This is Charlie
Charles Winslow Brown
Get Storied
Created March/April 2024
Charlie was our first Get Storied, and we learned a few things:
It took exactly one month from our first interview with Charlie to holding the finished product in our hands.
Stories, memories and details came into focus as we talked to family members and sent multiple draft versions around for review.
Meeting Charlie and learning about his life was an honor. We love the mission of Get Storied — to preserve stories and memories for now and for the future.
Ancestry
Charles Winslow Brown, known to all as Charlie Brown, was born August 17, 1939 at Hilo Memorial Hospital on the Island of Hawaii. It was 20 years before Hawaii became a state. His mother, Jessie Brown (maiden name Evans), hailed from Kansas.
Jessie was an active member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, connected as a descendant of William Bradford, who traveled to America on the Mayflower in 1620. Another ancestor was the brother of Edward Winslow, also on the Mayflower. Jessie said her family could trace its roots to Charlemagne, the famed ruler and uniter of Western Europe, who died in 814.
Jessie was lured to Hawaii by her sister, Charlie’s aunt Mary, who was the head of the Lapahoehoe School, situated along a line of cliffs on the Eastern side of the island.
“Mary said, ‘Jessie, you have to come here because there all these bachelors, Scotsmen who work at the plantation.’ My father was one and that's how they met,” Charlie said.
Auntie Mary went on to China to find a husband, Wallace, said Charlie. Wallace's father was the English instructor for the Imperil family. Wallace grew up playing with future Empire Hirohito.
Jessie, who had gotten her teaching degree from Kansas State College, taught at the Lapahoehoe School on Hawaii and later at Roosevelt High School in Honolulu. She married Charlie’s father, James Davidson Brown, on July 21, 1923.
James Davidson Brown was born January 21, 1898 in Cupar Fife, Scotland.
Charlie said his dad and a friend, both 16, lied about their ages, adding two years in order to enlist in Scotland’s Black Watch infantry battalion during World War I. James thought he’d be back home after a few months, but wound up serving for four years and was wounded twice. He didn’t talk much about his war years, at least not to his youngest child.
“The only story that he told was in the trenches,” said Charlie. “They were being shelled in the trenches, and one of the individuals that was close to him was killed. On the other side of the guy killed was William Robertson.” William F. Robertson and James would later become close friends in Hawaii. Uncle Robbie, as Charlie knew him, was Charlie's godfather. Robbie's son was Charlie's best childhood friend, Ian.
After the war, James planned go to the University of Edinburgh, but there were no jobs in Scotland, even for college graduates. Many of the Scots at that time left, including James, who followed his brother John McDonald Brown (known as Pat) to Hawaii in December 1919. James went to work for the Laupahoehoe Sugar Company.
Early Years
Jessie was 42 when Charlie was born. She thought she had a tumor, and was shocked to learn she was 6 months pregnant. Charlie’s sister, Wilma, was 11 years older; brother James Brown was nine years older.
Charlie said he was the only white baby born at Hilo Memorial Hospital, Hawaii, in August 1939. Being a small baby, his nickname “started as the White Midget, turned into Widget and settled as Widg,” which he answered to all the way through high school and still to this day with his extended family.
In his first years, Charlie lived with his parents and siblings on the Laupahoehoe Sugar Company plantation.
At that time, according to archives from the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, the plantation had about 6,400 acres of cane land, cultivated by some combination of homesteaders, planters and the company. The property had a hospital, built in 1937; parks; community halls and clubhouses. Of the 881 people who worked there, 60% were from the Philippines and about 25% were American citizens.
In 1942, the family moved to Honolulu, where James became manager of the Honolulu plantation department of the Theo H. Davies Company, one of the largest plantation operators on Hawaii at the time. That’s where he met Uncle Robbie, who was another Theo H. Davies manager.
Charlie, interviewed at age 84, had some memories of those early years, including the time, when he was four or five years old, when he walked in front of a car, got hit and broke his leg. “That would have been in December, because I remember I was in the hospital during Christmas,” he said.
When he was even younger, he remembered: “One evening, my mother was looking for me. She had put me to bed and went back into the bedroom to tuck me in and I wasn't there. So, oops, where did Widg go?
