Mike Brown was one of my favorite correspondents, one of my favorite writers, and one of my favorite people. For many years, he was the editor of the Rockdale Reporter, in Rockdale, Texas. One day in the summer of 2019, Kevin Williamson and I road-tripped from Dallas to see Mike in Rockdale. It was a wonderful day. I wrote about Mike under the heading “Newspaperman.”

Let me quote something:

Mike Brown’s wife, Sue, works at the library. When I tell her I’m a fan of Mike’s, she has to concede, “Yeah, he’s awesome.” (He thinks the same of her, clearly.)

I’ll quote some more, for “background”:

He was born in 1950 — not in Rockdale but in Alvin, a town south of Houston. Its other claim to fame is Nolan Ryan, the pitcher (born three years before Mike). The Browns moved to Rockdale when Mike was two. His father was a minister and his mother a music teacher.
As a kid, Mike loved to read the newspaper: the Reporter and also the Houston Press, “a scandal sheet,” he says. He also loved astronomy (and still does). When he was a sophomore in high school, he and his dad built a telescope.

A little about college:

He entered the University of Texas in 1968, that radical year — the year of the barricades. His parents drove him over to Austin, and he checked into Brackenridge Hall. He worked at the undergraduate library, shelving periodicals, and one day he came across a magazine with a blue border. “I looked inside and thought two things,” he says. “First, these people think like I do. And second, that’s really good writing.”
He subscribed to the magazine — National Review . . .

Then, of course, there was Bill Buckley:

One afternoon, when Mike was a senior, WFB came to the university to speak. “The talk was in the old Gregory Gym,” Mike remembers, “and it was packed. Standing-room only.” How did WFB do? “He was every bit as impressive in person as he was on the page. He showed that you could be both conservative and cool. And that was a big thing.”

It was, for so many of us.

By the way, Mike Brown was my kind of conservative. I told him that earlier this week. The way I put it was, “I’m a Mike Brown conservative,” which I think kind of tickled him. (That’s what we say in the Midwest, where I’m from: “tickle,” “please.”)

Mike had an understanding of the American project, of American ideals. He loved freedom and democracy and human rights. He believed unabashedly in the American Dream, and loved to see people pursue it, wherever they came from. He was both canny and kind.

I could go on.

Incidentally, he was a proper newspaperman, a proper editor and reporter — quite apart from his political views. He wrote both news articles and opinion columns. He respected the difference between the two.

Man, did he love our language.

Mike loved astronomy, but he majored in that other love, English. His favorite poet is Yeats. Mike is smitten with words, as writers tend to be. He is also naturally humorous — and does not disdain puns.

Nope.

Some years ago, Truman Lamb was succeeded by Joel Pigg in a key agricultural position. A number of headlines suggest themselves. Mike Brown chose “Pigg Replaces Lamb as County Agent, No Kidding.”

Something else:

He tells me a story, related to humor. One night, he was very low and doing some laundry. The Carol Burnett Show came on. And he laughed and laughed. “I would like to meet Carol Burnett someday to tell her what she already knows: what a gift she has, and how important it is to people. It’s important to laugh.”

More of Mike Brown’s humor? Here’s another slice of my piece on him:

When you start out at a community newspaper, you do everything — including those fundamentals, birth notices and obituaries. The former used to be called “stork reports,” Mike notes. “That was so long ago, the people who had the babies were married.”

Another sample:

I ask Mike, “How many people work at the Reporter?” “About half of us,” he quips.

The following will tell you something — something more — about Mike:

He is very patriotic, but not in a jingo way. Far from it. Indeed, he says it’s not for him to call himself a patriot. He gives me a story. “When my dad and I built that telescope, during my sophomore year, I told a friend of mine, ‘I’m an astronomer.’ My friend said, ‘It takes more than that.’”
For some 20 years, Mike gave a Fourth of July speech at a large picnic. One time, he got a compliment from a lady he had known for years — the mother of friends of his. Beaming, she grasped his hand and said, “Mike Brown, until tonight, I never knew you had any sense.”

On occasion, I would refer to Mike as “the last of the Mohicans.” I did this admiringly but also somewhat gloomily. In my piece, I wrote,

Let us hope that Mike Brown is not the last of the Mohicans. Let us hope that there will be many more like him, whatever our newspapers are in the future. But if he is the last — he’s a hell of a Mohican.

Maybe a week and a half ago, I had a long phone call with Mike, when he was in the hospital, undergoing chemotherapy. He was his delightful self. He said he was doing some reading and learning new things — things he had always been curious about. He also said what an angel Sue, his wife, had been.

Then he was in hospice care. Sue held the phone up to his ear. Mike said he was thinking of writing a piece on what it’s like to die. “Maybe I’ll send it to you,” he said. He would not get around to the piece.

I thanked him for being my friend. We need friends, in this life. We agreed we’d be friends forever. I look forward to seeing him again, by and by.

There will be more Mohicans, but, man, what a great one this one was, is.