoon," Brown says. Wesley sat in the cockpit, his hair flying in the breeze, having neglected to get approval from his parents for this new adventure.
"They didn't know," he says, "until I came running back to the house and told them."
At home in the circus
Brown met Dorothy Harrold in the summer of 1939. He was giving seaplane rides from the Trout River. She was 17, a waitress at an oyster bar, sitting there on a dock.
"I'm going to marry her," he told a friend.
Six months later, that's just what he did. After - of course - suggesting she go with him for a ride. She said sure, and showed up with her little sister, Barbara, as chaperone. Then he took them down the Trout River, flying low over the water and the trees.
Dorothy's reaction to the hotshot pilot? She laughs. "Oh, the stars," she exclaims, more than 71 years later.
The Browns live in the same house they've had since 1959, a country place off Lem Turner Road, down a long driveway. There's a barn-like workshop in the back where, in retirement, he built full-sized circus wagon wheels and other circus props, quitting that when he got to 82.
They raised two daughters: Lynn, who lives in Jacksonville, and Gale, who lives in Williston. When the girls were little, the family lived in Southside Estates. That's where their dad built a trapeze and circus swing in the backyard, and a tree fort with a cable attached so they could slide to the ground in the circus costumes their mom made for them.
Sure, their dad would have liked them to become circus performers, Lynn Brown says. But he wasn't one to pressure them into it. A good thing: Though they saw plenty of circuses while growing up, the girls did not share their father's fascination. |
