Kenosha News

Goodbye ‘Uncle Howard’

Updated

BY JOE POTENTE

jpotente@kenoshanews.com

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WWII veteran, Ivy League educated

Brown’s road to a life as a newspaper publisher, community benefactor, Ivy League graduate, World War II veteran and husband and father began July 31, 1923, when he was born to the late Isidore and Gladys Brown in Chicago.

The older son of an accomplished member of Chicago’s legal community, Brown graduated from the University of Chicago Laboratory School in 1940 and the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1942.

His time at Princeton University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1946, was bisected by two years of World War II European Theater Army service in the 44th Infantry Division and Military Government. Brown then earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1948.

Around that time, Brown picked up bylines as a stringer for the Chicago Sun-Times, filing dispatches from around the globe.

Brown settled in Cleveland for nine years, working in various capacities for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the now-defunct Cleveland News.

In 1959, Brown became the assistant to the publisher of the Times-Herald in Middletown, N.Y., where Brown met the woman who would become his wife of 51 years, Elizabeth Kassel. Howard and Betsy Brown would later have three daughters and nine grandchildren.

With the sale of the Times-Herald to the East-coast Ottoway Newspaper group, Brown worked as an executive assistant for that organization until 1961, when the opportunity to purchase the Kenosha News surfaced.

Modernizing the News

Brown purchased a controlling interest in the newspaper in December 1961, becoming publisher shortly thereafter.

Harlan Draeger, at that time a reporter at the News, said Brown worked hard to move the paper into the 20th century, bringing a Chicago-bred, Princeton-educated view to a small factory town.

Draeger, who went on to work at the Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times, said the Kenosha Evening News of that era was a sort of “stick-in-the-mud” operation that did not report much beyond routine news.

“Howard came along and he was determined to turn the paper into a respectable newspaper, and he did,” Draeger said.

Len Iaquinta, a Kenosha News newsroom intern in the mid-1960s who worked for many years in journalism and public relations, said “Uncle Howard,” as Brown liked to be called, served the community well with the investments he made in the newspaper.

“I think he tried to make the community a better place in a lot of ways, especially in encouraging and fostering conversation about what’s needed in the community to make it a better place,” Iaquinta said.

Brown ardently defended the News’ unusual policy of printing unsigned letters to the editor, stating doing so was a vital component to the preservation of freedom of the press. It’s a practice he defended in a 1997 editorial page column.

“By offering this option, we have succeeded in developing a spirited dialogue on many subjects of community interest,” Brown wrote. “We prefer to preserve freedom of the press to the highest degree possible without which, in my opinion, nothing really matters.”

Over the years, Brown grew United Communications Corp. into a multi-state operation that today publishes daily newspapers in Kenosha, Attleboro, Mass., and Watertown, S.D., and owns television stations in Mankato, Minn., and Watertown, N.Y.

The company also publishes the Lake Geneva Regional News, the Zion-Benton News in Zion, Ill., a weekly newspaper in Foxboro, Mass., and three local shoppers. Most recently, it launched Media Innovations, a Kenosha-based digital publishing company.

‘Rare breed’ of publisher

Brown earned various industry accolades over the years, including the Ralph D. Casey/Minnesota Award, one of the highest honors from the Inland Press Association, and the Silver Shovel Award, the highest commendation from the International Newsmedia Marketing Association.

In 2007, Brown was inducted into the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation’s Wisconsin Newspaper Hall of Fame.

Ray Carlsen, the recently retired executive director of the Inland Press Association, said Brown was a publisher whose heart remained with his roots as a journalist.

“He’s a rare breed of publisher in that he really put journalism first — he was a journalist before he was a publisher in his own mind,” Carlsen said. “And he behaved that way; he acted that way. The content, the stories, that was very important to him.”

Craig Swanson, Kenosha News editor from 1996 to 2009, said he got a feel for Brown’s commitment to the newspaper early on in his tenure, when Swanson asked the publisher about his philosophies on newsroom staffing and resources.

“He said something along the lines of, ‘Some publishers invest in summer homes and mistresses. I invest in new wire services.’” Swanson recalled. “And he was absolutely telling the truth.”

Wide community impact

Brown’s impact on Kenosha reverberated well beyond the News, as numerous community members recounted.