“My parents went outside and called and called and all of a sudden they heard this little tiny voice, saying, ‘Here I am. I'm sleeping with the chicky birds.’ I was in the chicken coop. I had been bathed and was in clean jammies and I was in the chicken coop, which was not the cleanest place. So that's how they found me. I had to have a bath again, get clean jammies. I didn’t get a spanking because I was too young. That’s a story my mother told me.”
Charlie remembered that Waikiki Beach was lined with barbed wire during World War II to protect against a Japanese invasion from the ocean. During the war, air raid sirens would sound every month, as a test, and his family would go to a neighbor’s underground garage, which served as an air raid shelter.
“Everybody had a gas mask,” he said. “Because I was a little kid, my gas mask was a suit. It was like a big pillowcase that went completely over my head and had a little plastic window so I could see out of it. And it had two bunny ears on it. That was my gas mask. I had to put that on kind of like a Halloween costume.”
He also remembered the end of World War II, in 1944. “We were down at what they call the Iolani Palace, one of the government buildings in Honolulu, and the service personnel were pretty well imbibed at that time,” he said. “I was a little kid and I sort of stuck my hands through the gate there. And they started putting money in my hands.”
Charlie spent his summers from 1946 to 1955 back on the Hamakua coast with Uncle Robbie and his best buddy Ian. They split their time between the plantation house in Paauilo and oceanfront Ali'i Drive in Kauila-Kona. “Those were the best days of this young boy’s life,” he said.
"A couple of times each summer we would go up country to Kukaiau Ranch on the slope of Mona Kea to ride horses and just go out with the cowboys to round up cattle or pig hunt,” Charlie said.
“I recall pig-hunting on horseback. Pigs were a nuisance, and hunting them was a popular sport. Dogs would track the pigs and hold them. When the dogs took off after a pig, the horses took off. You didn’t have to do anything. They really took off.” He would have been 13 or 14 years old, he said.
Another time, he was spear-fishing with Ian and “I happened to look down and there was a 10-foot tiger shark that was circling around us,” he said. “I grabbed Ian by the hair and I told him there was the biggest shark you’ve ever seen just below us and we should get the heck out of there, which we did. The worst part of it was we had to go out the next day to get our spear guns, because we left them there. Now that was a little spooky situation, but that’s the way it was. We got them. That’s the only time we ran into a shark in our diving experiences.”
Charlie described his parents as having a “good relationship,” and said his mother was the disciplinarian of the family. “She had a graduate degree in discipline,” he said.
“In Kansas, her mother, my grandmother, was the disciplinarian also. She would say, ‘Jessie, you go outside and cut a switch. Because if you don't cut a good switch, I will cut one for you.’ And they got spanked on the backs of their legs with a willow switch.”
Charlie remembers getting spanked “on occasion,” but says his mother usually doubled up the belt, so it made a lot of noise but didn’t hurt much.
“My brother when he was 8 or 9, back on the plantation, decided the way to cure this spanking thing was to take care of the spanking item,” said Charlie.
“He got my father’s razor strop, which was the long leather strap that my father sharpened his razor on, and he cut it into pieces, thinking that would solve the spanking problem. It did not solve the spanking problem.
“My mother took off after him to teach him a lesson. He started running around the house outside, and my mother chased him. After the second loop around the house my mother decided to stop and wait for him. When he turned the corner, he ran right into my mother. And my mother said he probably didn’t sit comfortably for the next two days because she really laid into him, and she didn’t double up the belt. She just found a good belt and whacked the hell out of him.”
Charlie was not a sailor, but he remembers going out on the water with his brother, Jim, who was a sailor for life. “I recall my brother getting really angry with me once, when I was about nine or 10, because I said a swear word. He raised hell with me, saying that I was just a kid and too young to be swearing already. You had to be older to swear.”
Charlie liked to play cribbage with his father, who never lost his Scottish brogue. “He would come home after work and have his scotch and water cocktail before dinner. Then he and I would play cribbage until dinner and after dinner we all went to bed fairly early. I was pretty good at cribbage. I once double skunked my father [won by at least 60 points] twice in a row, which is something you don't want to do to a person that you really like. But we had a good time playing.”
