Jerry Brown | Interview 1 | February 4, 2019

01-00:00:00

SHAFER: This is Monday, February 4, 2019, and the first recording with Governor Jerry Brown. We're at his ranch in Colusa County, right?

01-00:00:10

BROWN: Yes.

01-00:00:11

SHAFER: And with Cali and Colusa [Governor Brown's dogs] outside--that we might be hearing from time to time. All right, Governor, first of all, I just want to ask you just in general, you've been out of office now a month. How has the transition been for you?

01-00:00:28

BROWN: Excellent! It has been one of the best transitions I've ever seen.

01-00:00:33

SHAFER: How so?

01-00:00:34

BROWN: [laughing] Well, there's not any problems, so that's good.

01-00:00:38

SHAFER: Has it been a period of just sort of letting go then?

01-00:00:42

BROWN: You know, I've been asked that question--I don't know quite what that means. Because each day seems similar to the previous day. We change only slowly over time. So I'm only going an hour, sixty-five miles, from the capital. I had 00:01:00moved from Oakland into the mansion a few years ago, and now we've moved all our stuff from the mansion to the Mountain House. And this is a structure and a home we just built, so there's a lot of putting things together, and a lot of work to complete this house, and it has great historic significance to me, and even, I think, to others. So that is exciting in itself, and it requires a lot of work.

This thing just didn't happen. Even to find the place where to build the house took a few years, and we had a lot of--it offered a lot of choices, so all over here, twenty-five hundred acres. So we decided to put it exactly where the 00:02:00stagecoach hotel was about a hundred yards off in that direction, and there was a barn right there, and you've probably seen the picture. I don't know whether that picture is in here. [Brown looks at photographs in the book: Miriam Pawel, The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, 2018.]

01-00:02:26

SHAFER: Where would it be?

01-00:02:27

BROWN: Let's see if we can find the picture--it must be in the early part. [leafing through book]. All right. Do you see that mountain?

01-00:02:33

SHAFER: Yeah.

01-00:02:36

BROWN: That's that mountain right there [pointing to a hill to the northwest of his home]. So that barn we burnt down, so we're like right here. So if you want to call it a transition, it's been a continuous effort for the last five years, but in my mind for over twenty years, to do this. And so completing this--which 00:03:00we haven't completed yet--and working on it, is very exciting to me. So it's hard to think of leaving one thing as though that's an end, when what I'm beginning is, in some ways, equally as exciting as being governor. It's a different experience and different reality.

But it is reconstituting a place and reinhabiting a place that my great-grandfather [August Schuckman]--and others before him--came here in the nineteenth century. So to be able to give new life to a place with such historic significance is very exciting. And it's exciting because whatever brought people here, there was a certain logic. And the logic was that there was a lot of 00:04:00flooding going on in Sacramento, so people--my great-grandfather among them--were seeking higher ground. And this was a place where, because it was all done on horseback and stagecoach, people stopped to get new horses, fresh horses, and maybe stayed overnight on their way to the mines or on their way to spas. And there were a great many spas in Colusa and Lake County in the nineteenth century. But then that fades away, the spas decline, the mines exhaust themselves, the car replaces the horse, and therefore the functioning of a stagecoach disappears, a stagecoach stop, and the homesteading declines. The wheat price declines, the soils don't produce the wheat as well as they do, the prices change, and it goes from homesteading, with many plots and a lot of 00:05:00activity, a lot of families, a local school here--it goes into pastureland, principally sheep, and now it's become cattle.

But there is a certain new vitality. I have a neighbor a mile and a half away, and she and her husband are building an organic cheese dairy, which will take many years. And so that is also a new beginning, so I really feel I'm embarked upon something new and something exciting, but something that's very much rooted in the past, in my own family and California's history. So given all that, I would have to say I don't feel a real change from what I was doing in Sacramento and what I'm doing now.

01-00:05:56

SHAFER: Well, let's talk about a different thing.

01-00:05:57

BROWN: Oh, there is a change, but it's not what you would think. You know, it's 00:06:00not going from the important to the trivial, or the unimportant, or the remote. It's very much in the midst of action and, we can say creativity, in a way that I find very exciting.

01-00:06:22

SHAFER: Yeah. Well, let's talk about the beginning of you. Which was, I think, April 7, 1938?

01-00:06:27

BROWN: Yeah, I have no recollection of that.

01-00:06:30

SHAFER: [laughing] Well, others do, fortunately. But you were born toward the middle end, beginning of the end maybe, of the Great Depression. You were born a few years before World War II began, Pearl Harbor. What are some of your earliest memories or your neighborhood and life in Forest Hill on Magellan Ave.?

01-00:06:52

BROWN: Oh, we didn't grow up in Forest Hill. When I was born, my parents lived at my grandfather's house on my mother's side, Capt. [Arthur D.] Layne.

[side conversation deleted]

01-00:07:03

BROWN: All right. So we lived [in San Francisco] at Seventeenth and Shrader, and that was my [grandfather] Capt. Layne's house. And after his wife died, my mother [Bernice E. Layne Brown] and father [Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, Sr.] moved in there so my mother could help my grandfather. And we lived there until sometime in 1941. My grandfather died in 1940, and so it's at that point my mother's sisters and brother wanted to sell it, and they didn't want to sell it to them, so therefore they had to sell it on the market. And therefore they had to leave, and so they moved to Forest Hill. So I do remember moving to Magellan--that's the other place I stayed until I left to go to college and then to seminary. But I did like that house at Seventeenth and Shrader. I do remember it. I remember 00:08:00my room. I've been back there since. It's kind of a sunroom. I remember my grandfather, Capt. Layne.

01-00:08:13

SHAFER: He was a police officer/a police chief.

01-00:08:14

BROWN: He was a police captain in the San Francisco Police Department. Other than that--it was a big house, but just a few childhood memories. So then we moved to Forest Hill, and it was smaller and probably it was foggy, it had a sense of grayness, because it was probably foggy, as it was most of the time.

01-00:08:40

SHAFER: Yeah, and--as I said, the war--you moved the year of Pearl Harbor.

01-00:08:45

BROWN: I don't remember Pearl Harbor. Even though December, we moved in in the early part of '41, and I remember that, but I don't remember Pearl Harbor.

01-00:08:56

SHAFER: Were there things that your family did that were related either to the war or to--?

01-00:09:01

BROWN: Well, the air raids, where they put up that special kind of paper that blocks out the light. So there would be air raids. We had an air raid warden. He would come over, and it was someone who lived on the block and checked to make sure there was no light showing, and there'd be these drills. I do remember that. I remember my sisters [see full names below] and mother would play canasta during these things, and we had to keep the light from escaping, and so I do remember that. I remember rationing--I mean the ration cards. That was interesting.

01-00:09:39

SHAFER: And did it seem like you were living in a kind of--I won't say deprivation, but that you were a part of a larger effort that was with the rest--

01-00:09:48

BROWN: No, no. I did not have that sense at all. I didn't feel deprived. Although if I compare what is available today with then, it's not even close. 00:10:00There's hundreds of thousands of different options and products that you can get in stores. Things were a lot simpler. The bread man delivered, the milk man delivered, the ice man--we didn't have ice, but the people across the street had ice, so an ice truck would come by. So it was exciting, it was interesting--there's no bombs around, there's no crime, there's no turbulence, so it seemed. Well, it was all that I knew, so it seemed completely normal to me.

01-00:10:46

SHAFER: You had two older sisters [Cynthia Brown Kelly and Barbara Brown Casey Siggins], and eventually a younger sister [Kathleen L. Brown] as well.

01-00:10:50

BROWN: Yeah.

01-00:10:52

SHAFER: Were you sort of the favorite kid for a while?

01-00:10:55

BROWN: No, I wouldn't say I was the favorite. Maybe somebody thought I was. But I grew up in the pre-helicopter-parent environment. So my mother had plenty to 00:11:00do taking care of her three children, and then her four children. My father was fully engaged in his work, first as a lawyer, then seeking offices. He got elected district attorney, and their lives were full of their activities--and our lives were the lives of children. So we played and we went to school. The only times we were together were when we'd have dinner or when we'd take a trip or go on vacation. Otherwise, I think there was a pretty--you know, not an impenetrable line--but there was a demarcation. Adults had their parties, they had their conversation, and they had their activities, and then there's 00:12:00children, and the children went out to play and went to school. I don't think there was a lot of overlap there.

01-00:12:13

SHAFER: I think your dad became DA in San Francisco in '43. So you were five or so.

01-00:12:17

BROWN: In '43, I was five--yeah, well, it was November; I was five. I was in kindergarten.

01-00:12:22

SHAFER: Yeah, what do you remember?

01-00:12:23

BROWN: Well, I was in kindergarten--I was in Miss Pon's class. Miss Pon taught me and all three of my sisters. Well, I remember the election. I remember the little cards that he would hand out with his picture on it. And I remember going into the voting booth, because San Francisco had the electric voting machines, and you'd pull the curtain and then you'd move the levers to indicate your vote. I, of course, found that interesting.

01-00:13:00

SHAFER: What was interesting?

01-00:13:01

BROWN: Well, just the machine! I mean there was a curtain. You'd go into--someone, a block away, it was their basement, and people would line up. It happened only on Election Day, so that made it interesting. The first election I would probably remember would be November of '43. And I started kindergarten in January of '43, and when my father won, I think, Miss Pon had everyone draw a figure, I think maybe of clowns or other things, and she put it together in a booklet, and we gave it to my father as kind of his gift for winning.

01-00:13:53

SHAFER: [laughing] Clowns? [laughter]

01-00:13:54

BROWN: Yeah, well--it might not have been--that's kind of my memory. Just figures--people, persons.

01-00:14:04

SHAFER: Did it seem to you, as a five-year-old, you know, your dad--as you go to the voting booth with your father, did it seem to you, and to your siblings, like a big deal? What did it seem like?

01-00:14:15

BROWN: No, I wouldn't call it a big deal. It was just--a deal. It was just a lot of those things you do, like go to the grocery store. It was something different.

01-00:14:22

SHAFER: But I mean him getting elected.

01-00:14:24

BROWN: Oh, getting elected--I don't have a great memory of it. He did it again, which I remember more of that. I don't remember the election that much other than his little card that he handed out, and I have some of those posters to this day.

I remember the swearing-in, which was on January 8, 1944, and we sat on the 00:15:00steps inside there on the rotunda. And Mayor [Roger D.] Lapham was being sworn in, and my father as well. So I do remember driving to the city hall. I have a clear memory of that because I asked my father whether [Matthew A.] Brady, Matt Brady, the five-term incumbent that lost, would he be there--would he be sworn out as my father would be sworn in? So they didn't call it an inauguration, they called it a swearing-in. Actually, I have a picture, not a very distinct picture, but you can see all the people gathered in the rotunda in San Francisco City Hall.

01-00:15:46

SHAFER: And did it seem to change your status at school? Did your friends treat you any differently?

01-00:15:52

BROWN: No.

01-00:15:53

SHAFER: Not at all?

01-00:15:54

BROWN: I don't know that they even knew about it--well, it certainly was not very salient. I think for a five-year-old, who is district attorney is not of 00:16:00significance. [laughter] And was not, as far as I can remember.

01-00:16:08

SHAFER: Talk about your parents. Your dad, obviously, was running for office, I think by the time you were born.

01-00:16:15

BROWN: Yeah.

01-00:16:16

SHAFER: And your mom was a stay-at-home mom, but she had gone to college also. She went to Cal, I think.

01-00:16:21

BROWN: Yeah.

01-00:16:22

SHAFER: Talk about your two parents and the roles that they played in the family.

01-00:16:28

BROWN: Well, they played the roles of husband and wife, and mother and father. My mother did the cooking; my father did not spend any time in the kitchen. And everything seemed to go along. I think things that interested me was when we'd go on vacation to the Russian River or to Yosemite. That was exciting, that we would do as a family. And of course the first few years we did it, there was no Kathleen--my youngest sister. She came along in 1945. So I enjoyed the vacations 00:17:00together, otherwise it was just pretty normal. And we had a lot of kids on the block. I once counted over, I think, forty-five kids on the block, just on Magellan Ave., that one block, the 400 block. So I'd spend most of my time out on the street.

But I do remember the trips to Yosemite. I hiked the Ledge Trail, and I think I was five that year. And it's now closed, because it's too dangerous. That's where the Firefall--from what is it, Glacier Pt. You go from Camp Curry, and you hike straight up the rock. We didn't intend to, my father just--"Let's take a 00:18:00walk," my mother and my father and myself, and we ended up going to the top. And I remember that because there was no food. This was during the war, so it might have been '42. So we got up there, and all you could get is peanuts in the machine, and then we came down the Four-Mile Trail. But for someone who was four or five, it's about a mile and a half up. My father had to push me up some of the trail--it was a little scary. And then we walked down the Four-Mile Trail, which was much easier, so I remember that. I remember Yosemite. And I remember going to Twain Harte; I learned to swim there. I wasn't that interested in school, so vacation and playing were my principal interests.

01-00:18:57

SHAFER: Why weren't you interested in school?

01-00:18:58

BROWN: It wasn't that interesting.

01-00:19:03

SHAFER: And you're talking about like kindergarten through third grade, or what?

01-00:19:07

BROWN: Kindergarten through eighth grade, I think. [SHAFER laughs] Or beyond! I mean, it was pretty pedestrian and routinized. I wouldn't use that word at the time, but looking back, there's not a lot of surprise in school.

Actually, I liked kindergarten better, because I remember they'd paint and I liked that. You could paint with a little easel, and you had your little things and you'd slop it around. That was all right.

01-00:19:40

SHAFER: Did you paint anything memorable?

01-00:19:42

BROWN: No. I couldn't paint. I had no talent in that area.

01-00:19:46

SHAFER: Yeah, so it sounds like your mom and dad had a, what for the time was a pretty traditional relationship.

01-00:19:52

BROWN: It seemed pretty normal to me.

01-00:19:55

SHAFER: Yeah, but your mom, as I mentioned, she had gone to university and was 00:20:00very smart, I imagine. Did it seem to you either then, or looking back, that she made some sacrifices?

01-00:20:08

BROWN: That I don't know. Could be. I mean she didn't have a career, but I think on the whole Magellan Ave., that whole block, if there was one woman that worked, I'd be surprised.

01-00:20:22

SHAFER: And what about your dad?

