Literacy Instructor Esther Brown Dies at 77

Esther Brown, known in Orange County literacy circles for her passionate commitment to teaching English, died this week at the age of 77.

For the last 35 years, Brown taught English literacy and English as a Second Language to anyone who walked through the door of her center at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana.

A homemaker and mother of seven sons, Brown taught several hundred people to read over the years. Even when congestive heart failure and arthritis made getting about more difficult, Brown never missed her weekly class.

As time passed, Brown said, she came to understand that the study of English was often secondary to what really happened in her classes.

“Everything that goes on really has nothing to do with literacy,” she once said. “It is about caring, showing caring for someone else.

“People are to me the most wonderful gift of God. I don’t care where they’re from or what they look like--I love them all, and I want them to be happy.”

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And she meant it. Baffled one day when a friend exclaimed “Esther, I never hear you say anything bad about anyone,” Brown responded, “But I don’t know anything bad about anyone.”

An avid reader, Brown subscribed to 16 magazines and always had a Bible nearby at home.

Her students and the other volunteers who worked with Brown praised her caring and kindness as much as they did her teaching ability and dedication.

“I think she is a saint--she has a beautiful heart, and I love her so much,” said Okcha Fiduccia, 54, a Tustin resident of Korean background who first went to Brown’s literacy center 30 years ago.

“People who came to the United States 30 or 40 years ago . . . were helpless because we didn’t speak English well, and I didn’t have a good education,” Fiduccia said.

But whether offering advice about grocery shopping or providing rides home from class, “this lady helped everybody and all on her own time,” Fiduccia said.

It was 1963 when a minister from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station visited Brown’s church in Santa Ana seeking literacy volunteers. He told the congregation that 40 women, mainly the wives of Asian servicemen, were afraid to leave their homes because they did not know English and feared Americans would think they were rude.

“I thought teaching was way beyond my capabilities, but I knew how to watch children, so I agreed to do that” while the mothers studied English, Brown said.

Soon she was not only pressed into service as a tutor but began running the program, using her son’s college civics book as a text to teach English and citizenship. Eventually she turned to the Laubach method, which begins with instruction in the alphabet, then long vowels, short vowels, words, phrases and finally stories.

“Her heart and soul [were] really in it,” said Pauline Schoof, 78, of Tustin, who had volunteered with Brown for 25 years.

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Brown, who died Tuesday, is survived by her husband, George; sons Robert, Kenneth, Russell, Casey, Daniel, Andrew and Scott; sister Sarah Lauer; brother Eugene True, 13 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Services are scheduled for 3 p.m. Monday at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana.

The family requests donations to the Esther Brown Memorial Fund, care of Central Orange County Literacy Council, P.O. Box 10296, Santa Ana, CA 92711.