The last time I saw Gary Brown was at the deli counter in Country Mart. I don’t remember the day, but it was a few days after his mom Freda’s April 12 funeral. I laughed with him about how his mom used to joke with my wife Felicia and me about taking her to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on one of our winter trips.
“One of these days, Freda, one of these days,” I’d joke back.
One of these days. It’s a phrase we all use, but more often than not one of these days never comes. We plan to clean out the basement. To volunteer more. To serve our community and not always leave it to the other person. To visit the sick and shut-ins. To call an old friend. We just don’t get around to it.
A few days after I saw Gary at Country Mart, I was at Salem Memorial Hospital on a tour given by CEO Wayne Reid. As I walked down the hall I saw some of Gary’s family and asked who they were there to see. As it turned out, Gary was in the hospital experiencing heart problems but was expected to be released that day. I made a mental note to self: Call Gary and see how he’s doing.
One of these days never happened, and Monday afternoon I will be sitting at First Baptist Church for Gary Brown’s funeral.
Lucky for us when it came to Salem, our hometown, Gary rarely let one of these days never happen. The Mayor was proactive with a capital P.
A 1963 Salem High School graduate, he served his community for a little over 30 years. He was elected East Ward alderman in April of 1993 and died May 1, 2023. He was alderman from 1993-97, then Salem elected him mayor in April of 2000, a position he held for 14 years. The mayor is elected every two years, so he was elected seven times.
Even when Gary gave up his elected position, he continued to serve. The day he died, at age 77, he was still on the Meramec Regional Planning Commission and the Salem planning and zoning committee.
Gary was the sounding board for a lot of people, including me. Many is the person who came to Gary over the past decade as Salem city government crumbled and vented to him, asked him for advice or pleaded with him to run for office again.
The only things that rivaled Gary when it came to passion for serving his community were his church and his family. He prioritized both in ways we should all learn lessons from. He was a member of First Baptist Church for 70 years and married to Alys for 57 years.
For most of Salem and Dent County, Brown was simply The Mayor. I learned a lot about politics, church and the people here from Gary. I came to Salem in 1995, as he was just two years into his political life. We worked and churched together for most of the past 30 years, often seeking help or crying on each other’s shoulder when times got tough.
Politically speaking for Gary, no time was rougher than 2012 when Phineas came into Gary’s life. Phineas, a golden lab retriever , allegedly bit a young girl. After some back and forth and hearings and discussion, Gary ruled Phineas was a vicious animal and that the dog should be put down. One thing led to another and suddenly the saga of Phineas became a national story, with headlines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a spot on the TV show Inside Edition. It was a Salem story, too, with neighbor turning against neighbor and friend against friend.
In the middle of it all were Gary and Phineas. Through it all Gary had nothing but the best interest of Salem at heart. He wasn’t backing down and wanted to do what he thought was right, despite a big part of the city and America coming after him. The Battle of Phineas seemed to be 50-50, and Gary had to cast the tiebreaking vote.
Anyway, if you want to read more about Phineas, Google him.
Once the Phineas saga started to cool down and things got back to as normal as they can be when you are a small-town, part-time mayor, Gary dropped by my office. At the time, people who were in a rage about the lab Phineas were taking it out on not only Gary, but the entire community. People who lived a world away from us called for a boycott of Salem. A billboard on I-44 said as much. People slammed our relatively new website with nasty comments and threats and poor ratings. Our web rating dropped from a respectable 4-plus into the 2s as people attacked everything that had anything to do with Salem, including the hometown newspaper.
Gary sat in the chair across from my desk and apologized for all the grief he’d caused us. Yes, our rating dropped, and I got a couple death threats from out-of-town people who said we as a newspaper weren’t doing enough to stop the mayor from killing the dog, so I needed to feel what the dog felt.
Gary knew all that. He hated all that. Bringing good news, good jobs and good PR to Salem is what he worked for all those 30 years. Even when people like me got down and out, Gary was always there to lift us up, caring, loving and working to do what’s best.
A few months ago when things were looking bleak for Salem city government, Gary told me a lot of people were “after him” to run for office again, to bring the budget and the goals of the city back in line and crush the “good ole boy system” that helped our hometown get in the mess it was in.
“Are you going to do it?” I asked, already knowing that Gary could do it, but probably didn’t need to.
“Probably not,” he said, and the conversation turned to his aging mom Freda, who he helped on a daily basis, his age, his grandkids and all the important things in his life. It was Gary’s way of saying he would love nothing more than being a part of seeing Salem of today be a little more like Salem of yesterday, but it just couldn’t happen.
At the close of the conversation, I told Gary he didn’t need to have any regrets about not jumping back into the political fray. He had done his part, spanning three decades of service to community with a fervor and commitment he should be proud of. It’s also a season of service from The Mayor we should all be proud of.