01-00:20:23

BROWN: It was a very different--they were all families. I think one, two, a few didn't have children. They were all, with a couple of exceptions, married. So there are no single women or single men, so it was a pretty normal, middle class 1940s America.

01-00:20:50

SHAFER: Do you feel like your mom and your dad--they obviously played different roles in the family. Like how would you say each of them shaped you and your siblings? What are the traits?

01-00:21:01

BROWN: Oh, just a pretty normal life. My father was at the office--as he would say--making money. I asked him, "What do you do, Dad?" He said, "I make money." One time we were driving by the [San Francisco] Mint, and I said, "Oh, is that where Daddy works?" And she said, "No." But yeah, so he would come home, he'd read his advance law reports, the loose-leaf reports that come out of the appellate cases. He'd read those, or read the paper or magazines. We had afternoon papers in those days. And then we'd have dinner and we'd talk, and that was pretty ordinary, I would say.

01-00:21:46

SHAFER: Did you talk about his day or your day, or did you talk about bigger things?

01-00:21:48

BROWN: I can't remember when we did, but--

01-00:21:50

SHAFER: No memory, and what about your mom?

01-00:21:51

BROWN: We'd talk about what's happening, as the district attorney. There was just general conversation about what's going on--I mean, no particular topic, 00:22:00but a full exchange among my sisters, myself, my mother, and my father. There was no one quiet person there that I can think of.

01-00:22:18

SHAFER: Yeah, and do you feel like your mom--you probably spent more time with her, I imagine.

01-00:22:25

BROWN: Yeah, we didn't spend time with her. I didn't stay in the house very often. I was out playing or visiting other people's houses. We didn't just sit around and talk to my mother or my sisters, that just wasn't done. People were doing things. My sisters were doing things, and people would be home for dinner.

01-00:22:49

SHAFER: I remember my childhood. My dad wasn't around very much, but I did--

01-00:22:53

BROWN: Oh, my father was around! Every night he was there.

01-00:22:55

SHAFER: Yeah, but I remember talking to my father about politics. I mean, that's one of the reasons I got interested in politics.

01-00:23:00

BROWN: I don't remember talking about politics. I might have--maybe the district 00:23:00attorney, people would call on the telephone, and I'd pick up the phone, because he'd be at the dinner table and he said, "You go answer it," and then I would go tell him who's calling. So there would be activities around the DA's office. There were a lot of family welfare issues that he dealt with as district attorney, and we'd hear about it. Not the details, but just certain women would call and complain about this or that. I do recall that, but I don't remember any partisan or substantive issue.

01-00:23:36

SHAFER: And what about religion in the family? Your dad was Catholic; your mom was a Protestant. How did that kind of--?

01-00:23:43

BROWN: It didn't come up very much. I would say there was zero talk of religion.

01-00:23:49

SHAFER: What about going to church?

01-00:23:50

BROWN: Oh, at some point I know I was at West Portal, so that was only a block and a half away. They said, "Now you've got to go to catechism class," so I 00:24:00started doing that. And I can't remember when we started going to church, but we'd go to church every Sunday. My mother would often come, and we'd go to St. Cecilia's for the most part.

But that's it. We'd just go to church, and that was it. There was a kind of a flamboyant pastor, Msgr. [Harold E.] Collins, and I guess when my father was DA or attorney general, probably DA, he would always tell him to come down and sit in the first row, so it was a little bit of a show.

01-00:24:38

SHAFER: A flamboyant--what do you mean?

01-00:24:40

BROWN: He would just talk. He always said St. Cecilia's is the greatest and the best of all the other churches, so he was a booster. Maybe that's what I would say, not a flamboyant, but a booster. And we would sometimes go to St. Brendan's, depending upon the Masses. You could go to the 9:00am Mass; you had a 10:15am Mass; you had a 12:15pm Mass sometimes--depending on where it was most 00:25:00convenient, and we would drive.

01-00:25:10

SHAFER: And did it seem like you were going because your father wanted you to go? Or because it was like some politicians--

01-00:25:16

BROWN: No, we'd just go because that's what you did. You go to church on Sunday--you go to school, you go to church.

01-00:25:26

SHAFER: Oh, so it wasn't for show, in terms of, like some politicians will go to church--

01-00:25:29

BROWN: Well, it might have been, but it didn't strike me that way.

01-00:25:32

SHAFER: Yeah, and what about catechism class? Obviously, you became more interested in Catholicism.

01-00:25:37

BROWN: Yeah, I would go to St. Brendan's, in the basement of the church. They had two nuns, and they taught catechism class. We had our little Baltimore Catechism, and so I remember going through that for a few years. Then, in 1947, I transferred from West Portal and went into the fifth grade at St. Brendan's, so then that ended catechism class, because we were in a Catholic school and we 00:26:00had religion every day.

01-00:26:06

SHAFER: And did you remember that being more interesting, or not?

01-00:26:10

BROWN: The biblical stories--they had an easel, and they had pictures of the different stories from mostly from the New Testament, maybe from the Old Testament--I found that very interesting, yeah.

01-00:26:30

SHAFER: Did you find it interesting because the stories were interesting, or--did you believe them as like truth?

01-00:26:35

BROWN: Yeah, well we believed Adam and Eve were the first parents, and they'd gotten--the serpent, the sin, the Garden of Eden--all that, yeah. Mortal sin, venial sin, crucifixion, resurrection, grace, communion, confession, seven sacraments--the whole nine yards. It takes a while to get all that. But from catechism class, starting in the 1940s, and then going through high school, 00:27:00Santa Clara, the seminary, up until I went to Berkeley in 1960, that's probably fifteen years or more of regular Catholic religious instruction.

01-00:27:25

SHAFER: And we're going to get to some of those later things in a bit. But do you remember, as you were young, going through religious training?

01-00:27:35

BROWN: No, we made our first Communion. I remember that. We have pictures of that. We went out to Lakeside after that, and we had our little short pants and a little white sash on our arm, and we got our rosary beads and a little missal, so I remember that.

01-00:27:53

SHAFER: But I mean was there a point where as you were studying [snapping fingers] that something clicked for you?

01-00:27:56

BROWN: No, what do you mean it clicked? It was what it was, so it was part of 00:28:00the landscape. It was just part of reality; it didn't seem separate.

01-00:28:08

SHAFER: And did you engage with the church in a different way than your siblings, or not really?

01-00:28:13

BROWN: I can't tell. They were a lot older than I was--I think my sister Barbara is seven years older than me, and Cynthia was five years. That's quite a difference. So we weren't sitting around discussing religion or theology or politics. Barbara had her friends, Cynthia had her friends, and I had my friends, so a sort of normal differentiation.

01-00:28:47

SHAFER: Yeah, and your friends--you mostly hung out with boys in the neighborhood?

01-00:28:51

BROWN: Yeah.

01-00:28:52

SHAFER: And who were some of your friends?

01-00:28:54

BROWN: Well, there's Mark McGuinness, Peter Roddy, Mark's brother Michael 00:29:00[McGuinness], Charlie Corsiglia, Mitchell Johnson.

01-00:29:08

SHAFER: And what did you guys do when you were hanging out?

01-00:29:13

BROWN: Well, we played hide-and-go-seek in the early years, running around to all the different houses and backyards around. And then we'd play hockey on the street. There weren't that many cars then on Magellan Ave. You could actually play hockey with roller skates. And then we'd play touch football. And then we, at some point, rode our bikes and we'd ride different places. And it evolved as we grew up.

01-00:29:49

SHAFER: Did you consider yourself an athlete or were you interested in sports?

01-00:29:51

BROWN: No. Well, I mean we played--that was sports. West Portal didn't have any 00:30:00organized sports that I knew of, nor did St. Brendan's. This hyper-sports thing is a recent invention. There was the Pop Warner league, which I went one day to try out for, but I didn't have any interest. So normally, you could go to school and there was not uniforms or--parents were not taking their kids to games. That started in high school.

01-00:30:31

SHAFER: You were the only boy. You had three sisters. What was that dynamic like, and did you wish you had a brother?

01-00:30:40

BROWN: Yeah, I did, because there wasn't a lot to talk about with my sisters. And they were older, so they had different activities, certainly, growing up. And I was probably not very interesting to them. My friends in the neighborhood 00:31:00were not their friends. They had other people they liked to be with. So there's quite a differentiation. The school creates graded differences, so that when you're in the second grade, you're different than the third grade and the fourth grade, much less eighth grade. So schooling, unlike, I think, being on a farm or being in an earlier period in history--or being on this ranch--you stick to your grades. At the school you didn't want to talk to the younger ones; you didn't want to talk to the older ones. You knew who they were; you saw them, but that was that.

I also noticed that the people in school--I've reflected on this recently--most of the people I spent time with, they lived in the neighborhood. And we'd go to school, and it was rare that somebody just from the school would come over and play. That was true at West Portal, and that was true at St. Brendan's, where I went. So school just occupied your time. And in class you didn't talk--nobody talked in class. The teacher talked, or you answered questions or raised your hand. And then we'd play--at recess and lunchtime, there would be, obviously, playing in the yard. And then when we went home it was more of that. The people that I gravitated toward were the people in the neighborhood.

Mark McGuinness was on the corner, and they had a little basketball court, and 00:33:00I'd say that's a predominant activity after a certain age.

01-00:33:14

SHAFER: You said you were reflecting recently on the fact, I think, that the kids all had grown up in the neighborhood? Is that what you were referring to?

01-00:33:19

BROWN: No, I was saying that I didn't form friendships with people in school, if they weren't living within a block or two of my house.

01-00:33:32

SHAFER: As you were reflecting on it, what did you think?

01-00:33:36

BROWN: Just that schooling is an odd institution, and it controls and occupies your time and forces you into these exercises. And then when you leave it, it's just there, and you pick it up again the next day. So I guess I was reflecting 00:34:00on the fact that schooling did not create the conversations or the interaction or the being together with, that maybe being at Santa Clara did, where you have a twenty-four-hour environment, and you had a chance to eat meals with people, like at Santa Clara or in the seminary or at the International House at Berkeley. There was an opportunity to have discussions, get acquainted with people, whereas these schools, these grammar schools, you just go, and you do your pupil activity, and then you go home. And the only real interaction is sometimes you go to school, come and go with certain people, or I would get rides with various parents. My father and my mother didn't drive us to school. 00:35:00You could even walk--it was only, I don't know how far, probably less than a mile. But if I could get a ride from a neighbor, I would, and then you would talk to people and meet people. Otherwise, it was a kind of a controlled existence, in that sense.

01-00:35:20

SHAFER: Did you find that confining at all?

01-00:35:22

BROWN: I don't think I really thought about it. I didn't find it particularly invigorating, sitting there in class. It was interesting enough. It was all right. But it seems to be, if I can compare, and I don't know that I can, but it seems like school is a lot more important today. I mean, my parents wouldn't ask me, "What happened at school today?" Maybe they did, but I don't have a recollection of that. And there wasn't any great emphasis on it--I'd get my report card and they'd take a look at it, and that was that. Today we have all 00:36:00this data collection, and we have a statewide computer with all the different performance metrics for all 6 million children. And there's a band of academics that want to look at this very carefully, and people are judging neighborhoods and schools by the metrics on the state exams. So that's all an invention of more recent decades.

01-00:36:27

SHAFER: And you think that's a mistake?

01-00:36:29

BROWN: Well, I'm skeptical that regimentation and standardization is the pathway to wisdom, knowledge, and creativity.

01-00:36:45

SHAFER: Well, in that regard, I think it was a biography of your dad, you're described as being a rambunctious handful, and I think maybe it was another member of your family, maybe your godmother, called you--

01-00:37:00

BROWN: Not my godmother. That would have been my aunt.

01-00:37:04

SHAFER: She called you a hellion. Does that ring true for you at all? [laughing]

01-00:37:07

BROWN: Oh yeah, because when you're young, you have a lot of energy. You want to run around. You don't want to sit--so we were always outside running around doing one thing or another.

01-00:37:18

SHAFER: No more so than the other kids?

01-00:37:20

BROWN: No. What are you talking about, five, six, ten, twelve? You're in constant motion.

01-00:37:28

SHAFER: What's the worst thing you did as a kid, would you say?

01-00:37:31

BROWN: I don't think there was anything particularly bad, little notable things. I wrote my name in the cement that hadn't dried yet, down the street from our house. Thrown a few dirt clods at neighbors' houses. I hope I can throw it at that house or something. That's fun, to provoke people. [laughter] The whole game, the challenge is the excitement and to avoid boredom, which school 00:38:00represented in some respects. And that's why most kids are glad to get out of school and go play. That's what childhood used to be. Today it seems like school and sports is the controlling mechanism.

01-00:38:20

SHAFER: At some point you, I think, got interested in boxing?

01-00:38:23

BROWN: No, that's not true.

01-00:38:24

SHAFER: Oh, it's not true?

01-00:38:24

BROWN: We had senior fight night. My senior year, they had a fight night for seniors. And I participated in that, but it was a one-night, three-round experience, and they had four or five other fights the same night.

01-00:38:40

SHAFER: Describe what they were.

01-00:38:41

BROWN: Oh, it's a fight, it's a boxing match. You have these big boxing gloves that kind of weigh your hands down, and I was in a three-round match, and I won and that was good. But that was my first and last experience as a boxer. [laughter]

01-00:38:55

SHAFER: So you just had one fight?

01-00:38:56

BROWN: One--well, it's only senior fight night. It's like the junior prom or 00:39:00senior fight night. That's just one of the things they did in those days.

01-00:39:07

SHAFER: And did you have like a good left hook?

01-00:39:09

BROWN: I can't remember.

01-00:39:10

SHAFER: You don't remember?

01-00:39:12

BROWN: Well, no, it wasn't that sophisticated.

01-00:39:16

SHAFER: So it was in like a boxing ring with the whole thing?

01-00:39:18

BROWN: Yeah, in a ring in the gym.

01-00:39:19

SHAFER: This is a Catholic school campus?

01-00:39:20

BROWN: In the gym. With all the kids standing by watching.

01-00:39:24

SHAFER: And the school sponsored that?

01-00:39:26

BROWN: Yeah, it was at the school, in the school gymnasium, an event called the senior fight night. And it was voluntary, of course--some people did it, some people didn't.

01-00:39:37

SHAFER: Yeah, and your one match, who was that against?

01-00:39:40

BROWN: Peter Roddy.

01-00:39:42

SHAFER: And what happened?

