BROWN, Warren (William) 1894–1978

PERSONAL: Born January 3, 1894, in CA; died, November 19, 1978, in Forest Park, IL; son of Patrick and Hanore (Boyle) Brown; married Mary Olive Burns, August 23, 1919; children: Bill, Roger, Mary Elizabeth Brown Rempe. Education: Received degree from University of San Francisco.

CAREER: Played minor league baseball in Pacific Coast League, 1914; worked as sportswriter in San Francisco, CA, for the San Francisco Bulletin, San Francisco Call-Post, and San Francisco Call-Bulletin, beginning 1915; public relations manager for boxer Jack Dempsey, 1921; San Francisco Call-Post, sports editor, 1922; New York Evening Mail, New York, NY, sports editor, 1922; New York Journal, sports reporter, 1923; Chicago Herald Examiner, sports writer, beginning 1923; writer for various Chicago newspapers throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including the Chicago Herald & Examiner, Herald-American, and Chicago Sun. Guest on radio programs. Military service: Member of Coast Artillery Corps and Corps Intelligence, World War I.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named Chicago's "Number One" citizen by Mayor Richard Daley, 1964; J. G. Taylor Spink Award, Baseball Writers' Association of America, 1973; named member of National Baseball Hall of Fame, 1974.

WRITINGS:

Rockne, Reilly & Lee (Chicago, IL), 1931.

The Chicago Cubs, Putnam (New York, NY), 1946.

Win, Lose, or Draw, Putnam (New York, NY), 1947.

The Chicago White Sox, Putnam (New York, NY), 1952, published with a new foreword by Jerome Holtzman, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 2001.

Author of columns, including "So They Tell Me" and "Down Memory Lane."

SIDELIGHTS: Warren Brown was considered one of the top sports writers and editors of the twentieth century, his lengthy career covering forty-five World Series and forty Kentucky Derbies. Beginning his journalism career in 1916, he proved himself to be a versatile and prolific newsman, skillfully covering hard news as well as the sports stories that made his reputation. Brown was well-educated and noted for his "exceptional mastery of the English language, his encyclopedic memory, and his razor-sharp wit. He excelled at coining memorable phrases, whether behind a typewriter or behind a podium, and in either venue his humor could be sarcastic or benign—as easily capable of deflating as well as inflating," remarked Richard Brodenker in Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Brown was born in California and grew up in San Francisco. He developed a strong interest in sports performers, both contemporary and historical. Baseball and prizefighting, two of his favorite sports, were flourishing in San Francisco at that time, providing him with many heroes. He progressed so rapidly in his studies that at the age of eleven he was sent to high school. He was athletic as well as studious, playing baseball in college and eventually starting as a professional player with Sacramento's team in the Pacific Coast League. In his first appearance for Sacramento as a pinch hitter, Brown hit safely off former Chicago White Sox pitching star Doc White. Despite this and other thrilling moments, he returned to college at the conclusion of the 1914 season.

After graduation, Brown worked part-time at the San Francisco Bulletin, earning five dollars a week writing notes on semiprofessional baseball. He was soon publishing stories with his own byline, and his career was launched. After serving in World War I, he returned to the Bulletin but soon was employed at William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Call-Post, where he became the sports editor while still in his early twenties. He later worked again for the Bulletin, where he was the first writer to predict that Jack Dempsey would take the heavyweight crown from Jess Willard.

Besides his sports coverage, Brown also wrote reviews of musical and vaudeville performances and assisted in covering news stories ranging from political conventions to murder trials. He proved his adeptness at investigative reporting when he and fellow journalist Edward T. Gleeson uncovered some wrongdoings in the Pacific Coast League and published their findings. Eventually the league's president and several team owners were replaced. Working in California at that time, Brown could hardly fail to be immersed in the so-called "Hearst style," which Brodenker noted can be "identified by trick idiom, beautiful phrasing, and vivid imagery. Brown, however, held steadfastly to the concept of simplicity."