Charlie remembered that his parents would host parties during World War II. “We would have service personnel come up for cocktails and whatnot, once a month or something like that,” he said. “People would imbibe possibly way too much booze, and some of them actually fell into the indoor fish pond.” He also remembers two family dogs, Rory and Casey, and a cat, Inky-Dink.
Hawaii was different then, Charlie said. Laid back, not touristy and hectic like it is now. People didn’t lock their doors.
An obituary published November 6, 1955, in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald shows that Charlie’s dad died of a heart attack at age 57, when Charlie was just 15. James had been promoted just months earlier to executive vice president of Theo H. Davies & Co., Ltd.
Charlie stayed in Hawaii through high school, then went to Michigan State University to study forestry. He chose the school in part because it offered in-state tuition for residents of Hawaii.
The summer before he started college, he and his mother traveled through Europe for almost two months, he said. By then, his older siblings were out of the house, and his sister Wilma was married to Robert Vorfeld, who was also in the sugar industry in Hawaii.
Charlie said it was common for people to leave Hawaii after high school, but it was still a big change for him. “I had never seen snow before,” he said, and certainly didn’t have the right clothes or footwear for the weather. “I had a pair of slippers [Japanese thongs, called Zori], a pair of loafers and a pair of tennis shoes. And that was it.” Charlie is famous for wearing his Zori year-round, even in the snow.
He remembered being out one night and watching the reading on the bank’s electronic time and temperature sign go from minus 12 to minus 17.
Charlie had started competitive swimming when he was 10, and was captain of the swim team in high school. He swam backstroke, and was offered a scholarship to swim at the University of Minnesota. By that time, though, he was tired of competitive swimming.
Carol Anne Stevenson
When he was at Michigan State, he returned to Hawaii for the summer to work for the Division of Forestry and Wildlife. “That’s when I met my first wife,” he said. “She was a Girl Scout counselor, and we would take the Girl Scouts for hikes.”
That was Carol Anne Stevenson. They met in 1958 and were married on August 19, 1961.
Charlie spent his second summer of college working at Pacific Clay Products, a job Carol's father had secured for him. He lived at the Whittier Hotel. "All to be near Carol," he said.
After two years in Michigan, Charlie transferred to Oregon State to be closer to Carol. She was planning to transfer to Oregon to be with Charlie, but after majoring in partying he “was not invited back,” he said.
Carol was a California girl and was attending University of California, Los Angeles. Her mother, Dorothy Inez Little Stevenson, who died in 2004, had been a Girl Scouts leader in the Bay Area.
Charlie was close with his father-in-law, William Garrow Stevenson, who worked for IBM his entire career.
Bill Stevenson was born in San Pedro, California, in 1912. As a teen, he worked at the harbor cleaning the insides of oil tankers. Dorothy Little was born in Whittier, California, in 1913. Bill and Dor, as they were known to their friends, met at Whittier College. Bill played football for the Poets alongside Richard Nixon (who warmed the bench). They married after college, in 1937.
Bill, Dorothy and their children moved around the country several times for his job. They settled in the Atherton/Menlo Park area of the Bay Area so Carol and sister Sue could have a stable high school experience.
Bill Stevenson flew a small plane and was an excellent amateur photographer. Together, Dorothy and Bill were avid travelers who trotted the globe. Dorothy collected and cultivated orchids and was a judge for the American Orchid Society.
In the early 1960s, Bill and Charlie would fly to Idaho to fish in the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. After one such trip, Charlie was waiting for Bill to come get him with his small, single-engine plane. “He had to have to have someone fly him out to get his plane, which was at an airport outside of Boise,” Charlie explained. The grass landing strip at the Flying B Ranch on the Middle Fork was famously difficult because it was surrounded by mountains.
“He made a sweeping dive to come in for a landing, and he forgot one thing. He forgot to put the landing wheels down,” said Charlie. “We were watching it, and it disappeared over a knoll and all of a sudden, it came up and dust was all over the place and the plane sounded on the funny side.”