01-00:39:44

BROWN: Well, I knocked him down, and I won on points. But he got up, so it wasn't a knock out. But I won. I think that was good. I hadn't done that before. Before--or since!

01-00:39:59

SHAFER: [laughing] I remember when we talked a few weeks ago, we were chatting 00:40:00about the fact that you wished you'd had a brother, or you would have liked to have a brother.

01-00:40:07

BROWN: Well, because it's kind of boring just being there--there wasn't always somebody to play with. That was the big thing. Play was just the name of the game--and who you play with. So I liked to be with others.

01-00:40:25

SHAFER: You mentioned, I think, going over to Bill [William A.] Newsom's house, and he had a bunch of brothers.

01-00:40:30

BROWN: Yeah, I went over there--I think I only went over there once or twice. Well, they had six children, as I recall. Three boys and three girls. And they had three stories in their house, which I found interesting, because we only had two, so that seemed like a big house to me.

01-00:40:48

SHAFER: Yeah. Kathleen was born, I think, in '45.

01-00:40:51

BROWN: Yes.

01-00:40:52

SHAFER: What do you remember? Did that change? A lot of times in a lot of families, the youngest person gets all the attention, so suddenly it was a new youngest person, a little infant girl in the family. What did that change?

01-00:41:05

BROWN: I don't know that it changed too much. You know, an infant is an infant--a young boy is not paying much attention to his baby sister, I can tell you that. [SHAFER laughs] We're out there riding our bicycles or playing touch football or basketball.

01-00:41:27

SHAFER: You weren't doting on your little sister or anything like that?

01-00:41:29

BROWN: No, no.

01-00:41:31

SHAFER: Nothing like that, no.

01-00:41:32

BROWN: There wasn't a lot of doting in my family.

01-00:41:34

SHAFER: What do you mean?

01-00:41:36

BROWN: Well, just what you said. You conjured up an image of doting, and I said that's not something that I had much experience of.

01-00:41:44

SHAFER: Yeah. So talk more, a little bit more about your mom. She was around, and your dad was working a lot. What was she like as a mother?

01-00:41:52

BROWN: Um--fine! I wasn't into making any comparisons, so it was fine. We didn't 00:42:00have a lot of fights, things were pretty, you know--life was relatively simple. Certainly during the war, and afterwards, my mother had her activities. She took care of the house. As my sisters got older, they started doing cooking as well, and we had to wash the dishes or dry the dishes. That's something that I did somewhat, although I wasn't that diligent. So that's all. My mother was in a bridge club with some of the women in the general neighborhood, and their husbands were friends of my father, and they would have parties occasionally. And that's pretty much it, except for when we went on vacation, and then we'd go 00:43:00to different places.

01-00:43:02

SHAFER: A lot of times in families the one parent will be more strict, or one will be--like what--?

01-00:43:08

BROWN: Oh, I think they were kind of equal--my mother was around more, so she was more of the disciplinarian. But I stayed out of their way, so I didn't have much colliding in terms of, "don't do this," or, "don't do that." It was a pretty simple life. You could go out the door, and you'd run around for hours, and then you'd come back and go to dinner and go to bed. There was no television. There was maybe a--no, we didn't listen to records that much. You'd have the radio; they had the 5:00pm programs--Tom Mix, and Captain Midnight, and things like that. But I would just sit there and listen to it from 5:00 to 6:00.

01-00:43:53

SHAFER: Do you remember listening to FDR's fireside chats, or anything like that?

01-00:43:57

BROWN: No, I did not listen to that. I remember the 1948 election, when [Harry 00:44:00S.] Truman won. I do remember that, because my father and this fellow Homer Potter, who was running the Truman campaign, he lived around the corner. I'm in touch with his son, of the same name. So yeah, I had moments where I paid attention to elections.

I remember when Roosevelt died. I remember when the atomic bomb went off. I just remember that day one of the ladies was walking down the street saying the rosary, and Mrs. Potter, as a matter of fact, talking about how Roosevelt died. And then the kid across the street, who was a year ahead of me at St. Ignatius, came and said they dropped the atomic bomb. I asked him what that was--I can't remember what he said, but it seemed to be like a big thing. So the big world events--I remember Manila, I remember the name Manila on the map and then, when 00:45:00you're reading the newspaper, they'd have the arrows of the armies, in the war against Japan, the war against Germany. So I picked up on those things, but it was pretty remote. It wasn't like living in Europe during a time of war. This is a very kind of secure, safe, clean, healthy environment, where there's no crime, death is relatively rare, and everything's just fine. So that's my childhood, as it came up.

01-00:45:49

SHAFER: Despite the blackouts of the windows and the drills?

01-00:45:51

BROWN: Oh, that was fun! Yeah, the war--that was fun, and the rationing; the little ration cards looked interesting. They had some kind of pictures on 00:46:00them--they were like something you might collect, and just like milk tops were kind of interesting. You know, we'd take the milk and collect a certain amount of milk tops--or match books. See, life was relatively simple. [laughing] It seems very different than it is today.

01-00:46:20

SHAFER: You had to find your own fun.

01-00:46:22

BROWN: Yeah. Now, my neighbors have three children, I think five, seven, and ten. The baby was born, I think, just before they bought the ranch. And they work there on the ranch. They're homeschooled, and they're milking cows and feeding chickens and turkeys. And so that's another world--a very different world, that I find very instructive to how that would work. And I'm very impressed. I like being here, seeing people, and the people in the neighborhood, 00:47:00our neighbor whose cows run on our land. A lot of physical work.

And I think back when my great-grandfather August Schuckman was here, and my grandmother [Ida Schuckman Brown], they had a blacksmith's shop--they had to make everything. There was no electricity. There was no well--they got their water from the rain in a cistern. But there was a lot of physical labor. So my experience was much more convenient--just go to the grocery store. Yeah, there were no supermarkets. I can remember when Safeway started, I think after World War [II]--in '45 or something. It was very simple and limited, compared to what it is today, but it's still extremely easy living, I would say.

01-00:48:02

SHAFER: Speaking of which, I seem to remember that your parents, or your mom--the kids would get allowance in exchange for chores.

01-00:48:13

BROWN: I didn't get a regular allowance, and I didn't do regular chores. Whatever my sisters did--that was more the girls' job, to clean and take care of the house. My job was just to play and cause trouble.

01-00:48:30

SHAFER: So you didn't make a decision like--well, I'll forgo the allowance, but then I don't have--?

01-00:48:34

BROWN: No. It wasn't that well organized. It wasn't that precise. It was a certain ease, you know. It was not a regimented life, let's put it that way. Even though dinner was a regular occurrence and school was a regular occurrence, it was not a regimented experience.

01-00:49:02

SHAFER: Looking back, or even at the time, did you feel lucky that your sisters had to do all the cleaning and stuff, when you were out?

01-00:49:06

BROWN: No.

01-00:49:07

SHAFER: No?

01-00:49:08

BROWN: I didn't think it was a man's job, a boy's job in the first place. So it was more gendered--our rules were clearly more gendered than they are today.

01-00:49:16

SHAFER: What about like taking out the garbage or cutting the lawn?

01-00:49:17

BROWN: Oh yeah, taking out the garbage--yeah, you had to do certain things.

01-00:49:20

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah. Your dad, during this time, must have run for reelection, like in '47 or something?

01-00:49:27

BROWN: He ran in '46 for the attorney general, so it came pretty quick--he was sworn in in January of '44, and he was running for attorney general in '46.

01-00:49:42

SHAFER: And he lost that race.

01-00:49:43

BROWN: He lost that race. He won the primary, which was something, because the candidate for governor lost the primary, I think, in '46, because we had cross-filing. The candidates can run in both parties.

01-00:49:55

SHAFER: Do you remember at any point campaigning with your dad? Were you around? 00:50:00Would he take you to rallies or stuff?

01-00:50:03

BROWN: I think I went to a few events. I remember going to a [Adlai E.] Stevenson event. That would have been '52. I remember a radio--they used to do live radio broadcasts, so I remember that. My world was the child's world. My father was doing his thing, and I knew about it, but it was a different world. It was a different domain. My father didn't come to school, or come and watch me play basketball at Mark McGuinness's house, or ride a bike, or throw a baseball or something. He had his world, I had my world, my mother had her world. It all was integrated, but there were different roles.

01-00:50:59

SHAFER: And that was just the way families were then.

01-00:51:00

BROWN: That's the way it was. I think that's the way it was for everybody, at 00:51:00least on the block as I experienced it.

01-00:51:07

SHAFER: Do you remember dinner time? Were there lively discussions?

01-00:51:11

BROWN: Yeah, I think I remember that as discussions, talk. I remember more not wanting to eat my vegetables than what they were talking at the table. That was a more serious matter.

01-00:51:25

SHAFER: So did they talk politics and stuff, or not?

01-00:51:27

BROWN: Yeah, oh, they talked. Yeah, my father talked about politics--that's what his main subject matter was for most of his life, maybe all of his life.

01-00:51:37

SHAFER: Really? So that was really his main interest?

01-00:51:42

BROWN: Yeah, I think. Certainly, there was, whatever it was we were talking about while we were eating, like the district attorneys, there were campaigns, 00:52:00and there were campaign contributors. There were labor union people, and there were judges and different court cases. It's not very precise in my mind, but it all unfolded without major events.

01-00:52:22

SHAFER: And your dad ran again for AG in 1950?

01-00:52:27

BROWN: He ran for AG in '50, yes, and he won.

01-00:52:30

SHAFER: So you would have been twelve or so at that point?

01-00:52:35

BROWN: In '50? Well, yeah, in June, I would have been in the eighth grade. No, I would have been the seventh grade.

Oh yeah, I remember who he ran against. He was defeated by a guy named Frederick [N.] Howser. But Howser lost the primary because he got in trouble with some gamblers, or a gambling boat, in the vicinity of Catalina, and the LA Times 00:53:00jumped on him. So Frederick Napoleon Howser was defeated in the primary by a guy named Edward Shattuck, and my father beat him, in '50.

01-00:53:18

SHAFER: And do you remember that being a big deal, or how did you think about it?

01-00:53:20

BROWN: Yeah, I guess it was. Yeah. I didn't go to the swearing-in--I was probably in school. Because school was the predominant function.

01-00:53:35

SHAFER: I'm getting that.

01-00:53:37

BROWN: Yeah. Well, that's how they take care of you; that's how they occupy your time.

01-00:53:41

SHAFER: Yeah, do you feel like you had a good education? If you were in the eighth grade, was it more like rote memorization stuff?

01-00:53:48

BROWN: I think it was a pretty good education. It was clear. I've reflected on 00:54:00the fact that I don't think I ever heard an incorrect English sentence spoken, growing up. My parents, their grammar and syntax were without any errors.

I had the same nun in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades, Sr. Roseen, O.P. [Order or Preachers, also known as Dominican Order], who I kept in touch with until the end of her life, which was only a few years ago, and she had perfect handwriting. You'd use control paper to learn how to write. My handwriting wasn't that great. In fact, I had to work a little extra. It was the Palmer Method in West Portal, and then in St. Brendan's we got control paper, which I'd never seen before, with three lines. And some [letters] would only go up one line, like a g, small g. But if you had a j, it would go up three lines. And so 00:55:00it was all of this lined paper--I do recall that.

And in the eighth grade we had diagramming sentences, which I was not very good at. I didn't like it. But we knew what the seven parts of speech were, and we did our multiplication tables. And in some schools today, they don't get that, some of the lower-performing schools. So I would say, in general, it was a clear, coherent education, so that was fine. Yeah, it wasn't one of these Waldorf schools where you get a lot of different experiences and enrichment. These nuns--and they're all nuns. We had no non-nuns there, and the school was 00:56:00brand new. Fifth grade was the first year it opened. It was a brand-new building. They seemed a little foreign to me, because they came out from Chicago. They talked a little funny from my point of view. It was different than West Portal--it was a little oppressive. You asked me if it was good. I think it was a good education, but oppressive. They knew if someone caused trouble in the neighborhood, they'd call the nuns, and the nuns would then call you to account in the classroom. So it was pretty orderly, and there was no fooling around in the classes that I can remember. Yeah, and so it was a good, clear foundation, I would say.

I mean I always marvel that people don't know the parts of speech--and today 00:57:00they've kind of deconstructed that, and they don't think of it in quite that rigid manner, but we had to.

01-00:57:14

SHAFER: What are the seven parts?

01-00:57:15

BROWN: There are seven. What are they?

01-00:57:17

SHAFER: What are they?

01-00:57:18

BROWN: You know what they are. [laughter]

01-00:57:19

SHAFER: You're talking about nouns, verbs, adverbs, something like that?

01-00:57:21

BROWN: Yeah, the nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives--did I say adjectives? Prepositions, conjunctions, interjections. Is that seven?

01-00:57:35

SHAFER: Yeah, very good.

01-00:57:36

BROWN: Now, you don't know that, do you? Did you know the [speaking to Holmes and Meeker]--[laughter]

01-00:57:39

SHAFER: They're academics!

01-00:57:40

MEEKER: I went to a Catholic high school, so that was drilled into me.

01-00:57:43

BROWN: I learned that--well, I didn't remember it, but I've looked it up in Google, in recent years. So that's why I sometimes like to ask people, "Do you know the seven parts of speech?"

01-00:57:54

MEEKER: Because you have smart-alecky interviewers asking you that? [laughing]

01-00:57:59

BROWN: But it does give a coherence. And similarly, I think there was a clarity 00:58:00there. I have my English text from Santa Clara, Reading for Understanding, edited by Fr. [Maurice B.] McNamee, and I look at it from time to time. And I marvel at the, I guess clarity is the word, or it was a world view that was coherent and in place, as opposed to the kind of postmodernist deconstruction of the world we have today, where you don't have that. We had a world that was clear, and you were right and wrong. And you knew what was a venial sin, what was a mortal sin, and you had to go to church on Sunday. You didn't tell lies, you're not supposed to steal--it was a pretty clear--it's kind of what you think 00:59:00of the 1950s.

01-00:59:04

SHAFER: Did you rebel against that at all?

01-00:59:06

BROWN: No.

01-00:59:07

SHAFER: Not at all?

01-00:59:08

BROWN: Well, I don't think rebellion was even in the ballgame. There was no thought of that. It was a very stable world, and it just was what it was. The exciting times were after school, summer vacation--that was it. And so I liked summer vacation, Christmas vacation, Easter vacation, and recess much better than I liked school. So that was just playing. You all go outside and run around--you know, exuberance. Sort of like these dogs do [referencing his two dogs.] They don't like to sit around.

