Eulogies Recall Brown’s Humor, Love of Family

Pat Brown would have wanted it just like it was, his granddaughter Kathleen Kelly assured 900 family members, friends and associates gathered Wednesday for a funeral Mass for the 32nd governor of California.

“This is just where Grandpa loved to be: right up front, surrounded by his family, his dear friends, the clergy, distinguished dignitaries, the press and hundreds of voting Democrats,” she said.

It was a day for remembering Edmund G. Brown Sr.--Pat was a boyhood nickname--with humorous anecdotes of his love of politics and of California.

“This is my father’s kind of day,” said Kathleen Brown, the former state treasurer who was the third member of the family to run for governor. “First of all, he’s in the news. And there’s political news after New Hampshire . . . and the Republicans are in disarray.”

California’s current governor, Republican Pete Wilson, was among those who turned out during a break in the rain for the two-hour service and remembrance. Wilson was elected to his first state office, as a member of the state Assembly, in the same 1966 election in which Ronald Reagan crushed Pat Brown’s bid for a third term.

“It was a lovely ceremony,” Wilson said. “It was one that Pat would have enjoyed. It’s too bad he wasn’t here because he would have enjoyed it.”

The bear flag of the state of California was draped across the casket as it was borne from St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church in the Sunset district, just a few blocks from the old Brown family home on Magellan Street.

An honor guard of eight California Highway Patrol officers stood at attention as the church bell tolled solemnly. Four California National Guard helicopters flew over in a “missing man” formation. A line of San Francisco police officers stood at attention and saluted.

After the Mass, Brown’s body was interred near the graves of his parents at Holy Cross Cemetery. Brown died Friday of a heart attack at his home in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon. He was 90 years old.

Bernice Brown, Pat Brown’s wife of 65 years, left the church in a wheelchair, her silver hair waving slightly in the breeze. The chair was pushed carefully from the church by their only son, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., also a former governor of California.

A few minutes into the service, attorney Vincent Mullins, 80, a deputy to Brown when he was San Francisco district attorney in the 1940s, collapsed and was removed on a stretcher. Mullins was taken to UC San Francisco Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death was not immediately revealed.

For the last three decades, the Browns had lived in Benedict Canyon above Beverly Hills, where Brown practiced law. But he always considered San Francisco his home, family members said. This is where he was born just a year before the great earthquake of 1906 and where he broke into politics. He won his first office, San Francisco district attorney, in 1943, by pledging to break up “the rackets.”

Brown went on to serve two terms as state attorney general and two terms as governor, from January 1959 to January 1967.

In obituaries and tributes since his death, Brown has been extolled as an ebullient, activist governor whose leadership brought about the State Water Project, the modern California freeway system and the ambitious expansion of the higher education structure in California.

On Wednesday, it was more a time for Pat Brown to be remembered as a buoyant, generous, caring person and family man. Other than the priest who celebrated the Mass, the Rt. Rev. Msgr. James McKay, pastor of San Francisco’s Dolores Mission, the only speakers were two of Brown’s children and two of his grandchildren, Kelly and grandson Charles Casey Jr.

In all, the funeral was attended by the four Brown children, 10 grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and uncounted numbers of more distant relatives.

The talk was of Brown’s spirit, generosity and love of family, and of his ability to laugh and have fun.

“That was a belly laugh if there ever was one,” grandson Casey said. “My cousins and I always got caught up in that laughter. It was infectious.”

Casey said he had looked in the eyes of his own 8-day-old son, Edmund Patrick Casey, just Tuesday “and I recognized that far-flung gleam of Pat Brown . . . and now I fully understand that that spirit will continue to live for generations.”

Kelly said their grandfather loved to do whatever the children wanted to do. “He even loved to skinny-dip,” but only when he had been assured that all the young people had gone inside, she said.

Brown always had three questions for any potential beaus the girls brought to meet him, she added: “Are you a Catholic? Are you Irish? Are you a Democrat?”

“He loved us. He loved politics. He loved California. And he loved the law,” Kelly said, adding that Brown broke into tears on hearing the news that she had passed the bar exam.

Daughter Kathleen Brown, an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1994, said the most common inflection to his voice was good cheer.

“We knew it in the family, and over time, it became apparent to California. And what made it so endearing to many was the fact he never hesitated to laugh at himself. He was a man of pride, but never of vanity.”

And Jerry Brown, who as governor often spoke caustically of his father’s old-fashioned style of politics, related several old political anecdotes his father used to tell.

With Wilson sitting nearby, he noted that his father “didn’t talk about welfare cuts” and that his proudest achievement had been to extend welfare pension benefits to people who had lived in California without the benefit of U.S. citizenship. Wilson has pushed a succession of welfare reductions and was a leader in the fight to cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants--the most emotional issue during his 1994 reelection campaign against Kathleen Brown.

Others who attended included Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and other former mayors, including Republican George Christopher; current and former state legislators and members of Congress, and U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), the general chairman of the national Democratic Party.