Don Brown was in one of the first groups of servicemen to leave the South Pacific islands when World War II ended in 1945, and a news photographer shot his picture.
It appeared on the front page of the Shawnee Morning News - and a paper in Hawaii - long before Brown’s troop ship completed the 21-day trip from Guam to San Francisco.
Because of the photo, “my parents knew I was coming home,” Brown said.
He was subsequently discharged in Norman in spring 1946 after two years, six months and five days service in the Seabees.
Brown returned to Shawnee High School that fall. “There was a whole bunch of us who went back,” he said.
He graduated from SHS in 1947 and he and Mary Anna Brown were married Aug. 30, 1947. At that time, she was working at the former Carnegie Library here.
Don Brown - Orville Donald Brown Jr. - earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and biology in three years from Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Weatherford, graduating in 1950.
Later that decade, he completed a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Arkansas. Ultimately, Brown accumulated more than 300 hours of college credit at eight different colleges and universities while pursuing a doctorate degree.
Brown’s main career was teaching anatomy and physiology to pre-med and nursing students “and anyone else who needed it,” for 17 years at Seward County Community College, Liberal, Kansas.
He also taught biology, photography and for several years, fish parasitology at the college. Brown first taught ninth grade math in Liberal Public Schools before joining the college faculty.
Brown did not complete the doctorate degree because his sponsor became ill but no matter: “I wouldn’t have gotten the job at Liberal. They couldn’t use doctorates,” he said.
Meanwhile, his wife had received two master’s degrees, one in business, one in library science and was a library director 22 years.
Brown’s first job out of Southwestern was teaching fourth and fifth grade classes “in everything,” he said, at Dodson, Texas, west of Hollis.
Next he taught at Dale, Prague and Hominy High Schools before entering the University of Arkansas for his master’s degree.
Brown taught in the University’s zoology department while working on that degree.
He spent five years with the Arkansas Game and Fish Department in Batesville, Ark., doing trout research 10 months of the year and fish management the other two months.
Brown later joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department in Galveston, Texas.
, doing shrimp research. He also taught one semester at Texas A & M. College during his doctorate studies.
The Browns moved to Liberal in 1969. On retirement in 1991, they returned to Shawnee where he began an extensive renovation of the home his late parents bought in 1941.
“The people in Liberal were great but the winters were very severe,” Brown said. “So we decided to go south - to Shawnee.”
They will observe their 63rd wedding anniversary in August, perhaps with their one son, Orville Donald Brown III, Mesa, Ariz., a Public Health Service pharmacist attached to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
They have one grandson, Edward Donald Brown, a bio-engineering major at Arizona State University.
SHAWNEE, Okla. —