01-00:59:44

SHAFER: Burn off energy.

01-00:59:45

BROWN: Yeah.

01-00:59:46

SHAFER: At some point you got interested in debate and elocution, I think, right?

01-00:59:50

BROWN: Well, I was on the debating team. Yeah, I did find that interesting. So in the debate team, the National Forensic League, St. Ignatius was there, and we'd go to tournaments at various high schools. People from the valley--Merced, 01:00:00Ripon, Bellarmine, Lowell--were active in all that.

01-01:00:16

SHAFER: Do you remember some of the things you debated?

01-01:00:18

BROWN: Yeah. We debated free trade, we debated universal conscription in a time of war. We debated whether NATO should become a federation, which they ultimately did in the Common Market, of sorts--not entirely. I think we debated the Electoral College. Each year, in those days, you'd have one topic for the entire year, and you'd be given either the affirmative or the negative, and you'd find that out a few minutes before you went into the debate. I didn't go 01:01:00to too many, but I went to enough.

01-01:01:03

SHAFER: How did you prepare for them?

01-01:01:05

BROWN: I didn't prepare that much, but you had books, you had magazines--Time magazine, Newsweek. And I also did the freshman elocution contest, which I won, and the sophomore oratorical contest, which I won. I still have the medals sitting in one of my boxes, one of my 250 boxes.

01-01:01:27

SHAFER: What does one have to do to win an elocution contest?

01-01:01:30

BROWN: You have to convince the judges that you're better than the seven or eight other contestants.

01-01:01:36

SHAFER: But I mean, how do you do that?

01-01:01:37

BROWN: I don't know--I just did it. I practiced, and that was that. But there were far better debaters than me at St. Ignatius High School.

01-01:01:51

SHAFER: Really?

01-01:01:52

BROWN: Yeah. And Lowell had some good debaters. [Supreme Court Justice] Stephen [G.] Breyer was a debater there. The guy I appointed judge--he's still a judge, 01:02:00Stu [Stuart R.] Pollak, was a debater. And we had people at St. Ignatius. Fr. [John] Coleman was a debater. There was a team, with [Marc E.] Leland and Breyer, and Lowell. Our team was Coleman and Biancho. There were others that were good. I was more back in the pack somewhere.

01-01:02:35

SHAFER: [laughing] That's a little surprising.

01-01:02:37

BROWN: Well, it may be surprising, but it's true. But I did learn a lot. You learn to express yourself. In order to do these topics--some of them are alive today, debated today--you have to read contemporary journals, which I did. At 01:03:00that time I guess it was just basically Time and Newsweek.

01-01:03:04

SHAFER: That was it.

01-01:03:06

BROWN: I would think that was--and I'm trying to think of what else there was. Oh, U.S. News & World Report.

01-01:03:15

SHAFER: Wasn't there Look and Life?

01-01:03:17

BROWN: Yeah, but they weren't going to give you arguments.

[side conversation deleted]

01-01:03:34

SHAFER: So your given name was Edmund G. Brown, Jr.

01-01:03:38

BROWN: Right, right.

01-01:03:39

SHAFER: Everyone calls you Jerry.

01-01:03:40

BROWN: My mother did.

01-01:03:41

SHAFER: How did that come about?

01-01:03:43

BROWN: I don't know. I was Jerry when I first became aware of things. I think my mother didn't want me to be called Eddie, so she decided to call me Jerry.

01-01:03:54

SHAFER: Did people call your dad Eddie?

01-01:03:56

BROWN: No, no. They called him Pat. My grandmother, his mother, called him 01:04:00Edmund. And I think his sisters called him Edmund. Connie [Constance Brown Carlson] did, his sister.

01-01:04:14

SHAFER: And one other thing--just sort of random, but I remember reading, I think it was from the oral history that your dad did--you have a distinctive voice. I don't know if you're aware of that or think about that, but you have a very distinctive voice--a little gravelly. And your dad mentioned that you had, I think, polyps or something? Were you aware of that?

01-01:04:34

BROWN: I remember people talked about that, but it didn't go anywhere.

01-01:04:38

SHAFER: They talked--?

01-01:04:38

BROWN: Well, they didn't do anything. I always had kind of a husky voice. So, I don't know whether some doctor said, "You have polyps in your throat." But my father didn't want to have any operations, so I didn't have any operations growing up.

01-01:04:59

SHAFER: Yeah, so that was that.

01-01:05:00

BROWN: That was that.

[side conversation deleted]

01-01:05:02

SHAFER: I think you graduated in '55 from St. Ignatius [high school]?

01-01:05:03

BROWN: I did.

01-01:05:04

SHAFER: Yeah, so talk about that school. Why did you go there?

01-01:05:07

BROWN: Well, originally I wanted to go to [Archbishop] Riordan [High School], because it was a newer school, and some of the kids in my neighborhood were going there. But then my father said to me, "You can't go there. You have to go to Lowell." I said, "Well, I don't want to go to Lowell. I want to go to a Catholic school." So then he said, "Okay, we'll compromise and you'll go to St. Ignatius, because they have more tradition." He thought that was important. So I took the exam, and I got accepted. So I went to St. Ignatius, and that was over on Turk and Stanyan, so it was near where USF is today. So that was that for school. And I found that much more interesting than St. Brendan's. St. Brendan's did have a sense of confinement, so it was strict, and most people were glad to 01:06:00get out, at least at that time. But I remember, talking to one of the girls who was a couple of years behind me, and she commented how she didn't like the eighth-grade teacher, Sr. Alice Joseph, who I found pleasant enough. But they were strict. I found St. Ignatius much more interesting. You had different teachers--we had only one teacher. I had one teacher, Sr. Roseen, for three years, and I had Sr. Alice Joseph for the eighth grade, the final year. But in St. Ignatius, we had many classes. I count more than two hundred kids in the 01:07:00class, so it's bigger. My class was in the twenties, at St. Brendan's--pretty small. It was a new school.

01-01:07:09

SHAFER: And you just liked what, the diversity of--?

01-01:07:11

BROWN: Yeah, well it was more interesting. The ideas were interesting. The Jesuits were interesting. The course matter was, there was more intellectual content and more stimulation. I liked school better in high school, for sure.

01-01:07:34

SHAFER: Why didn't you want to go to Lowell?

01-01:07:36

BROWN: I wanted to go to a Catholic school. I guess I got that influence at St. Brendan's, and it left its mark.

01-01:07:45

SHAFER: Despite the confinement--

01-01:07:49

BROWN: Well, yeah, I don't think I connected that to high school.

01-01:07:56

SHAFER: Yeah, so I want to ask you a little bit more about the debate stuff. 01:08:00You'd mentioned some of the topics that you debated, and you said you didn't find out until right before the actual competition which side you were going to debate. Did you have a preference?

01-01:08:12

BROWN: No. I can't remember. I can't remember.

01-01:08:15

SHAFER: But I mean in terms of something you agreed with. Was it more fun to argue a position you agreed with or disagreed with?

01-01:08:21

BROWN: I'm trying to remember what I--what free trade/reciprocal trade. Those were the two--a federation or a confederation for the European nations. The Electoral College or not the Electoral College. I don't know that we were, that that particular process led one to a fixed belief in one position or the other. It was more figuring out ways of articulating the case, and we always divided 01:09:00the case into facts and logic. Logic was the arguments and the coherent thoughts you'd put forward, and then facts were usually citations to U.S. News & World Report, or something. I don't think there actually were facts, we called them evidence, that's it--logic and evidence.

But as far as having a deeply held opinion of any of those four topics--even today people talk about the Electoral College, and getting rid of it. I remember the arguments that America was founded as a group of states, it wasn't just the people--it was the states. That's what the electoral college represents. Of course at that time, it wasn't as it is today, these small states--at least we 01:10:00didn't perceive it in quite the same way you would today, with the one man/one vote, which we didn't have in those days, so it seems less supportable. But at the time, that wasn't the point. The point was to win the debate! And to win the debate, you had to convince the judge you did a better job than your opponent, and this was happening frequently. So it wouldn't be just one debate--it might be three different debates on a one-day tournament, or more. I can't remember now.

01-01:10:39

SHAFER: Other than the debates, describe what was a day like at SI.

01-01:10:44

BROWN: A day like at SI--well, I would go over there. Usually I would hitchhike to school, until I got a car I think in my senior year. And you had your Latin, 01:11:00math, English, history, religion, public speaking, ROTC in the second year and the third year. We had recess, we had lunch, and we came home. Schooling didn't capture my attention all that much.

01-01:11:19

SHAFER: Even in high school?

01-01:11:22

BROWN: Yeah. Oh--even ever. School is a confining experience, because you're being told to think like somebody else is thinking, so I didn't always respond to that. Some teachers did more than others. I had different experiences in different classes. So yeah, I found it interesting. I liked algebra, I liked religion, I liked chemistry, I liked history, especially world history. So yeah, those were topics I liked.

01-01:12:00

SHAFER: What about student government? Did you ever think about--?

01-01:12:02

BROWN: No.

01-01:12:03

SHAFER: Not at all?

01-01:12:03

BROWN: No. I was a yell leader for a couple years. But at that time, I think when I went, they said, "Okay, you want to be a yell leader? Show up at room," whatever, and like there were two people there. So it wasn't quite the organized activity that it is today. Things were a little looser. I would say that society was more organized, but the activities in school were not as regimented as they are today.

[side conversation deleted]

01-01:12:45

SHAFER: You mentioned your maternal grandfather who was a police captain.

01-01:12:49

BROWN: Capt. Layne, yeah.

01-01:12:51

SHAFER: Yeah, and then your paternal grandfather [Edmund Joseph Brown]--whole different kind of--

01-01:12:55

BROWN: Yeah, he was an entrepreneur--because he even had a movie theater, had a 01:13:00photo arcade studio on Market Street, and he had a couple poker clubs. Different jobs over different times in his life. Of course, I didn't know much about that. He died, I think, in '41. I only saw him once. I knew the other grandfather better, even though he died in1940. I was only two and a half, I guess, but I do remember him.

01-01:13:37

SHAFER: There's a little bit of irony, I guess, that your dad became DA?

01-01:13:41

BROWN: Right. And they have a story that may be in here, but one of the daily newspapers had a big screaming headline that my father had incorporated his father's gambling clubs, and I think there was some question as to their legality, although they were certainly tolerated--slot machines were tolerated 01:14:00too. When I was a little kid, and we went up to Twain Harte and we stopped along [the way], there would always be slot machines in the stores, and I think Earl Warren was the one who took that out. So I think a poker club certainly was there. And bookmaking was clearly illegal, but that was pretty common. These were clubs, so probably it was illegal playing for gain, yeah, gambling. But I think it was pretty much tolerated.

01-01:14:44

SHAFER: Was there any--I don't know, for lack of a better word--attitude from your mother's side of the family?

01-01:14:50

BROWN: Not that I could tell. No, I learned about that really later. I never thought of my grandfather as having a gambling club. I think I learned that much 01:15:00later in life.

01-01:15:03

SHAFER: And then what about your grandmother, [Ida Schuckman Brown] who died, I think, in '74?

01-01:15:07

BROWN: 1974, yeah, in December.

01-01:15:09

SHAFER: What was she like?

01-01:15:11

BROWN: What was she like? She was--hard to tell. What are people like. If you ask me what are you like, I'd be hard-pressed to give you an answer.

01-01:15:23

SHAFER: What do you remember?

01-01:15:24

BROWN: Or even what is Evan [Westrup] [Westrup, Brown's communications officer, who was in the room] like--what are you like, Evan?

01-01:15:27

WESTRUP: Depends on the day and the company.

01-01:15:30

BROWN: Evan, what is Evan like? Yeah, he plays a lot with his cell phone. [laughter]

01-01:15:33

WESTRUP: Almost as much as you.

01-01:15:36

BROWN: Yeah. How many hours--did you get your report?

01-01:15:37

WESTRUP: Well, yeah, I'm sure we're competing.

01-01:15:41

BROWN: [laughter] Yeah. So what was my grandmother like? Well, she took care of us. She knitted us robes and pajamas, and she would go to her grandchildren, because she had four children, and they all had [her] grandchildren. They lived in the Bay Area, San Francisco or Marin County. And so she would come to 01:16:00dinners, and she would babysit us when we were younger. She liked to clean my fingernails with a toothbrush, and I did not care for that. We talked about religion. She was not happy with the Catholic Church at all. She was very anti-Catholic, so we would argue about that. And when I was very young she used to read me Bible stories, and I remember the pictures--Moses in the bulrush[es], and the destruction of--with Lot's wife looking back, Adam and Eve in the garden. I remember all those stories, crossing the Red Sea. I liked that very much. I liked the Bible stories. And she used to talk about the Mountain House and how wonderful it was, so that left an impression on me--although she left it when she was eighteen.

01-01:17:01

SHAFER: Well, I was going to ask about that, yeah. So she went to San Francisco, right?

01-01:17:03

BROWN: She went to San Francisco. She was the youngest of eight kids. Interestingly enough, all eight kids are buried in the Williams cemetery, as is her mother and father, August and Augusta [Fiedler] Schuckman. Her sister Emma [Schuckman Allen] got married--I think was married by eighteen--yeah, was married by then and had a child, and they lived around the corner, out about a mile and a half, which is still a part of the ranch. It's called the Allen Place. Emma married a guy named Rufus [R.] Allen. So she's gone. The boys are gone, so she might have had to have done more of the work--or maybe there wasn't much going--so she obviously wanted to get out. But she always told me the Mountain House was wonderful, and interesting people would stop by. And I'm sure if you're living out here, whoever stops by had stories to tell. That would be a 01:18:00very exciting experience. But I think the talk of the Mountain House kind of dropped off after I was relatively young. I don't remember it coming up again until my father took me. My great-grandfather died in 1907, and his brother Frank had taken over the Mountain House.

[side conversation deleted]

01-01:18:30

BROWN: So yeah, Frank [J.] Schuckman took it over. I think he moved out of here sometime in the 1920s, maybe after World War I. As soon as the car came, the stagecoach stop didn't work anymore--and not having any amenities, no electricity, no well. They had a big water tank out here, and I saw that--that was still there in 1960 when I came. But the hotel stood--nobody was in it--probably empty, from probably the late '50s or '60s. And the barns became 01:19:00very graffitied, and pretty soon an arsonist in the neighborhood burned it down, in '71. But I saw it in '60, and my father bought it with his brother and four businesspeople, so that became Rancho Venada.