Brown's knowledge of boxing and his admiration of Jack Dempsey provided another career opportunity in 1921, when he took on the task of supervising the champion's press relations prior to a bout with Georges Carpentier. The job led him to Atlantic City on the East Coast. Though he returned to San Francisco in 1922, he had his sights set on a writing position for a New York paper, and it was not long before he had secured a position with the New York Evening Mail. Brown was now working in the same city as legendary sportswriters such as Heywood Broun, Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, and Ring Lardner. He soon moved to the Hearst-owned New York Journal, but in 1923 the Hearst organization transferred him to the Chicago Herald and Examiner. By 1926 he had a column running six times a week in the paper, titled "So They Tell Me," which focused on a variety of sports performers, athletic competitions, sport oddities, and general human-interest items.

In the Midwest, one of Brown's loves was collegiate football, especially the teams of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois. There he became familiar with such legendary figures as coach Knute Rockne and halfback Red Grange, whom Brown nicknamed the "Galloping Ghost." Brown's friendship with Rockne led to his first book. Published in 1931, Rockne is a flattering autobiography of the football coach, who had died in a plane crash earlier that year. In the foreword to Brown's book, Notre Dame president Reverend Charles L. O'Donnell praised Brown, noting that his sketches provide a truthful portrait of Rockne. This sentiment was echoed by Casswell Adams, who stated in his New York Herald-Tribune Books review: "He writes of Rockne the man, and from him we learn of the humor, the genius, the generosity, the sincerity of the stocky, baldheaded coach. He, in a terse, not unpleasant style, hurriedly sketches the coach by telling us wisecracks, his satirical shafts." In this and other books, as in his shorter pieces, his work is typically "precise, insightful, and, at any given moment, witty, funny, angry, or scathing."

Brown continued to work for the Hearst corporation during the 1930s and into the 1940s, but signed on to Marshall Field's Chicago Sun early in the decade, taking his "So They Tell Me" column with him. He stayed with the Sun until 1946, when he returned to the Hearst organization. In 1947, he published Win, Lose, or Draw, which included Brown's reflections on his sportswriting career and his association with many great sporting personalities. New York Times critic Harold Kaese took a tongue-in-cheek look at the book: "By being so witty, entertaining and informative, Warren probably has done the sportswriting industry irreparable harm in writing his memoirs…. There will be no salary increases in the near future for sports writers whose publishers read Brown's expose of our charming circle and find it a strong argument for less money and longer hours."

Brown also had a long-standing sideline as an after-dinner speaker, which developed into regular guest appearances on Bing Crosby's nationally-broadcast network radio program, and occasional spots on other popular shows. He even wrote some of his own material for these programs. He also became active in working with the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His career stretched on for more than five decades, and he continued to write well into his senior years. At the age of seventy-eight, he contributed a column, "Down Memory Lane," to Baseball Digest magazine.

Brown relied on anecdotes to convey his impressions of the sporting world. In reviewing Rockne, Caswell Adams reported that Brown probably knew the legendary Notre Dame football coach "more intimately than any other newspaper man. Similarly, in his later books on Chicago's baseball teams, Brown added an entertaining style to a foundation of facts. "Brown has done an exhaustive job of research and brightened the resulting text with a leavening of anecdotes," wrote Robert Cromie in his review of The Chicago White Sox.

Brown died in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brown, Warren, Rockne, Reilly & Lee (Chicago, IL), 1931.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 241: American Sportswriters and Writers on Sport, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Chicago American, November 9, 1964, "Old Friends Pay Tribute to Warren Brown," p. 19.

Chicago Sun-Times, January 7, 1974, "Writing Great Warren Brown in Hall of Fame," p. 84; August 12, 1974, "It's 'Fame' Day for Brown, Too," p. 102.

Chicago Today, August 12, 1974, James Enright, "Warren Brown Joins Hall of Fame Today," p. 44.

Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1952; November 22, 1978.

New York Herald-Tribune Books, June 21, 1931.

New York Times, September 22, 1946; February 8, 1948, Harold Kaese, review of Win, Lose, or Draw, p. 18; April 20, 1952.

Sporting News, February 3, 1979, p. 36.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Sun-Times, November 22, 1978, p. 98.

Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1978.