5
Mother, who was thirty-five when I was born and in her
forties before I began to remember much about her, was
really the head of the Brown clan during her adult years.
Although she was next to youngest, her four sisters - she
had no brothers - looked to her for guidance, and in our
family she was the business head and the balance wheel,
never letting her feelings get out of control, running the
home and supporting Dad emotionally so that he could do
anything he wanted to do in the outside world. She
realized her importance. When I was young she told me,
"A man can't be a success unless his wife helps him. How
do you think your father got as far as he did? A man's
wife is a part of his life, of his successes and his failures.
His success is hers too."
She couldn't have found a better mate than Dad. He expressed
in word and deed the idealism that they shared.
Dad loved freedom and because my mother backed him
completely, he could do and say the things he thought a
free, thinking man should.
Settling down in the States with his new bride, Dad became
a railroad mechinist during the heyday of railroading
when some of America's sturdiest legends were being written.
He railroaded from Mississippi to Illinois and in between,
and once he was a roundhouse foreman on the same
line for which Casey Jones, born John Luther Jones at
Cayce, Kentucky, was an engineer. In his early days of
railroading, risks were frequent and dangerous on the
railroad. As a mechinist, Dad was fortunate enough to avoid