[side conversation deleted]

01-01:19:26

BROWN: That became Rancho Venada, and Harold [Harold C. Brown], my father's brother and four guys--so they bought the ranch in 1962 from the estate of Frank Schuckman. He had left it to twenty-two heirs, including my grandmother. So then they bought it, but they didn't do anything with it. When we took over the records just a few years ago, we calculated from the annual reports that they had only invested $1,250 in that period. When they took it over, the 01:20:00blacksmith's shop disappeared. The remnants of the gas station disappeared. The hotel was burned down. There were four barns, and this barn was pretty good, but then they started stealing the metal off the roof, and because of that it started collapsing, so I burned that barn down. But I did get a chance to walk through it and see it. And so that was interesting. But this Mountain House--it was the second Mountain House. My grandmother was in the first Mountain House, and there's a picture of her. And she scratched her face out of the picture. She's there with her brothers.

01-01:20:48

SHAFER: This is the grandmother who left?

01-01:20:50

BROWN: Yeah, that's Ida. That's my grandmother.

01-01:20:52

SHAFER: Why did she scratch her face out [of the picture]?

01-01:20:54

BROWN: I don't know. She probably didn't want to be seen, maybe she didn't like it at that point. But she did when she talked about it. It was very exciting the 01:21:00way she described it. But as I said, that was when I was younger, and we didn't hear much about it until I came and visited in 1960, and then I didn't really see it again until probably the '90s, when I moved from LA to Oakland and had a chance to come up here and visit. But all that was here was the four barns.

01-01:21:23

SHAFER: You know, earlier I asked you what your grandmother was like--and I mean the fact that she had six siblings--or seven or eight of them?

01-01:21:30

BROWN: She had seven siblings. One died young.

01-01:21:32

SHAFER: Seven siblings, and she was the only one that left. What does that say about her?

01-01:21:37

BROWN: Well, she was independent. She was independent, and her grandniece, I guess, Patricia Schaad, who lives in Williams, told me that her grandmother, Emma, said to Patricia--Patricia was her granddaughter, and she lived out at the Allen place and then moved into Williams. And her Grandmother Emma said, "Now, 01:22:00Patricia, you be content with your life." And Patricia then said, "But Ida always said you be discontent with your life." So that definitely marked a difference.

Ida was an explorer. She went to different lectures and took my father around to that, and she had a lively interest in religion. If she was anything, she'd call herself a Unitarian, but she was a free-thinking person. I noticed, when she said that in 1948 she voted for Henry Wallace, and I remember there was a proposition on the ballot. It was called an anti-feather-bedding initiative. I think it was maybe 1948 or 1950, and I remember her sitting and talking to my grandmother about it, and she said, "Oh no, that's a bad thing. This is not 01:23:00good." It was the railroad's effort to reduce the number of employees, and it turns out that some of her brothers worked for the railroad, and her nephew, Victor [C.] Schuckman--who later changed his name to Creason--but Victor worked on it and lived in Dunsmuir. So my grandmother had what I'd call a liberal perspective. She thought the churches should be turned into childcare centers. She didn't like the big Catholic cathedrals and the wealth of the church. So she was a freethinker, and I think an inquisitive person.

01-01:23:45

SHAFER: You said she was upset with the church. Was it for those reasons?

01-01:23:47

BROWN: I don't know whether the word is upset--she disagreed with the Catholic Church, that's all. I don't know the different reasons of why it all happened, 01:24:00maybe going back to her husband and whatever the hell it was. But she definitely didn't like the Catholic Church as an idea. She liked religion, but not the church of Rome.

01-01:24:17

SHAFER: So you, obviously, had a different point of view. Did she try to talk you out of that?

01-01:24:21

BROWN: No. I tried to talk. I tried to talk her out of her anti-Catholicism, but that didn't go anywhere.

01-01:24:29

SHAFER: Yeah. You guys want to jump in and ask some things?

01-01:24:32

MEEKER: Sure. This is Martin Meeker, and I'm picking up after Scott SHAFER. So Governor, I'd like to ask you a little bit more about politics. Was there a point, growing up, that you came to realize that your dad's job was different than others, that it was unique in some important ways?

01-01:24:56

BROWN: I wouldn't put it that way.

01-01:24:57

MEEKER: Okay.

01-01:24:59

BROWN: No, I mean I knew he was the district attorney, and nobody else on 01:25:00Magellan Ave. was elected to any office. But no, I don't know that different was--it just was. I'd visit him in his office down on Montgomery Street, which was where it was at that point. I went to some of the picnics that the district attorney's office had, so I talked to the deputies. But no, I guess I didn't know what other people did. I mean, I knew that Peter Roddy's father was in the coffee business, and I knew that John Haster's father was in the insurance business, and Mitchell Johnson's father was an assistant chief counsel at the Bank of America, and that Mark McGuinness's father was a doctor, and that Charlie Corsiglia's father ran a pharmacy. So that's just the way it was. I 01:26:00didn't stand back and frame it in the way you described it.

01-01:26:14

MEEKER: Well, you know, all of your friends' dads had to do their jobs in order to keep their jobs, but your dad was the only one whose fellow citizens could fire him.

01-01:26:24

BROWN: Yeah, well--that's a nice generalization that you're making, but it's not one I made as a child.

01-01:26:29

MEEKER: Okay.

01-01:26:31

BROWN: That's a little later articulation.

01-01:26:34

MEEKER: Well, I think in this day and age, the children of politicians are both highly scrutinized, but also shielded in some ways from public scrutiny.

01-01:26:49

BROWN: Well, first of all, there wasn't that much public scrutiny in those days. The press is a lot nosier today than it used to be. And so we used to get, for 01:27:00example, free passes to the theaters and to Whitney's at the Beach, and today you wouldn't do that--and no one thought anything of it. So, I don't know, it was just normal. A district attorney, he's not president, he's not a governor--it is an elected position, but there were eleven supervisors, there's the mayor, there's a lot of people in city government, so I didn't distinguish it as anything. The district attorney was the DA, that was what that was, and I'm sure I could frame it in various ways, but it seemed fairly ordinary at the time.

01-01:27:58

MEEKER: Did your mom or dad ever sit you down and say, "Hey, Dad's job is kind 01:28:00of unique. Watch out!"

01-01:28:04

BROWN: No, no. Not even close! That kind of a conversation is totally alien to my memory of growing up.

01-01:28:13

SHAFER: I just wonder though, and you were a little older at this point, but I seem to remember from your father's oral history, that you wrote him a letter urging him to think about running for the senate.

01-01:28:25

BROWN: Yeah, that was when I was in the seminary. That would have been 1957 or '58.

01-01:28:31

SHAFER: Okay, we'll get to that later.

01-01:28:33

MEEKER: And I'd also like to ask you--

01-01:28:34

BROWN: And that reflected my general interest in national/international as opposed to local.

01-01:28:42

MEEKER: A little bit more about SI, and a little more about Catholicism. You said that your dad had urged you to go to Lowell, and you wanted to go to SI--or to Riordan.

01-01:28:52

BROWN: No, I wanted to go to Riordan. We compromised.

01-01:28:54

MEEKER: The compromise was SI.

01-01:28:55

BROWN: I didn't think of St. Ignatius. By the way, Homer Potter told me, which 01:29:00might have influenced me--he was two years ahead of me, so he was already at Riordan. And he said he went to Riordan because they were going to build a swimming pool, which, to date, they haven't built yet. So that might have been one of the reasons I wanted to go to Riordan.

01-01:29:20

MEEKER: Just thinking about Catholic education as opposed to public school, was there something that you, in particular, had in your mind? Was it just that it was familiar, or was there something else that you can remember about--?

01-01:29:31

BROWN: Well, and a Catholic education presented a Catholic view, which in that pre-Vatican II, 1950s period was a very comprehensive framework, and it was the framework that was something that I had learned, and I thought that was the correct way of looking at the world, so I wanted to continue in that tradition, 01:30:00under the guidance or auspices of the church.

01-01:30:14

MEEKER: Can you describe what that framework was, at that time?

01-01:30:19

BROWN: Well, the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ, who is the son of God, and we've had popes for the last two thousand years. And popes have bishops, and bishops have priests, and the priests serve in parishes, and the parishes do baptisms and confessions and communion and Mass and the other sacraments, and that's part of the ritual or the routine of life. So that struck me as an important aspect of my reality at that time. So I didn't see any reason not to follow through on that.

01-01:31:02

MEEKER: That's the superstructure of the church, if you will.

01-01:31:05

BROWN: Yeah. Well, as opposed to--?

01-01:31:09

MEEKER: What about the beliefs? What about the doctrine? Were there parts of learning the faith at that time that were particularly intriguing or meaningful to you?

01-01:31:22

BROWN: No--well, it was all meaningful. That was a thoroughgoing story of the way things are, the way things have unfolded, and so it's an identity group. A rather big identity group and one of long standing, so I think it was very normal. In fact, I'd say most of the kids in my class at St. Brendan's went to Catholic school, both the girls and the boys. So that was the norm.

And there were parishes. They were very distinct, and the parishes had their local Catholic schools, and there was a number of boys' schools--there's only three really: Riordan, St. Ignatius, Sacred Heart. I think there was another one--St. James--but that was not as familiar. And then you had all the girls' schools, and that's just the way it went for people who went into the Catholic grammar schools. And that was the whole point. The church--that's what their plan was, and the plan was executed fairly successfully in the 1950s.

01-01:32:44

MEEKER: What about distinguishing between good and evil? Was that a big part of education?

01-01:32:49

BROWN: Not good and evil, I think sin--there was sin, there was grace. You get grace by going to Mass and communion. You commit sins by being late for Mass or, 01:33:00you know, being disobedient or stealing things or something like that. So yeah, there was a rather detailed moral code that was part of the catechism, because we studied the catechism, and the catechism is pretty comprehensive. Seven sacraments, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, cardinal virtues--it's a pretty detailed schema of things, which I think was a good thing, because it gave a framework. It's not this kind of amorphous floating set of identities that often kids experience today.

01-01:33:53

MEEKER: Did you feel like you lived pretty close to the virtues and to the sacraments?

01-01:34:02

BROWN: I mean, it was a pretty simple life. I think it was just--it was the norm. So I don't think people thought about being holy or not holy, it was just--this was reality. Just like you're an American, you're not an African or Chinese. You're not a Hindu. You're a Christian, and a Roman Catholic at that, so those are the identities. So, today we have a lot of different identities, but it's similar to that.

01-01:34:45

MEEKER: Was being a Democrat an important identity for you?

01-01:34:49

BROWN: I don't know if it was important. It was something that I accepted, that certainly I identified with. My eighth-grade nun, Sister Alice Joseph, didn't like Truman and didn't like [Dean] Acheson, and I think spoke about losing China 01:35:00to the Communists. And I disagreed with her on that, basically from my father's talk and conversation. So yeah, I had an independent view. Not independent of my parents, but independent of the nuns--this one nun, she's the eighth-grade nun, what she talked about. The others did not. The other one. There was only two; I only had two nuns.

01-01:35:34

MEEKER: What did it mean to be a Democrat, say in the 1950s, before you head off to college?

01-01:35:40

BROWN: What did it mean to be--not for [Thomas E.] Dewey and not for [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. So that--I mean, those were the candidates.

01-01:35:53

MEEKER: So what did Truman and Stevenson stand for?

01-01:35:56

BROWN: Well, they were Democrats.

01-01:35:57

MEEKER: Okay.

01-01:35:58

BROWN: Yeah, they're supposed to be the common man against the big business or 01:36:00something, that it was just relatively simple and traditional.

01-01:36:10

MEEKER: Labor would play a big role in that in the 1950s.

01-01:36:13

BROWN: It did play a big role, but not in my mind. There were no union members on Magellan Ave. If we lived in the Mission, we probably would have seen a lot of trade. I mean I knew about trade unions, particularly the building trades, because they were active in the campaigns.

01-01:36:38

MEEKER: So did these professional circles around your dad--and I assume labor unions would have played a role in that--did those professional circles ever bleed over into your own social life growing up?

01-01:36:53

BROWN: No--how? What would that be? I didn't go to any bar association meetings. We used to go to the district attorneys convention, which was held--I remember 01:37:00doing that. That was fun. Yeah, we went to the Tahoe Tavern, went down to the Hotel Del [Coronado], so I remembered it more as, in that kind of spirit. Not the way DAs perform today, discussing all the different criminal laws that they want or want to protect. That's very substantive--I saw it from the eyes of a young person.

01-01:37:46

MEEKER: It was like a family boondoggle or something, huh? [laughing]

01-01:37:48

BROWN: Not a boondoggle. The word boondoggle didn't even show up. I'm sure I must have heard that one later, in college or something. In fact, I don't know when I first heard boondoggle, but I certainly don't remember it in high school.

01-01:38:01

MEEKER: You said that there were some debates.

01-01:38:05

BROWN: That's much later, that may be kind of anachronistic to apply that--growing up it all seemed: this is the way it was, so there wasn't a lot of discrepancy.

01-01:38:18

MEEKER: You said that you had debated a little with your grandmother about Catholicism.

01-01:38:22

BROWN: I wouldn't say debate--discussed.

01-01:38:26

MEEKER: What were the critiques that she would have had?

01-01:38:29

BROWN: I think I mentioned those. The money, too much money spent on churches--

01-01:38:38

MEEKER: How would you respond?

01-01:38:40

BROWN: Maybe the intolerance, the dogma--probably that would be it.

01-01:38:43

MEEKER: How would you have responded to those critiques?

01-01:38:45

BROWN: I don't think I got into the details, just--Catholicism is the one true religion, and there it is. But you don't argue with your grandmother that much, you know. So you'd have a discussion, but it's not like we're talking about it now.

01-01:39:05

MEEKER: So you graduate high school, I believe, in 1955.

01-01:39:07

BROWN: Yeah.

01-01:39:10

MEEKER: You know, just kind of at the beginning phase of some of the cultural tumult that San Francisco sees in the mid and late 1950s, with the Beats and North Beach.

01-01:39:21

BROWN: That was not in '55. That came while I was in the seminary.