The plane then traveled up the valley and disappeared for a half hour. “It came back and he managed to land it,” Charlie said. “The propeller had hit the ground when he landed and bent back on the edges. It was one of those fortunate things that they were even on both sides so there wasn’t any bad vibration. Otherwise, he would have crashed.”
The propeller then had to be taken off and sent to Boise to be straightened before Bill could fly the plane back to California.
Meanwhile, Charlie had joined the U.S. Army in 1959, and after basic training at Fort Ord, California, and Intelligence training at Fort Holabird, Maryland. He got a plum assignment at the Presidio, in San Francisco, thanks to a Michigan State fraternity brother.
“In our graduating class of some 300, half went to Germany, almost half went to Japan or Korea. One guy went to Kansas City and I went to the Presidio,” Charlie said.
“We lived off post, which was very nice, because I was actually making more money than a first lieutenant because we had quarters and whatnot.”
Charlie wrote to Carol's father, while stationed at Fort Holabird, asking for permission to marry his daughter. He did not receive a response. He doesn’t remember how he proposed, but remembers the wedding, at the Congregational Church in Woodside, California, and the reception, at a mansion in Atherton that belonged to Stevenson family friends.
Then Charlie and Carol got in their car and drove up the California coast, all the way to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.
While tent camping at Crater Lake, Oregon, a bear came into their campground and ate all the meat out of their ice chest while they sheltered in their tent. “Then we decided we’ll just go home,” Charlie said.
After three years in the military, Charlie was discharged one month early to attend San Francisco State College. He got a degree in geography. Charlie recalled: “If I was going to do a thesis, I'd sit down with a jug of wine and drink wine and type at my IBM typewriter that sounded like a machine gun.” He typed all of his daily notes and papers on that typewriter. He still has that typewriter, he said. It still dings.
After graduating, Charlie got a job as a Chrysler Plymouth car dealer in San Mateo. Carol worked at Pacific Bell. They both liked to hike, golf, play bridge and camp.
One time, Charlie and Carol planned a two-day rafting trip to Folsom Lake. “There were six of us on the raft, plus the guide,” said Charlie. “Within the first 200 yards of our departing point, we hit a rough patch of rapids. Carol fell out, and the guide also fell out. This made for a rather tricky situation. We managed to paddle back toward shore, and we had to wait for Carol and the guide to come back. The guide was extremely embarrassed because he had never crashed out of the raft before with a group of people.”
Charlie and Carol lived in Redwood City, and behind their apartment was a YMCA. “I would go over there and swim in their pool,” said Charlie. “I was an avid free diver when I was in Hawaii, and I found out that they were giving scuba diving lessons at the YMCA. So I took up scuba diving then.”
He and Carol both got certified as divers with the National Association of Underwater Instructors, and Charlie became an instructor in 1967 with the recreation department for the City of Sunnyvale.
The same year, he opened Charlie Brown’s Diver's Dock, which operated in Sunnyvale from 1967 to 1975.In 1965, Charlie and Carol bought a house in Los Altos, and got a dog named Katie. They moved in 1971 to the house on The Dalles where he now lives with Lonna, in Sunnyvale.
Daughter Cherilyn Maile was born February 3, 1967, and Cynthia Anela was born August 7, 1969.
“I have some pretty fond memories of that time,” Charlie said. They’d go to the zoo, or drive down to Carmel. “The girls would come down to the beach when they were old enough.”
He remembers one time, when Cheri was 8 or 9: “Cheri’s mother, Carol, had a scar under her chin. We were down at the beach with one of my diving classes and Carol was there with the two girls. There was a set of stairs that went up to the road where the cars were parked. Cheri tripped going up the stairs and landed on her chin and cut her chin, right where her mother had a scar from a time when she fell over and cut her chin.”
(In 2013, Cheri would require an entire jaw reconstruction after her road bike slipped on black ice.)
Cindy joined a local cross country track team when she was nine or 10. “Carol and I went to her first big track meet, up in San Mateo,” said Charlie. “The distance for this run was about a mile and a half. Cindy was in the lead in the first 300 or 400 yards, and they had to run down the hill, where we couldn’t see them, and circle back to the finish line. All these kids came past us and there was no Cindy. Where was she?
“Finally, there she was, dead last. She didn't realize that she had to pace herself, so she ran as hard as she could for as long as she could, and then she died. That was poor training.”
