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R. J. Brown

R. J. Brown, an adopted WWII orphan, came up in England behind three older brothers. She attended Eothen boarding school in Surrey, and then Queensgate School for Girls in London, graduating with‘O'level GCE. For four years she was Lead Alto in the London Schoolgirls Choir which sang, among other concerts each year, before the Queen in the Royal Festival Hall.

All her school life, she had been keen on lacrosse and tennis, until knee surgery sidelined her, and she took up swimming and diving. While practicing in a public pool for an all-London school try out, a fall from a crowded 30 meter board, broke an eardrum and her nerve.

After graduating at 16, she attended St. Martin's School of Arts and Crafts, where she majored in sculpture and calligraphy. On a lunch break, along Tottenham Court Road, she was offered five quid to enter a theater full of screaming girls, where a portion of A Hard Day's Night was being filmed. During school holidays, she worked in the arts and crafts department of Foyle's Bookstore and, at night, ushered at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, where foreign films were feature each month.

She joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement helping, in their movable offices, with mailings and meetings. There she met Nelson Mandella, and was later arrested, along with hundreds of others, for marching on the South African Embassy to protest his incarceration.

After two years of it, RJ's Mater so disliked the influence of art school that she shipped RJ off to Portugal, with one of her sisters, a retired Doula. In Ericeira, on the Atlantic Ocean, RJ worked in Tia Tunta's pension, ate her first fresh seafood and salads, and met her first American families. She also explored the then primitive Grotto at Fatima,and often traveled between her other aunts' homes in Carcavelos and Lisbon.

When RJ returned to London, her Mater enrolled her at the Marlborough Gate Secretarial College from which she graduated with flying colors. She left home to live in a flat in Earls Court with three other graduates, and "temped," until hired as Export Secretary at Sir Robert J. Burnett's 200 year-old distillery. When it was dismantled, in a hostile takeover, RJ decided to see the world. To save on money, she moved into a bedsitter, "temped" by day, waited tables in Stockpot restaurants by night, and worked in a laundrette on the weekends.

Unwelcome in what was left of the British Empire, due to her anti-apartheid connections, she went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square to emigrate. She set sail for America on the Castel Felice in August 1965, just before her 22nd birthday. Nine days later, she passed the Statue of Liberty, by dawn's early light, and at Penn Station boarded an overnight train to Chicago, Illinois. With interviews set up by the Vera Sugg International Placement Bureau, she got her first American job in a small industrial advertising firm, where she quickly learnt they took advantage of her immigrant naivete.

Meanwhile, she lived in a cell at the NearNorth YWCA, until she answered a notice on the bulletin board for someone wanting a live-in nanny for four children.

That December, her new family offered her a month's paid vacation, traveling by rail, to the then raw ski resort of Vail, Colorado, When her job wouldn't give her time off, RJ quit, and never regretted it. In Vail, she swam in hot pools, froze the hairs in her nose, and rode in one-horse sleighs.

Back in Chicago she got a call from her oldest brother's wife's college friend whose brother was looking for a good secretary. RJ was accepted by the Director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Midwest. Rabbi Robert J. Marx, a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, often hosted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was in town. She also reviewed books and movies with inter-racial and inter-religious themes for the temple schools. Two years later she transferred to the UAHC's Olin-Sang Union Institute which ran a year-round camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where she met the concentration camp survivor and author, Elie Wiesel.

At that time, suburban baby-boom teenagers were running away to Chicago, and many camp parents asked her to find them. Her searches took her into the Counter Culture, which she eventually joined, volunteering at Alice's Revisited, The Seed newspaper, Grace Lutheran Runaway Recovery Program, and George's LSD Rescue Squad. She expanded her mind, burnt her bra, gave birth to a daughter and a son, and became a partner in a secondhand bookstore on Lincoln Avenue, sewing clothes to earn her keep.

In 1979, fed up with commune life, she went west with her children to the Bay Area where she worked at cleaning houses, and discovered food co-ops, alternative schools and the Human Potential Movement.

Then she visited the Pacific Northwest, and moved to Port Townsend where she house-sat and cleaned houses while training as a Children's Advocate for the Jefferson County Domestic Violence Program. She ran weekly groups for children of abused mothers, and created the Stepson Walk'n'Talk Safety Course. Then, she was offered the Managing Editor position at Jonathan Collin, MD's Townsend Letter for Doctors, which she held for nine years, taking the hard copy publication from a 32 page newsletter to a 144 page illustrated magazine.

She encountered the Olympic Peninsula Women's Spiritual Movement, took training in frame drum making, and midwifed over 200. She joined WomanFest, which met in lodges along Lake Crescent; Long Dance, which convened over Summer Solstice, in the Olympic Mountains, and WOW—Wild Olympic Women, who sewed spectacular quilts to raise money for endangered salmon.

In 1993, with her children grown and flown, she met and married D. H. Brown and started her own publication, Wolf's Digest Of Alternative Medicine, a plain English magazine for patients interested in other forms of health care. After Poppa Brown suffered a mild stroke, they moved on to the West End of the Olympic Peninsula, where they built their octagon cabins in the rainforest, and took care of him in the last years of his life.

In 1998, they created RebeccasReads.com, an award-winning book review website devoted to the love of reading and writing. By 2006, this labor had so exacerbated her Veteran husband's war-related illnesses, they retired the site. Two years later, it was acquired by Irene Watson out of Texas, who revived it in a different format.

Now a grandmother, RJ lives with her husband the suspense-thriller writer D. H. Brown, writes for the Seniors Sunset Times, and manages Big River Press. She is at work on her first mystery, THE DEAD HUSBAND, as well as RAIN FOREST LIVING: Sketches from a Northwest home.

The author's website is: www.rjbrownbooks.com.

The Books of R. J. Brown

Published April 2009.

The Dead Husband
by R. J. Brown

A Sally Sees Cozy Mystery

Cleaning up dead husbands is not in SALLY COLLIER's job description so when she finds one half-buried at the bottom of his garden, her Monday morning schedule gets seriously derailed.

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Published October 2008.

Standing The Watch
by R. J. Brown

When a prominent doctor in a Seattle hospital tells Lincoln Brown he has less than three months left to live; R. J. Brown's life changes. In the 89th year of his life, Lincoln chooses to return to his cabin in the rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula where his beloved Buddy dog awaits and where he can die at home in his bed, the way he was born, in the company of his family.

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