01-01:39:24

MEEKER: Okay, okay. So you weren't exposed to any of those cracks in the--

01-01:39:29

BROWN: I did not know that Allen Ginsberg and [Jack] Kerouac were down there on Grant Ave. until I left the seminary.

01-01:39:39

MEEKER: Well, there were some Bohemians down there. Were you ever exposed to any of that kind of stuff?

01-01:39:44

BROWN: Not until after I came out of the seminary. I did go to the Co-existence Bagel Shop in 1960. I went to a jazz poetry club, and I remember going to that, 01:40:00and it was kind of the last--they were closing down. That must have been very soon after I left, in 1960. I don't know which one it was. I think it was poetry and jazz, but it was closing.

And the Co-Existence Bagel Shop closed very soon after--maybe in '60 or soon thereafter. So the longer you're around, the more you see the passing quality of things. They try to keep North Beach alive, but it was a bit more lively in the early 1960s and late '50s. And I got to know Gary Snyder in recent years. He's a good friend of mine--he was definitely a part of that scene. I've had a chance to talk to him about it.

01-01:40:54

MEEKER: You got to know him after this period of time?

01-01:40:57

BROWN: I met him first in 1974 at the Zen Center. Dick [Richard D.] Baker had 01:41:00invited him for a meeting on energetics, and that's when I met Stewart Brand and Gary Snyder.

01-01:41:15

MEEKER: Well, we'll certainly want to ask you about that later.

01-01:41:21

HOLMES: This is Todd Holmes. Governor, a lot of biographers and historians have written that the dinner table discussions in the house, particularly as you were getting into your teenage years, sparked your interest in politics. I wanted to ask you, when do you recall your engagement with politics beginning to surface?

01-01:41:43

BROWN: Well, I don't think I was really engaged in politics. I certainly went to a few events of my father's. I went to some Stevenson [events--I remember the Stevenson campaign. I met Stevenson briefly when he came to speak in San 01:42:00Francisco. I liked hearing him speak. I watched his convention speech in 1952. I thought it was very exciting, very moving. So that was '52. So yeah, the presidential campaign I noticed. My father ran as a favorite son against [Estes] Kefauver, and Kefauver won. So I noticed that part of it, but I wasn't that political. High school was not political. The Jesuits didn't talk politics in their classroom. My history teacher spoke out against farm subsidies--Mr. Corwin. I remember that--it's probably the most political thing I heard. And then at Santa Clara, there wasn't a lot of politics. You know, the life of a 01:43:00student, a child, a teenager, a young man, that has its own fullness without having to get into a lot of adult issues. And in fact, even today you find that people can vote at eighteen, but not a lot of participation, and that's because there's a lot of vitality in doing the things that you do when you're sixteen or eighteen or twenty. So I think that my interest, I think that came later.

01-01:43:44

HOLMES: Would you say during your teenage years, and thinking here particularly in high school, did religion engage you more than politics?

01-01:43:51

BROWN: Yes, I would say so. But basketball engaged me even more. [laughter]

01-01:43:56

HOLMES: That's fair. What are some of your earliest memories of the--

01-01:44:02

BROWN: Oh, and the Olympic Club. We used to go down to the Olympic Club, and I guess that we played basketball or swam. In those days, you just jumped in the pool and splashed around. You didn't have lanes that you had to stay in, and you had diving boards. You'd jump off the diving board--the high dive, the low dive. So now it's a little more regimented. You're supposed to do your laps.

01-01:44:25

MEEKER: The Dons were pretty good back then. Did you go to any USF games?

01-01:44:28

BROWN: No, but I knew about them. I knew about Russell, [William F.] "Bill" Russell and [K.C.] "Casey" Jones, [Harold L.] ["Hal"] Perry--we knew about those guys. And I knew about Ollie [G.] Matson, the USF guy that won eleven games. I did see a football game at Kezar Stadium. I used to be a fan of St. Mary's, but they were already kind of dying on the vine when I started seeing them. But I was very excited about Herman [J.] Wedemeyer. In fact, I even got my mother to 01:45:00give me a jersey, a number eleven, so that was exciting football. Although I got interested in football from Peter Roddy. He's the one who told me about it. And then USF--I forget what, it must have been '50 maybe, when they played their last game. They were undefeated. So that was interesting. I never went to a basketball game, but I knew about them. They won the NIT, I think--National Invitation Tournament--in New York. So that was something.

But it isn't this hysteria that you have today--everything is more hyped, because of the media, and it's more saturating of our minds. So that when you read back, you know, we did other things.

01-01:46:00

HOLMES: You went to high school during the 1950s. What are some of your earliest 01:46:00memories of the Cold War?

01-01:46:06

BROWN: Of the Cold War--well, I remember the invasion of South Korea. I was at Camp Royaneh, not too far from the Russian River, so I remember that. I remember following that war, and the Americans almost got pushed out, and then [Douglas] MacArthur going in, and then MacArthur getting fired, and the Panmunjom discussions. Those were definitely news events that I followed with interest. And I remember Eisenhower running and saying he would, I don't think--visit Korea? He said something. And so I did follow those. But I found Stevenson a lot more interesting than Eisenhower at that point. Not only interesting, I found 01:47:00his speeches exciting, which I can't say about any other politician, but definitely Stevenson. And Stevenson was the one who helped get the whole movement of Democratic clubs started in the 1950s. [Alan] Cranston got his start in that, and there were hundreds of Democratic clubs that would endorse in the primary, and that got going with Stevenson. A lot of people came into politics through that. Now, I wasn't that active, but I did follow it. Now, that'd be 1952--yeah, that'd be '52. Also Truman was not very popular when I was in grammar school, but we knew about Truman. He got a lot of bashing in the general media that I probably noticed.

So I think pretty early on I started following current events, either because of 01:48:00my father, what he talked about at the dinner table, or maybe the debate team. You had to read papers and magazines to stay on top, because we had not only the topic, but we had something called extemporaneous speaking, which--they'd give you a topic and you'd have thirty minutes to work it out. So yeah, I was interested in current events. Probably a combination of my family, my father, and the debate team. The debaters would talk about current events, I would say, more than a lot of other people would in the school. That was at St. Ignatius.

01-01:48:50

HOLMES: To follow up on that, you had to participate in ROTC during high school.

01-01:48:55

BROWN: Right.

01-01:48:56

HOLMES: Which was largely standard for both high school and land-grant universities during that time.

01-01:49:00

BROWN: Well, it was mandatory. If you didn't get Greek, which I didn't, then you had to take ROTC for two years. And I had to take ROTC at Santa Clara. That was mandatory then.

01-01:49:12

HOLMES: What was your experience with that, or impressions?

01-01:49:16

BROWN: It wasn't all that serious. We had to wear our uniform, I think, once a week and march around. I remember we had to watch some movies the Army put out. We studied--I learned about the M1 rifle, that it weighed 9.5 pounds. I learned about the unity of command and different formations that you would proceed in. I learned what a squad was, and a battalion. But in general, it was not taken all that seriously. It seemed to be a lighter experience than in chemistry or geometry or Latin that we had to take at that time. All of our courses were 01:50:00required. We didn't get our first choice until, I think, senior year. We got a choice--one, I think, one choice. We only had one language: Latin. No other language, and we only had two sciences--that was chemistry and physics. We didn't have biology, let alone earth sciences. So it was a fairly limited curriculum, but it seemed plenty, full enough, from my point of view.

01-01:50:49

HOLMES: Well, many people say--and as you've demonstrated much throughout your career--you've been strongly independent and usually don't like to take orders, and so I was just wondering how ROTC fit with that personality?

01-01:51:00

BROWN: Well, it wasn't too onerous. It was only like an hour. You'd have an hour's class, so you sit--it's no different than any other class. You had, in fact, more discipline in the non-ROTC classes than the ROTC classes, so it was not a militaristic spirit, in any event. Not as much as the Oakland Military Institute, I think.

01-01:51:32

SHAFER: We'll get to that. This is Scott SHAFER again. You said when you were talking about high school, and somebody wanted you to go to Lowell.

01-01:51:39

BROWN: Yeah.

01-01:51:40

SHAFER: And you wanted to go to Riordan, and you ended up at SI. You said that the reason was that you thought that the church had the correct way of looking at the world.

01-01:51:49

BROWN: Well, those are my words now. I don't think those would be my words in 1951, when I was thinking about going to high school.

01-01:51:57

SHAFER: But it must have, in some form, gone through your mind.

01-01:52:02

BROWN: Well, it's an identity. So, you know, if you went to Catholic school, you're more likely to root for Notre Dame than for USC. These are just facts. Or you're more likely to root for St. Mary's than for UC Berkeley. So this was the group that I was a part of--I didn't stand back and look at it in a sociological sense. It just was the world, as I experienced it.

01-01:52:42

SHAFER: So when you said you didn't want to go to Lowell, it was because you wanted to root for the Catholic teams?

01-01:52:46

BROWN: Yeah, probably.

01-01:52:48

SHAFER: Or was it bigger than that?

01-01:52:48

BROWN: Not root for them, but I was using that as a metaphor. I think we're being much more conscious than we are when we just grow up--it just is. You're 01:53:00not looking at a whole range of alternatives. Even today, when people talk about going to college, they apply to ten colleges--some people apply to twenty. That's unheard of. I applied to two: Santa Clara and UC--that was it.

01-01:53:20

SHAFER: So when you were talking about, I think, current events, and you said that one of the nuns talked about blaming, I guess, the Democrats for losing China?

01-01:53:29

BROWN: Truman. Acheson, Truman. Yeah, I think so.

01-01:53:32

SHAFER: And you said you knew about that in talking with your dad--so what other kinds of big issues did you talk with your dad about?

01-01:53:44

BROWN: I don't think there were any big issues. It's more simple: the Democrats versus the Republicans. Democrats are the good guys, Republicans are not as good, so it's pretty basic, and not the kind of nuanced slicing and dicing that 01:54:00we are taught to notice as we go through the hyper-schooling process that people are now subjected to.

01-01:54:14

SHAFER: Your dad was a Republican, right?

01-01:54:17

BROWN: He was. I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, he was a Republican, and changed, I think, in '34, and he talks about that.

01-01:54:25

SHAFER: All because of FDR?

01-01:54:27

BROWN: That's what he said. I was not born, and he didn't talk about it. He didn't talk about being a Republican.

01-01:54:37

SHAFER: But he must have talked about, I would think, what it meant to him to be a Democrat later on?

01-01:54:42

BROWN: No, I don't think he did--it was just we're Democrats. There were a few Republicans in the neighborhood. Of course, he was running for a nonpartisan office: DA and attorney general. Well, the attorney general was partisan. But it didn't have that flavor, like when you're governor, or like the legislature. 01:55:00It's far more partisan. Until 1960, when my father was governor, the rule was cross-filing. And as a matter of fact, until 1956, when the Democrats got control of the legislature, the ballot title didn't even appear in your name. So you didn't know whether [Earl] Warren was a Republican or Democrat. He appeared on both ballots, as did my father when he ran for attorney general. So this first step was putting the name Democrat or Republican underneath the name, and the second was abolishing cross-filing. So we've had an evolution toward a more demarcated partisan system. It didn't exist when I was growing up.

01-01:55:53

SHAFER: Your dad ran against Estes Kefauver in--was it '52 for vice president?

01-01:55:56

BROWN: Fifty-two.

01-01:55:56

SHAFER: For vice president?

01-01:55:57

BROWN: For president.

01-01:55:58

SHAFER: Oh, for president.

01-01:55:59

BROWN: He ran as a favorite son. I don't know if they knew about Stevenson then. 01:56:00Let's see, in June Stevenson really wasn't the nominee. They were talking about a lot of people at that point--Kefauver, even Eisenhower. Well, as the attorney general in '52, he was the only Democrat in office.

01-01:56:31

SHAFER: And do you remember when he ran and he lost, was it a big deal, or not so much?

01-01:56:35

BROWN: Not a big deal. No. See, we didn't have the media that you have today, so the newspapers don't cover it. Well, first of all, a favorite son campaign, what is it? It's why Kefauver won. Kefauver was a real candidate, and he'd had his Kefauver hearings, and he had his coonskin cap and he was around. So he was a 01:57:00national figure, had identity--had face and name recognition. So that's why, I think, they tend to vote for a real candidate. And the favorite sons, I think, were more in the convention states. So it didn't quite work in the primary--at least it hasn't worked yet.

01-01:57:24

SHAFER: Yeah. And then one more follow-up kind of question. Several times, as we've been talking this morning, you talk about--"well, that's the way it was," or "that was just normal."

01-01:57:35

BROWN: Yeah, well because you're framing it fifty years later, and using categories that I don't recall as being operative in the same way they might be in 2019.

01-01:57:47

SHAFER: But my question is, and maybe it's the later part of your life, but at what point did you stop wanting to conform.

01-01:57:57

BROWN: I don't know--I don't know that I ever did or didn't. I mean, I do have a 01:58:00certain aversion to dullness and boredom, so that inclined me to seek out a certain measure of adventure and excitement. I don't know that I thought about it. I didn't wear funny-colored socks or something. I was pretty conformist. I'd say the 1950s were very conformist.

01-01:58:30

SHAFER: Yeah. I think we're good up to this point. Do we want to keep going? I think the next chapter is seminary. It's up to you what you want to do.

[break in recording, side conversation deleted]

01-01:58:45

MEEKER: So what we're going to start, just a little bit now, and certainly not finish, is your college and then seminary years. So you applied and are admitted to Santa Clara University in fall--

01-01:58:59

BROWN: And UC too, but I chose Santa Clara.

01-01:59:02

MEEKER: Well, let's talk about that whole decision-making process.

01-01:59:06

BROWN: That phrase, decision-making process is again, a recent invention. We didn't think of a decision-making process in 1955.

01-01:59:16

MEEKER: What was the process then?

01-01:59:19

BROWN: It wasn't a process! You could apply here--and yeah, I want to go here, I don't want to go there. A lot of my friends were going to Santa Clara. I wanted to be away from home, but I didn't want to go that far away. I wanted to go to a Catholic college. It was that simple, and a number of my friends went to Santa Clara. So today, it seems to be totally different. You know, you want to go to some school because they're rated highly by U.S. News & World Report or they're excellent in some field that you're trying to pursue. You just go to college. I thought I might be a lawyer. That was probably an assumption or possibility, but 02:00:00beyond that, even what the major would be, I didn't think about that. The world seemed to be simpler.