Carol’s parents, Bill and Dorothy, lived a couple of miles away, and spent a lot of time with the family. The Browns also hosted parties, cooking up the abalone and other seafood they harvested on their dives. This was when Charlie developed his love of wine.
Charlie and Carol closed the dive shop in 1975. He thought he would join the National Park Service, but that fell through because “Dick Nixon was the president and he shut off all hiring for the park service,” Charlie said.
After six months as a school bus driver, Charlie began working construction for G&C Construction Services. He was with them until 1983, when he went to work for Ross Engineering. Charlie got his general contractor license in 1986, and launched Charlie Brown Carpentry Inc., which he ran until he was in his early 70s.
When the girls were still young, Carol was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a mastectomy, but the cancer came back. She was 43 when she died on November 9, 1984. Her daughters were still in high school.
The Lonna Years
Charlie married Lonna French on January 18, 1986.
The two knew each other because they all worked at Ross Engineering Corp. -- Carol as Accounting/Office Manager, and Charlie in construction of a new company building.
Charlie invited Lonna and another colleague to see Side Saddle, a female bluegrass band. She didn’t realize it was a date, but it was.
Charlie was 42 and Lonna was 23, but, she said, Charlie was young at heart, and she was an old soul. They went together on a family trip to Hawaii, and before long they were planning a life together.
In 1985, before he married Lonna, Charlie had a few dates with his high school girlfriend, Charlotte, competing in a few 25-meter backstroke weekend meets at her swim club.
His drinking developed into daily excess. After losing his job at G&C, he said to Lonna that he would understand if she wanted to call off the wedding. “I said, ‘you’re not getting off that easy,’” she recalled. “It’s not something I could control, but I knew I could support him in understanding that his best self was in there waiting to come out.”
The way Charlie tells it, his faltering golf game finally pushed him to quit.
His last drink was November 27, 1985. “My morning routine was I’d have a large glass of wine for breakfast. I went to play golf, and I couldn't hit the ball. A good friend of mine was in AA, so I called him and he took me to a meeting. I haven’t had a drink since.”
For a long time, he went to AA meetings every day, he said, though he no longer goes.
Children and Grandchildren
After her mother’s death and before she went to college, Cheri lived with her grandmother, Dorothy. She majored in history at Whittier College and married Steve Merrihew November 5, 1994. Josh Merrihew was born February 28, 1997 and Charlie Merrihew was born October 22, 1999.
Cheri is program director of the Colorado League, a high school nonprofit; Steve, who has a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford University, is an engineer for Lockheed Martin. The Merrihews live in Denver.
Cynthia graduated from University of California, Irvine with degrees in Spanish literature and social science, and a minor in Peace and Global Conflict. She later joined the Peace Corps, serving two years in Turkmenistan, and then got her MBA from Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management. In September 2001, she began her career as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State, retiring in at the end of 2023.
She married Jonathan Pearson on May 8, 2004, and they currently are traveling and living on the road in their van, Lola.
Lonna, born April 15, 1961, has a son, Michael, born September 23, 1977. Michael was adopted by Charlie at age 18. He now lives in Santa Monica with his partner, Kim, pursuing his interests in music and graphic design. From the age of eight, Michael has watched Charlie grill up most dinners, and as a result developed an appreciation for and mastery of barbecuing.
Charlie is retired, though he still does projects around the house. He golfs twice a week, a sport he took up in high school. He occasionally caddied for his father at the Oahu Country Club. His last year in the Army, he played every Tuesday with his commanding officer.
He and Lonna, who still works at Ross as the company’s accounting and office manager, like to travel with friends and family. Many of their vacations are built around golf or around Cynthia’s overseas assignments.
He fondly remembers a 2009 vacation in Thailand with his daughters and their families to celebrate his 75th birthday.
Other favorites were a 2013 safari in Botswana while visiting Cynthia and Jonathan in South Africa, where she was posted with State Department; and a 2011 trip to Scotland with Cynthia and Jonathan. They visited his father’s birthplace in Scotland. His favorite golf vacation was traveling and golfing along the Robert Trent Jones Trail in Alabama.