Can-do attitude, taste for adventure, brought Brown from far to here

By Chris Mac Kenzie
The Alpine Sun

     ALPINE — Wayne Brown delivered five babies while a captain on a ferry boat in San Diego Bay, was vice president of a bank at 22 years old, fought fires on Palomar Mountain when he was 14, been a radio deejay, and slept only two hours  a night for years on end.
     It all started for Brown, who is the assistant manager at Alpine’s True Value Hardware, when he dropped out of school and ran away from home in Blackfoot, Idaho, at age 12 because his mother had beaten him so badly that she almost killed him. “I had a little island in the middle of the Snake River, “ he said. “ I was too proud to beg and too afraid to steal. But after a couple of days I was so hungry that I stole a sack of onions from a farmer’s truck and a loaf of bread that a lady had put outside to cool. She baked 10 loaves every day, but I’d only take one.
     Then after a couple of days, I found she had put out 11. She was a nice lady. I learned to fish and that was the way I lived until I could pick up odd jobs like yard work.”
     He soon headed for California, riding the rails, hitchhiking and living in hobo camps. “I’ve never had as good care in my life as I got from them.  Those guys wouldn’t let anybody or anything hurt this young kid,” said Brown nostalgically.  He got a job fighting fires on Palomar Mountain and, when he turned 17, he joined the U.S. Navy.
     He served a tour in the Navy as a clerk typist which apparently gave him enough experience to become a vice president of the Idaho Bank and Trust in Blackfoot. Next he became a radio deejay at KBLI, he said, “but they didn’t pay me enough, so I decided to go back to California.”
     He signed on as a deck hand on the San Diego Coronado Ferry Boat Company and began to work his way up.  During his half hour lunch, he’d watch the pilot at the wheel, learning everything he could. He finally took and passed the test to become a mate in 1960. Two years later, he passed the test for a master’s license.
     “I was so afraid I couldn’t pass it,” recalls Brown, “that I memorized the entire Rules of the Road —  all 79 pages of it, so when the tester asked a question from it, I simply wrote down the answer exactly as it was in the book. The guy thought I had a cheat sheet so he came over and stood behind me to check. I remember the first oral question before the written part, was about what kind of authority does the captain of a boat have, and when I answered  one word, “absolute,” he was impressed because no one had ever given him an answer like that before.”
     Next, Brown wanted to earn his pilot’s license. “I had to do a map of the Bay that couldn’t be even one-eighth of an inch off. It had to mark every reef, every buoy, everything. It took me over a week to make it.”
     Those babies he delivered with only a required first aid course as training, provide an interesting history too. In those days, the Coronado Bridge was not yet built, so expectant mothers had no choice but to ride the ferryboat to get to a hospital.
     Servicemen’s wives living on Coronado had to go to the Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego for delivery, while those living in San Diego were required to travel to the Naval Air Station Hospital on Coronado! Brown still shakes his head at the stupidly of that rule.
     The ferry ride took only five minutes, but that was too long for some of the mothers, already well into labor by the time they got to the ferry which carried 64 cars. “They delivered in the back seat of their cars. I’d lay the baby on the mother’s chest, tuck the umbilical cord around them and send them off to the hospital after we docked.
     The bridge opened with the ferry making its last trip in August 1969.  “I remember I kissed the rail as I came off that boat for the last time at midnight and never looked back. That was the best job I ever had,” Brown said.
     He probably got a bit more sleep for a while. He’d been working the 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift on the boat, then reporting at 9 a.m. to a job as a salesman in the Handy Spot Junk Yard on Highway 84,  “I slept from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.  “After seven years at the Junk Yard (That was a fun job, like a big swap meet) I moved on to the Henny Penny Egg Plant working the second shift and at the Shell Station here in Alpine from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.”
     Next came 23 years at K Mart as the stock manager, retiring in October 1992.” I had a small stroke in January ‘93, but I was able to go to work for Jerry here at True Value the next month,” recalled Brown. “I stayed here for three years, then did a spell at Holland Motor Homes and Ethan Allen Furniture for another three years.”
     Finally he came back to Jerry Hines’ where he’s been ever since and where he met his second wife, Doris, who has a manicurist shop in their home.
     She was a customer needing help with something, so when he discovered she was a widow and he a widower since 1990, they were married a week later!
     Somewhere in the middle of this saga, Wayne and his first wife of 43 years had moved to Alpine.
     “We had two kids of our own,” he said, “adopted three more, and raised 14 foster children. And no, I didn’t have a lot of time to spend at home, but what I did have was always quality time.”
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