There were fewer people applying to all of these schools. They were a lot cheaper. UC was essentially free. Santa Clara was very modest. So it wasn't as momentous, and you didn't feel like if you don't make the right decision, your life is going to be affected. It used to be on the basis of making the football team that you liked to root for. Or I liked it because Santa Clara had the mission there--it was pretty. It was a pretty campus, and it was close to Santa Cruz. It seemed like a good place to go.

01-02:00:54

MEEKER: Had you yet considered seminary while in high school?

01-02:00:57

BROWN: I think I had thought about it from time to time.

01-02:01:01

MEEKER: Had you shared that idea with your family before graduating high school?

01-02:01:05

BROWN: I don't know. Possibly, possibly--yeah, probably did.

01-02:01:14

MEEKER: So the decision to go to college rather than seminary right after high school.

01-02:01:21

BROWN: That wasn't the way I put it. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to go to Santa Clara. It seemed like an adventure--these schools were relatively confining. St. Ignatius was less confining than St. Brendan's, but Santa Clara seemed like a much more expansive opportunity.

01-02:01:40

MEEKER: Did you live in a dorm?

01-02:01:41

BROWN: Yeah.

01-02:01:43

MEEKER: Tell me about that.

01-02:01:45

BROWN: Well, I lived in Kenna Hall, and when I went there, there were two roommates with bunk beds, and then a single bed. And you're assigned your roommate. You didn't pick it. You were not allowed to have a car. You had to 02:02:00have your lights out by 10:30pm, and the senior student that lived in the dorm would come around and make sure the lights were out. It was all boys. There was about 1,300. It had a fair number of priests--I had a priest for French, I had a priest for religion, and I had a priest for English. So yeah, I thought it was pretty exciting to be there--you eat in the cafeteria, went through the line, and you went to classes. You didn't have as many classes. It wasn't like being in school for six hours. You'd go for a period, I don't know how long it 02:03:00was--maybe a couple of classes a day. I enjoyed it. I liked it.

01-02:03:17

MEEKER: Did you experience it as a kind of a natural progression from high school? Or did it feel like a big break from what your life was like in high school?

01-02:03:28

BROWN: I don't know. Well, it was a break--I don't know how to compare those two things. There's obviously a break. You're not home. Up to that time I'd lived at home, so now I'm living in a dormitory with a bunch of guys, and that was interesting. It was exciting. It was a full-time engagement with ideas, with the 02:04:00subject matter, so it was more interesting, I would say, than high school.

01-02:04:12

MEEKER: Do you remember there being classes or teachers who were exposing you to ideas that did seem new to you, that were novel at the time?

01-02:04:23

BROWN: Well, taking psychology and logic. Those were kind of novel. English, I had a guy named Father Perkins. Since I have my textbook I can review what I learned. But it was far more--well, I don't know if it was far more orderly, but it seems more orderly to me than education. There was a point of view, and it was a Catholic point of view. I mean if you have a priest, and he's teaching you 02:05:00psychology or logic, it's all related.

And in one of the essays that's in this book--it's on my shelf right now--was one of the chapters from John Cardinal Newman's book, The Idea of a University, and I always remember that. And they also had, in the same book they have articles by [Robert Maynard] Hutchins, who was the boy-wonder chancellor at the University of Chicago. And there were essays by Mortimer [J.] Adler, and others: "What Does It Mean to Go to College?" And of course, it meant something. There was an idea of college.

Cardinal Newman said theology was the queen of the sciences, and everything 02:06:00built up in kind of an architectonic framework, with theology being at the top. So there was an order, which I think is good. It served me well, having a sense that the world hangs together in a certain way, so it's not quite as episodic as I would say postmodernism tends to be.

01-02:06:35

MEEKER: Was there anything in that first year at Santa Clara where professors might have been challenging or questioning Catholic orthodoxy?

01-02:06:45

BROWN: No. There was no questioning Catholic orthodoxy. That didn't show up. We had a philosophy professor--I didn't take that, but I heard one of his lectures in the evening, named [Frederick D.] Wilhelmsen, and he had a big German accent. 02:07:00He later went to teach in Texas, but I found him exciting. And he talked about--"Celebrate reality. Don't tinker with existence." I just remember that. I'm just listening to him talk. I don't know if I fully understand what he was talking about, but he was exciting.

01-02:07:25

MEEKER: Can you say that again? Celebrate reality, but--

01-02:07:28

BROWN: No, I said it. You're recording on your machines.

01-02:07:30

MEEKER: [laughing] I'm trying to grapple with it right here though.

01-02:07:32

BROWN: Well, you don't have to grapple with it. You can reflect on it later. But it seemed exciting at the time, and he had a German accent. So I had never had a teacher with a German accent, and I only heard him once, but I recalled it.

So all those, the essays, just in this book, the short stories--they were interesting, and I still remember them. Not all of them, just these are ideas 02:08:00that I live with, I came to understand. Mortimer Adler was a Thomist, and he wrote a book called The Paideia Project [The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto], which I didn't know about then--it didn't exist. But there was this certain excitement there. I read Portrait of [the] Artist [As a Young Man] by James Joyce. So it was an intellectual adventure, I would say--for me. Not that I was any great student--I wasn't. I didn't study that much, but I liked it. And I became acquainted with Dylan Thomas. So it was intellectually another level up 02:09:00from high school, for sure.

Now, in today's world, it would look very confining--a 1950s all boys, virtually all Catholic, with a heavy emphasis on a Catholic perspective in almost everything--that would be unheard of today. But at the time, that was the norm, and it felt right at the time. And I still think it was a very positive thrust for a young man in my position.

01-02:09:37

MEEKER: You said most of your professors were priests?

01-02:09:39

BROWN: Not most, but more than you have today. Today, it's virtually none. Then, as I said--I mentioned there were three.

01-02:09:46

MEEKER: Did you look at priests as a group of people, as more like an intellectual group or as spiritual leaders?

01-02:09:56

BROWN: I think more intellectual probably--whatever that means. Because they 02:10:00were in class. One was teaching us French, the other was teaching us English, and the other one was teaching us psychology one semester and logic the next. So what's the connection between religion and those courses? Oh yeah, we had another guy teach, Father Martin taught religion. So yeah, only in the religion class did you get a taste of religion. But I think the coherence of the presentations is more noticeable now, looking back, than at the time, when it just seemed that's the way the world was at a Catholic college, whereas today things are a little more secular, more careerist, and more vocationally oriented. Whereas then it was very clear we were getting a liberal education. We 02:11:00were not getting a job. We were learning the basics of education.

I think that's a distinction that was very self-evident--I mean it was very, very clear. This is before Silicon Valley, before computers, before all that stuff. There's no Intel, there's no Apple. I don't even think there was an HP at that time. This is, you know The Organization Man, by [William H.] Whyte, I think, or Why Johnny Can't Read: [And What You Can Do about It]--that was another book in the 1950s. Eisenhower is president. Elmer [E.] Robinson is mayor of San Francisco. Santa Clara is a Republican county, so it's a very different 02:12:00world than what we have today.

01-02:12:05

MEEKER: At what point in that first year at Santa Clara did you start considering going into seminary?

01-02:12:10

BROWN: Well, I thought of it during the summer before I went to Santa Clara. I worked in Idaho at a lumber company, and I had time to think about things out there in the forest. So that inclined me, and then I think sometime during my second semester I decided that's what I wanted to do. And I visited a novitiate, and I thought it looked pretty interesting to me.

01-02:12:34

MEEKER: Was there a precipitating event or a--?

01-02:12:37

BROWN: Not a precipitating event, just a general sense that I wanted more depth in my life, and I thought the seminary would be a path to something deeper and more intense, more meaningful.

01-02:12:55

MEEKER: Was there anything that you were learning, or any people you were engaging with at Santa Clara that were kind of sending you in that direction?

01-02:13:03

BROWN: No--no, more from the teachers I had at St. Ignatius. The Jesuits were probably the only people who had any intellectual depth that I encountered. Everything else was rather garden variety, mundane existence, whereas the Jesuits--there was a point of view. There was an historical thrust to what they were doing. It seemed that way to me. So it had more meaning than just the normal get a career, get married, make money, die. I mean, I could see that, even then--that's not enough. And so the seminary had, as a pathway to the 02:14:00divine or the life of the spirit, seemed to me a more profound journey than the one I was on, headed toward graduation at Santa Clara.

01-02:14:12

MEEKER: Well, this is certainly after-the-fact-type thinking, but that's not too far away from the way in which people like the Beats, at the same time, were starting to talk about the reality of their existence.

01-02:14:26

BROWN: Yeah. Well, when we were in the seminary, one of the fathers--Father Meehan, who was the assistant--he came in and told us about the Beats in San Francisco. And I remember him saying something about gargling with razor blades, and he of course put this down. I think he put the emphasis on beat, not beatitudes. But I remember even at the time I was interested. The Beats struck me as interesting. And later, when I had been in the seminary for a couple years, one of my friends in the seminary, Peter Finnegan, who is a friend of 02:15:00mine, he had a visitor. And in fact that visitor lives--I was talking to him recently--but he came and he was talking about [Albert] Camus and the absurd for an hour. And he talked about it, and I found that very exciting too.

So one of the first things I did, when I left [seminary] in January, was to go to North Beach, and I was interested. That interested me. Not that I followed through on it that much, but I remember the poem. I remember, I think in some of Allen Ginsberg's poetry he talks about Robbies [Robbies Cafeteria], so when I was at UC, I remember being at Robbie's, and I would think about Allen Ginsberg, kind of in my own mind. I would live those thoughts.

01-02:15:53

MEEKER: Were you a pretty voracious reader growing up?

01-02:15:55

BROWN: No, no. I think I read three books, four books when I was in high school. 02:16:00I can always remember them: Kristin Lavransdatter, Mr. Blue, Treasure Island--maybe another I can't remember.

01-02:16:11

MEEKER: Did that change when you went to college?

01-02:16:13

BROWN: I read more, but basically, you get assignments, little pieces that you're supposed to look at, short stories, and I did that. But no, I wasn't a big reader. I mean I read things, but I wasn't consuming massive amounts of literature.

01-02:16:33

MEEKER: What about at seminary?

01-02:16:35

BROWN: Oh, there we read more. We were in silence the first two years. The first half hour we read, after breakfast, was [Fr. Alphonsus] Rodriguez, [Practice of Christian and Religious Perfection] In fact, I have the book here. Not a very interesting book, by the way, but we had to read that, half an hour a day. And 02:17:00then, in the afternoon we'd read fifteen minutes of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, which is a very classic book from the fourteenth century. And then we would read a half an hour in the evening, after dinner, which was a little lighter reading--biographies of Jesuits, mostly Jesuit saints. And that was it. But that was a solid hour and fifteen minutes every day, without fail. We didn't have television and radio or newspapers, and we didn't go to movies. With less stimuli, reading was more accessible and more attractive. So that's definitely a point. The more distraction, the harder it is to zero in on a difficult book.

01-02:17:59

MEEKER: Can you recall for us the conversation that you must have had with your 02:18:00parents when you let them know you wanted to leave Santa Clara and go to seminary?

01-02:18:08

BROWN: Yeah, we had a couple conversations. My father didn't like it. He was opposed to that, but when I was going in, he was off to the convention, Democratic Convention of '56. And I didn't talk about it that much with my mother, but I know she didn't like it. So it was a little painful to make that break, but I thought it was an exciting prospect for me.

01-02:18:37

MEEKER: The conviction you must possess to make that kind of a leap--

01-02:18:42

BROWN: Yeah, because you have to have something. I couldn't say any more--I did it, and that's what I wanted to do. And I left with the same zeal that I went in with! [laughter]

01-02:19:09

SHAFER: This is Scott SHAFER again. You know, I think we've all kind of probed 02:19:00to see when were you interested in politics, and it's not entirely clear. But I wonder, like a lot of people now, parents and adults will say, "Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Did people ask you that?

01-02:19:24

BROWN: No.

01-02:19:25

SHAFER: It wasn't a thing?

01-02:19:27

BROWN: I don't think so. The closest I came to politics was probably the debate team, and the necessity for observing current events, and then, of course, the elections. Since my father was usually running, I would get the ballot pamphlet, I'd notice it. So I was aware of ballot measures. I was aware of candidacies. I knew who the statewide candidates were. I knew Frank Jordan was secretary of state. I noticed the judges that were on the ballot in San Francisco. I knew the 02:20:00mayors, from Lapham to Robinson to whomever the next ones were--

01-02:20:10

SHAFER: [George] Christopher--

01-02:20:11

BROWN: [John F. "Jack"] Shelley, maybe, or was it Christopher?

01-02:20:13

SHAFER: Christopher.

01-02:20:13

BROWN: Christopher and then Shelley--so I would follow those things. I had some interest, but I didn't want to run for student government. I was more interested in ideas, I'd say, the ideas that had come up in the courses that I took in college.

01-02:20:38

SHAFER: So when you get to a certain age and you start to think, "Well, what am I going to do next?" Obviously, for you, it became the seminary. But did you think beyond that, like, "What did you want to be when you--?"

01-02:20:48

BROWN: No, that was enough.

01-02:20:50

SHAFER: You wanted to be a priest.

01-02:20:52

BROWN: Priest, teacher, Jesuit. So it's not just a priest, it's a member of an order that is worldwide. There's a general of the Jesuits in Rome, and it has 02:21:00colleges all over the world: South America, Asia, Europe, Canada--all those. And I've visited many of these colleges, not then, but since. So that was exciting. It's a world. And in the seminary, of course, you're looking at history, the history of the Jesuit order. When you read Lives of the Saints, St. Ignatius, the other Jesuits, Peter Canisius--this was during the Reformation, Ignatius--I think the Jesuits started in 1540. Luther was 1517, I think? And so through religious studies, I got a lot of European history, and so that was very broadening. So it isn't just about San Francisco and my back yard, it's history. 02:22:00Francis Xavier went to India, tried to get to China, died on an island off China. He was a Jesuit.

The narrative, I'd say, of the Church, of the Jesuits, was intellectually opening and illuminating for me. So I think it helped me to transcend my parochial perspectives from Magellan Ave. Well, certainly that's true in the seminary, and that became true at Berkeley, the University of California.

01-02:22:55

SHAFER: It seems like religion, in a way, was your window out.

