Lists of books that you should add to your Summer Reading list abound online, in the magazines, on TV. Last week a book came into my hands that is worth a read at any time, especially if you grew up in a small town, and even more so if you didn’t. Is it great literature? Well, that depends on how you measure great. I was captivated. I think you would be too.
This is a book about becoming, about the value of hard work, of compassion, caring, family and friends. A lot of it is about the Marcellus that was, and, in some spaces, still is.
“A Farm Boy in the Rain” is the personal memoir of Robert Burton Brown. As a dreamy child who loved to roam the fields and hills above the village of Marcellus and then as an unsettled adolescent faced with family disruption, sickness and hunger, Bob aspired to become a farmer like his beloved grandfather. The path that was Robert’s life meandered far from these early imaginings.
How far away? Well, from a house without electricity, running water or sewers, a house where bitterness and cruelty were like the wallpaper, Robert Brown, the second oldest in a family of seven, would become a translator of Mandarin Chinese, serving our country during the Korean War, and, later, a successful businessman whose story, so deeply rooted here in Marcellus and its environs, touched the lives of so many then, and, even now, continues to weave its way through the memories of many.
Robert’s memoir is more than the journey from farm boy to Washington D.C. It is the story of someone who overcame much that would have destroyed others. It is a story of resilience, responsibility and love.
His story begins with an idyllic early childhood, as a “wild” child roaming the fields and woods of his family’s farm where his beloved grandfather demonstrated the verisimilitude of the good life, teaching him about the land, change, caring for animals – the rhythm of farm life.
And there was his mother … “I was particularly close to my beautiful, beautiful mother. As she walked around the kitchen, I would clutch her skirts, and she would sing to me…”
Those were that farm boy’s days in the sun.
Then came the days when the skies were dark and the rain fell hard, washing away his notion of home and love and security. There was the day when he was 10 and he came home from school to find that his mother had left, as he says, driven away by the hatred of his cruel, vindictive grandmother.
There was the death of his grandfather and the subsequent failures at farming by his alcoholic, absentee father, leaving the remaining family of seven children with little, so little that they were often hungry and subjected to the cold, forbidding care of his father’s mother.
But the sun did come out again. The chapter in his book, “The Miracle of Frank and Ruth,” says it all. Frank and Ruth Wicks offered a very malnourished 15-year-old Bob a job and a home. Under the tutelage of Frank and calm example of the well-run household of Ruth Wicks he prepared himself to take over his grandfather’s farm as he gained weight, strength, knowledge and what he considered to be another family.
But rain comes, sometimes even when the sun is shining and the skies are fair.
He’d graduated from high school and was on the verge of taking over what was left of his grandfather’s farm. He had the knowledge, a small amount of savings and the tutelage of Frank Wicks to move his plans forward.
Then the barn on his grandfather’s farm burned down and his options crumbled.
Bob joined the U.S. Army and was, after boot camp, sent to the Army’s language school in Monterey, California, where he learned to speak, write and translate Mandarin Chinese.
And the sun shone on him for many years with good jobs, a wife and two children of his own …a family and success, even though, at the age of 50, he began to lose his sight.
As you wander through this marvelous book, Bob explains how he saw himself as becoming the man he was because of the “others” in his life. He revels in telling the continuing stories of those with whom he attended Marcellus Central High School and those with whom he worked in Washington, D.C. He enthusiastically illustrates his praise with photographs, a bit fuzzy, but identifiable.
He saw himself as the product of those early carefree childhood days wandering the fields and woods on Seal Road. He knew that the pain inflicted by the difficult relationships with his grandmother and grandfather laid out a path that he trod with great difficulty, and that the Wicks family, as he put it, saved his life. He never forgot the kindness that he received from the Wicks, and, when he heard about the devastating sledding accident that injured the youngest Wicks son, David, he brought the young man to D.C., helped him adjust to the world of work and find his way in life. As the Wicks saved Bob, he saved David.
David Wicks contacted me a while ago and wanted me to read this book. “I’ve ordered one for you,” he said. We met, along with his brother Martin, in the Marcellus library. Two more charming men do not exist in this world. Warm, self-effacing and earnest, they wanted the world to know about the good man who wrote “A Farm Boy in the Rain.”
Robert Burton Brown died in 2019 without local notice, no eulogies, no obituaries to enkindle the sweet memories of all of those with whom Bob lived that part of his life.
David wanted the people, and all of the many families with whom the Brown and Wicks families had interwoven their lives, to know of Bob’s passing, but even more so, to know how a life in which they played important parts unfolded.
“A Farm Boy in the Rain” is a loving tribute to something that we used to know as community, to a place where family, kith or kin, have always been important … a reminder of who we were, who we are and who we should be.
As Robert said as he recalled those who touched his life, “…in my dreams, I still see their bright eyes and smiling faces. Such dear hearts.”
