Over the course of three decades, Cecil Brown mailed dozens of letters to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Tucked inside the envelope were donations – perhaps $10 for heart disease research or, on occasion, a $100 check to help scientists find treatments for cancer.
While his family and close friends appreciated Brown’s generosity, they also knew he spent little money on himself. The Clinton resident drove an older model car, and as a young man, he was known to eat nothing but beans for weeks on end.
Following his death at age 95, Brown surprised OMRF with his largest gift: $200,000 from his estate. The donation, which OMRF received this spring, was the product of oil investments and mineral rights he’d purchased from Custer County farmers in the 1940s.
“He always talked about how OMRF was doing some remarkable things for health,” said Vicki Falconer, Brown’s accountant. “He was always very high on the research scientists were doing.”
Brown died in August 2005, leaving the bulk of his estate to OMRF and more than a dozen nieces and nephews. Married twice, he had no children of his own.
According to Brown’s niece Ruth Jacobs, who lives in Yukon, her uncle saved his money for the things that mattered most to him, like charity and family. “He didn’t spend his money foolishly,” Jacobs said. “There are just certain things that are ingrained in you from the time you’re born.”
Born in Butler, Okla., in 1909 to Charlie and Mary Miller Brown, Cecil Brown married Vivah J. Earles in May 1940. After serving in the Army Air Corps in England, France and southern Germany during World War II, he returned to Custer City and worked in the insurance business. At his boss’s encouragement, Brown saved his money and used some of his wife’s salary as a teacher to buy mineral rights from local farmers. At times this left the couple with little money for food, except for a bowl of beans.
“He’d go to the county seat and look up these guys who had mineral rights,” Jacobs recalled. “And they were tickled to death to sell it, so they could get insurance for their crops.”
Those first purchases sparked a life-long interest in investing. During the final years of his life, when Jacobs visited Brown, she often found him glued to the television, keeping an eye on the stock market.
Yet Brown always put family first. When Vivah, his wife of 48 years, was stricken with a rare brain disease in the 1980s and took up residence in a care facility in Clinton, Brown would visit her several times a week to feed her lunch.
Following Vivah’s death in 1989, Brown wed Abbie Cline, a former sweetheart whom he’d dated more than a half-century earlier. They were married for more than a decade, until Alzheimer’s claimed Abbie’s life in April 2005.
“Cecil Brown lost two women he loved to brain disease,” said Tia Jones-Bibbs, OMRF’s director of planned giving. “But he used his own loss as an opportunity to help future generations. I can’t imagine a more generous, more far-reaching legacy.”
In recent years, OMRF scientists have made a series of crucial breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Led by Jordan Tang, Ph.D., OMRF researchers have identified the enzyme believed to cause Alzheimer’s and have created a chemical inhibitor to halt the enzyme. Tang’s team hopes to begin testing an experimental Alzheimer’s drug in humans in the near future.
Other OMRF researchers are making inroads against Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases. And a pair of OMRF scientists are also exploring a novel treatment for a deadly form of brain cancer.
A photo of Cecil Brown is available upon request.
About OMRF:
Celebrating its 60th birthday in 2006, OMRF (www.omrf.org) is a nonprofit biomedical research institute dedicated to understanding and curing human disease. Its scientists focus on such critical research areas as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, lupus and cardiovascular disease. It is home to Oklahoma’s only member of the National Academy of Sciences.