01-02:22:58

BROWN: I would say so. Yeah, you could say I rebelled by a greater conformity, 02:23:00which religion is, and which it certainly was in 1956. But it was also, not just conformity, it was a depth of ideas and perspectives and historical events that gave meaning and shape to reality as I encountered it. So this was not the news of the day, which even today I marvel at how the focus is barely at the end of the week, let alone the end of the world, which doesn't exist at all. So the quondam, the trivial, and the banal very much occupy the common imagination, and I have found it more to my liking to try to seek out different perspectives and 02:24:00a greater depth of understanding.

So anyway, college was an opening, and religion was an opening--the Catholic Church, the history of the Catholic Church is very much connected with European history and the spreading of the West throughout the world. Now, it was a perspective that, in the multicultural age, is completely different today, that kind of view. The decolonization of the West, that goes in with the de-evangelizing of the Church. So there's a decentering now. It isn't Europe 02:25:00spreading and dominating the world, it's all of these different cultures and countries and perspectives vying for attention and influence.

So even at that level, I suppose that's somewhat unusual for me even to think about these kinds of things. But I've been thinking about them--they're the kind of things that show up at high school. That's what some, not all of the teachers, but some of the teachers would talk about. And certainly in college, we're in the dormitory and we're talking all the time. And then in the seminary, we didn't talk a lot--the first two years we could talk after lunch and after dinner, but what do you talk about? You talk about what you're reading. And we're reading about stuff that is not about being in Santa Clara County. It's about the last thousand years, two thousand years, or longer, just the whole 02:26:00Biblical and classical tradition.

The world was very simple in those days. Adam and Eve started it, and along came the Hebrews. And then all of a sudden you get Moses and the Promised Land. And then we have the rise of Greece, classical culture. Then we get Alexander the Great; we get the expansion of Greek culture through Alexandria. And then we get Rome, and then Rome falls and we get Christianity. And we get the, some people call it the Dark Ages. We were told it was the Golden Ages, where Catholicism reigned in all the lives at that time in Europe. And then we get the Middle Ages. Then we get the Crusades, then we get the Enlightenment, and then we get the Industrial Revolution. Then we get modernity--and here we are. [laughter] So 02:27:00the world was very coherent, whereas today, it seems more fragmented, for sure, because we're not looking from one point of view, we're looking at many points of view. And so I think the framework, the curriculum, the perspective was very helpful in looking out at a fragmented, confusing world, to have an orderliness in one's existence. So I find that order is very helpful in the face of chaos.

01-02:27:45

SHAFER: You took psychology in college, you said, right?

01-02:27:48

BROWN: Yeah.

01-02:27:50

SHAFER: So what is psychology from a Catholic perspective?

01-02:27:54

BROWN: Well, the only thing I remember from Father Behan's class--Fr. Behan, I remember him--he said, "Intelligence is the ability to perceive relationships." 02:28:00So I remember things that different teachers say, so I found that very interesting. "And how quickly you can see relationships, and the more relationships you see, is a measure of how intelligent you are."

01-02:28:24

SHAFER: Give an example. What kinds of relationships? Human relationships?

01-02:28:28

BROWN: All relationships. Well, I'd say my wife is very intelligent, and one way that manifests itself is when she's driving down a block, she will see maybe a block or a block and a half ahead, that a car has gotten over in one lane and she's already shifting to the other lane, so that's perceiving the relationship of her with that. Now, you can also perceive relationships of ideas. It could be political, it could be artistic, it could be human, being able to relate what 02:29:00people do, size them up. So that is intelligence.

Now, how does religion fit into it? I'd say at that time the world was very orderly. It all fit. Europe was kind of the mother ship as it were, and we're in America, and the Church is going to evangelize the world and we're kind of waiting for that to happen. That does not appear to be the case today. But it was a good base in the face of Berkeley, where it's like a massive supermarket, where you can pick and choose, this course, that course--and there was no defined authority. So most of the time growing up, there was an authority for almost everything--or for everything for that matter. So that, I think, has given me a certain confidence to size things up.

01-02:30:06

SHAFER: Just coming back to psychology, is there a--?

01-02:30:11

BROWN: Well, I'll tell you what he did. He talked about--yeah, this is very traditional--the cognitive and the appetitive. So the cognitive was your ideas, talk about cognitive therapy. The appetitive was the desire. And the conative related to will or action. So the education I got--everything was in its place--you had the will and the intellect and the memory. You had these different aspects of the mind, so we just had to figure it out. And it was in the book, or the priest knew about it, and we could figure it out. Today, we 02:31:00don't have that same confidence that there's an orderly substratum that we can all arrive at that will illuminate our lives. It's much more of a--you think this, and I think that, and maybe tomorrow we'll think something else. So it's much more in flux.

01-02:31:24

SHAFER: The idea of sin, I imagine, did not enter into your teaching in psychology.

01-02:31:31

BROWN: No, they did not talk about sin. That's an issue, because you have these Jesuits who are committed to saving souls and bringing people to the Catholic Church, and they're just teaching a secular topic. That's true. You could ask why, what's that all about? In fact, there are many today who think the Jesuits 02:32:00shouldn't be in the universities, they should be out there working with the poor or more social action. So they didn't always connect. In high school we had physics, how did that relate? It was pretty religious--you have a crucifix in the front of the classroom, you've got a priest who's in a Roman collar. So that surrounds you. But nevertheless, these are the secular courses. And I suppose as you get through it, then you're into your business, and the more religious aspects fall away for 90 percent of the people.

01-02:32:43

SHAFER: Sometimes you hear debates about can you believe in God, and all that goes with that, and believe in science? Did you see a conflict in that?

01-02:32:51

BROWN: No. But that was a debate. When I was in college and in the seminary, 02:33:00there were Catholic intellectuals who'd bemoan the fact that there were so few Catholic intellectuals, that it's an immigrant church. Where were the Catholic writers and scientists? But no, they reconciled science with God. There was no debate, since we're in a Catholic school and everybody's on board--this is something that happens later when you're at a public university. And I suppose today people don't even talk about it. It's not as much of an issue.

01-02:33:43

SHAFER: You said that the first couple of years you spent mostly in silence.

01-02:33:46

BROWN: Well, yeah. You have silence from the time you get up to the time you go to bed, because you have meditation, you have class--you can talk in class as part of the class structure. But that's the point. Two years of formation they 02:34:00call it. The Jesuits had, then, a fifteen-year formation. You had two years in novitiate, two years in the juniorate, which was the beginning of college, then you went to three years of philosophy, which gave you your BA and MA--master's degree. Then you taught in school, like at a high school for three years, and then you went to four years of theology, and you were ordained after the third year, and you then completed your fourth, and you went to one more year--or ten months--of reflection. And after fifteen years, you were fully cooked, as it were, and out you went to the world. [laughter] So today, things have changed quite a lot. So I'm very conscious of the fact that the world has changed. The churches were packed, and there was a Mass said at 6:15, 7:00, 8:00, 10:00, and 02:35:0012:00, so there were five Masses in each of these parishes, and they were pretty full. Today, it's far less than that.

01-02:35:12

SHAFER: So when you were in the seminary, how often did you go to church, so to speak?

01-02:35:16

BROWN: Oh, you go to Mass every day.

01-02:35:17

SHAFER: Just like once a day?

01-02:35:18

BROWN: Once a day, yeah.

[side conversation deleted]

01-02:35:22

SHAFER: So the Jesuits take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

01-02:35:27

BROWN: Right.

01-02:35:29

SHAFER: So which of those was the hardest for you?

01-02:35:31

BROWN: They weren't particularly hard. I mean, you're in the seminary--it's all part of the program. It's totally controlled, so that's the norm. So that probably becomes more difficult when you're out there as a priest or a teacher, or something. But the order, the bell rang at 5:00am, at 5:30 you started your mediation. An hour later you go to Mass. After Mass you go eat, in silence, then 02:36:00you clean up in the kitchen. Then you come back, and along your day, every 45 minutes the bell rings. Now that was the novitiate. The juniorate, it's a little looser, because you're going to courses. And there's no visitors. So you're living this world--what other world is there?

01-02:36:27

SHAFER: So obviously, you left the seminary. What was the process of leaving? What was it that made you decide to leave?

01-02:36:34

BROWN: Well, first of all, I think the life itself became less real to me after three years or so. I wanted to get out into the world and be part of the more rugged existence of being on one's own, making money, and living the life of a 02:37:00normal human being. This was kind of a hothouse of detachment. And then the doctrines, you know, seemed less plausible, so I didn't want to be part of that. So I just decided I'm going to leave, and I did.

01-02:37:25

SHAFER: And did anybody try to change your mind?

01-02:37:28

BROWN: No, no. I think they were glad to see me go, as a matter of fact. [laughter] I was sowing a bit of independent inquiry. I did do a lot of thinking and discussing, with some, not with everybody.

01-02:37:51

SHAFER: And that didn't go over too well.

01-02:37:52

BROWN: No, because it's a very tight, conforming environment, and I appreciate that. It can be helpful, but it's more for a period than for a whole lifetime. 02:38:00Although we do have monasteries. Now, we don't have the monasteries like earlier, you know, there were thousands and thousands of monasteries in Europe and Mexico. And now they're there, but there are very few--just like all these great cathedrals. Something built those cathedrals. That took a lot of belief; it took a lot of work for many, many years, to get a cathedral built. So that was an idea, a faith, a collective belief that manifested itself in real action. And now, this change in belief is changing the nature of Catholic schools, Catholic life. And so the university and the Church itself, they're all going through lots of crisis. But so also is democratic governance. There was a fellow 02:39:00named Christopher Dawson, who we were taught about, and he related Europe to the Church. And I can't find him having said this, but my teacher in the juniorate said, "This guy was a great Catholic historian in the 1930s,"--and he said that, "Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe." Now, the Church is in crisis, and Europe is in crisis, and the Jesuits are in crisis. There is a certain undermining of the hegemony of the West and many of its institutions, so I think they can be studied in tandem, as I often do. I continue to be interested in the 02:40:00world as I have experienced it earlier in life, and how things are going today.

And certainly thinking here, sitting here in front of this hill where we have pictures of my great-grandfather, I can think of what it took to get here for him, what they did, and how the world was a very vital place, and then how it kind of disappeared with the car and World War I, and whatever. But in some ways, it can be restored--and I'm doing that. I don't think my olive business will compete with the stagecoach stop. But he was in the hospitality business, and I'm somewhat in the intellectual hospitality business.

01-02:40:58

SHAFER: [laughing] What does that mean?

01-02:40:59

BROWN: Well, I will have people here. We're talking today. We're discussing 02:41:00serious matters. So when they came to get their horses refreshed, I'm sure they sat around the bar a hundred yards from here talking about whatever they talked about. And when you're out here, most people around here are cowboys. They deal with their cows, and they're very physical and very friendly, and you get to know people. So Peter Coyote and others--I don't know whether it was Gary Snyder or what--but there was something called the Reinhabitory Theater. And that was the idea of inhabiting, but then reinhabiting. So I'm reinhabiting this place, where my grandmother started. And it'll be something different, but it's reinvention, it's creation, but anchored in what's gone before. So I find that interesting.

01-02:42:05

SHAFER: Last question, and this is sort of which of these is different from everything else. You mentioned that you worked in a lumber company in Idaho?

01-02:42:15

BROWN: Oh, the Ohio Match Company.

01-02:42:16

SHAFER: Yeah. How did that happen? What was that like?

01-02:42:19

BROWN: Well, my father was a good friend of Norton Simon. They went to Lowell together. An entrepreneur--a rather well-known one--and he owned the Ohio Match Company. So together with my friend Bart Lally, we went up there in the summer of '55, after graduating from St. Ignatius, and worked a couple months out there.

01-02:42:43

SHAFER: What did you do?

01-02:42:44

BROWN: Oh, we were kind of helping out with clearing the roads, being kind of assistants. We didn't cut any trees, but we were right there in the lumber camp helping them.

01-02:42:57

SHAFER: Yeah, was that exciting?

01-02:42:59

BROWN: No. [SHAFER laughs] It's not exciting.

01-02:43:01

SHAFER: Anything else? All right, I think we're good.

01-02:43:04

MARZORATI: You now, I wanted just to clarify--I remember your mother and father talking about not giving you a waiver to enter the seminary--

01-02:43:11

BROWN: There was no such thing as a waiver. I think that's when I was in high school. But they kind of--what shall we say--characterized it in later years, maybe that way because they were opposed to it. But I've never heard the word waiver.

01-02:43:33

SHAFER: Just one other thing. You obviously left the seminary, but I think it has had an impact on you, and I think you would agree. But when you look back, like what do you think of those years, that time in your life?

01-02:43:44

BROWN: Well, everything has had an impact. I did run for the same job my father had, and I'm living in the same place where my grandmother was born and grew up. She wasn't quite--she was born about a mile down the road, a couple miles down the road. So there's a lot of things that influence.

01-02:44:02

SHAFER: Sure. But is there something in particular that you think of that you took with you from the seminary?

01-02:44:06

BROWN: Oh, from that one--because I take from a lot of things. I even visited my political science professor on my honeymoon. [laughter] Yeah, he lived in Mendocino, Sheldon Wolin, so yeah--I do look to the past while I'm trying to create something in the future.

So what did I take from the seminary? What did I take? An appreciation for the common life. I was interested in intentional communities like Synanon and Delancey Street. And my experience at the seminary showed me the value and the strength of a common life of people together. In part, creating the Oakland 02:45:00Military Institute is a way of combining the military framework with, not the religious, but the social. Socializing, of having ritual and common ideas and common vocabulary and common gestures and rituals together. So what did I take from it? I took a lot from it. And I certainly took friends. I'm still in touch with a number of people who were in the seminary. Some left and some are still there. So it leaves an imprint, because it's an intense experience, maybe analogous to being in the army or something--or maybe even college, for some people.

People whose lives are very individualized--you have your one house, your wife and your kids and your job--and every day it's similar and it's somewhat isolated. But that's why people probably like to go on vacations, or they go on cruises, because now they're in a group. And the seminary is definitely a group. It wasn't very big--I think there were thirty guys in my class, and there was a class behind me of thirty and then above me, so it's a relatively small, isolated group, where you have an intensity, because you're seeing the same people day in and day out. So I appreciate the value of that.

01-02:46:48

SHAFER: Good.

01-02:46:49

BROWN: All right?

01-02:46:50

SHAFER: Very good.

01-02:46:53

BROWN: All right.