His most public effort was Kenosha Christmas Charities Inc., known more commonly as the Goodfellows, which collected millions of dollars under Brown’s stewardship.

The effort, highlighted by an annual fundraising dinner where Brown was long a fixture, funds the Holiday House umbrella that conducts distributions of Christmas toys, Thanksgiving food baskets and children’s winter coats.

But Brown did much more for the community on a quiet basis, often anonymously assisting agencies and individuals, friends and business associates said.

“Right from the beginning, they immersed themselves in the community in very generous ways of time, treasure and talent,” Kenosha businesswoman Rita Petretti said of Howard and Betsy Brown. “You don’t find that very much in a business leader, which is really what he was.”

Nancy Frost, a longtime friend of Howard and Betsy Brown’s, said Brown silently did many things.

“He was like Mary Frost Ashley,” Frost said, referencing her late husband’s aunt, another community benefactor who died in 2006. “He just quietly and silently did things for the community that people don’t even know about. He was just a steady force for our city, dependable for us.”

Kreuser, who worked as assistant to then-County Executive John Collins in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, recalls calling Brown on a few instances where individuals needed help but did not fit into the social services grid. Brown verified, then delivered, Kreuser said.

On the opposite end of society, Kreuser and others said Brown would do his best to bring people people together to try to solve the community’s problems or lure a new business to town.

Kreuser said Brown, in the late 1980s, was very much the glue that held together a coalition that formed to contemplate the community’s future as Chrysler was ending its auto manufacturing operations in Kenosha.

Commitment to education

A quarter-century earlier, Brown served a similar role as Kenosha worked to lure the four-year University of Wisconsin System campus that would become UW-Parkside.

At the time, Draeger was reassigned from his duties as a reporter to assist Brown with the effort.

“Kenosha always had this labor-management hostility — it was built into everything,” Draeger said. “It was pervasive throughout the political scene, and almost everything broke down over labor-management lines. Howard, he was the kind of person who could talk to both sides, and he got them working on this university project.”

Brown also was active with Carthage College, where he served as an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees until his death.

“Within a few weeks of Barbara’s and my coming to town, I concluded that Howard would be a grand addition to the Carthage board,” said F. Gregory Campbell, Carthage president since 1987.

Campbell said Brown was a natural appointment to the board’s Academic Committee, which Brown chaired for several years.

“I think, clearly, his great contribution was, by his nature, he had a strong intellectual bent,” Campbell said. “That’s what helped incline him toward his commitment to journalism.”

Local focus, world citizen

Many remembered Howard Brown the man for his courtly manner, formal dress and love for playing tennis and his “bride.”

Brown was also known for a zest for world travel, the journalistic fruits of which sometimes manifested themselves into special Kenosha News supplements.

Al Leeds, president and editorial director of the Washington Post News Service with Bloomberg News, said while Brown’s focus was serving Kenosha and the other cities where he owned properties, he was a citizen of the world.

“He had the finest formal education anyone could have, but never stopped reading, traveling, questioning and learning,” Leeds said. “He then shared that constant, life-long, love of knowing with his community via the best vehicle imaginable — a thick, news-packed, elegantly presented and produced newspaper staffed by dedicated, well-paid professionals in a state-of-the-art facility. And one he was always trying to make even greater.”

Local leaders, including some who occasionally differed with Brown, said his passing will leave the community with a difficult void to fill.

“I think, from my perspective, the part of Howard that I will always cherish is that he was someone who truly cared about the community,” said John Antaramian, Kenosha mayor from 1992 to 2008. “Different times, I would get mad at the News — that’s the way it works — but he was someone who truly wanted to see the community prosper.”

Andy Palmen, owner of two local automobile dealerships, came to know Brown as an advertiser, and a friend.

Palmen said he does not believe Kenosha has had a better ambassador than Brown.

“A lot of people live here and work here,” Palmen said. “But I don’t think anybody has put more into this community than Howard over his lifetime.”

Longtime businessman Ray Camosy, the retired president of Camosy Construction, said he could not imagine who would take over Brown’s role in the community.

“I think there’s going to be a hole left after Howard leaves,” Camosy said. “And we’ll miss him.”

Editor Jon Losness contributed to this report.

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