South Strafford
A second-generation dairy farmer, Brown may not have roamed far from his roots. But from those roots grew a large and close-knit family, a salt-of-the-earth set of values and an endless supply of outlandish stories that contribute to the sensibility of a man who had the land in his bones.
The stories don’t begin with his wife, Ellen, but it’s a good place to start. They met on a blind date set up by a mutual friend. He was atrociously late.
When he finally arrived, and told her his excuse — that his cows had gotten out and he’d had to go after them — Ellen nearly turned around and left.
“But I liked the looks of him so much,” said Ellen, an avid horseback rider, “that I stayed.” Later on in their courtship, he told her that as long as they were together, she could have any horse she wanted.
“And I did,” she said.
In the 47 years of marriage that followed, their house on Stage Road was rarely empty. There were six kids, five of whom were from his previous marriage to Geraldine Gould, and all of whom stayed in New Hampshire or Vermont after they grew up; they are, in descending order of age: Deborah Gray, Charles “Punka” Brown, Dixie Brown, Anthony “Tony” Brown, Cynthia Brown Falzarano and Frank Brown Jr. Seventeen grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren eventually followed.
In addition to a family that seemed to be constantly growing, the Browns took in a handful of kids from town over the years — kids who were getting in trouble, or had trouble at home. There were at least six kids who Charlie invited to stay for as long as they needed to; one or two even stayed for years.
“He just really liked kids, and didn’t want to see them in a bad situation,” said Frank, who now lives down the road and up the hill from his childhood home.
Later, when the children started growing up, Charlie and Ellen found they needed to subsidize their income, so they took in a man with intellectual disabilities named Sonny Taylor. Taylor ended up living with them for around 30 years, and the Brown kids said that they, their peers and other members of the community benefited from knowing a person with special needs.
“Not every youngster gets to grow up with someone who has those challenges,” Frank said. “I know me and my friends learned a lot from having him around.”
Because of Charlie’s good-natured response to some of Taylor’s eccentric behavior, like going on walks wearing nothing but his boots, the kids learned the power of a compassionate sense of humor.
“Our neighbors are all far away, so it worked out great,” Punka joked. “Dad used to say, ‘Well, at least we got 200 acres.’ ”
And those 200 acres meant the world, though not everything, to Charlie Brown. Falzarano, his second-youngest, remembers how he would take her small hands in his own, and show her how and where to squeeze a cow’s udders to milk her. And he was eager to spread the gospel of good, old-fashioned maple sugaring to anyone with an interest — including kindergarten students from the Newton Elementary School in South Strafford, and some strangers who Dixie described as “hippies” from a commune that sprang up nearby in the 1960s.
Mostly, though, maple sugaring was a Brown family affair.
“We’d all go out together. Back in those days Dad had these big workhorses, and we were all responsible for emptying buckets into the tank,” Falzarano said. “These days, everything is done with technology and pipelines.”
Afterward they’d go back to the house, where Charlie would boil syrup and pour it over freshly fallen snow.
He kept on making maple cream, Falzarano said, right up until the last few years before he died.
The Stage Road Farm sugarhouse, built in 1930 by Brown’s father, Frank Brown Sr., was strong and sound — though an exception must be made for the addition some of the kids built onto it when they were younger, which rotted after a year and had to be rebuilt. They suspect their dad knew all along that the addition wasn’t up to snuff, but bit his tongue at the time, in the interest of facilitating a proper learning experience.
“He let you try something your own way, even if he knew there was a better way,” Frank said.
He did exert his will sometimes, though — like on Christmas, when he tried to stave off the gift-opening for as long as he could.
“I guess we were really bad,” Punka said. “We’d do anything to get into that living room in the morning.”
Not if Charlie Brown had a say in it.
Punka remembers going downstairs one Christmas morning to find a rather unorthodox surprise waiting for them: Charlie had nailed plywood and two-by-fours over the entrance to the living room, so the kids couldn’t sneak in while he was out milking. Afterward, at the customary Christmas morning breakfast, he ate his food gleefully slowly, just to draw out the anticipation that much more.
It was worth every minute of torture, Falzarano said. “He got us the best presents. There would be homemade jams and pickles, and maple syrup and maple cream, and warm socks and hats. Nothing materialistic — that just wasn’t my dad.”
He kept these traditions alive even on the year the cows got loose, and he had to go chase them down in the snow — but running after cattle on Christmas morning barely scratched the surface of his nearly bottomless energy reserves. He was the kind of man who would wake up at the crack of dawn to milk, then do chores, then ski 18 runs with his kids at Dartmouth Skiway, then come back to milk the cows again, then go dancing before finally falling asleep in his recliner. He threw huge, and hugely popular, parties at the farm. He coached the Central Vermont League’s baseball and basketball teams, and taught swimming lessons at the farm pond. He went zip-lining well into his 70s, when he already had at least one stent put into his heart. He went carriage driving with Ellen in the rain.
For Charlie, involving himself in sports and recreation was part of what made him more than just a farmer. Though he loved the farm fiercely, “he was not going to let the farm define his life,” said Punka. If the baseball game he was coaching spilled into extra innings, he’d say, “The cows can wait another hour.”
This happy-go-lucky attitude sometimes translated into him being somewhat, as Gray put it, “accident prone.”
He had this reputation outside the family, too. He’d often go into Coburns’ General Store in South Strafford — a place he regarded as integral to the community, and staunchly supported even as big box stores opened in the area — to regale Mel and Sue Coburn with the tale of his latest misadventure that, Sue said, “could only happen to Charlie Brown.
“He came into the store, always bubbly with a cheery note about him, and go, ‘you’ll never believe what just happened to me.’ ” She still remembers the time Charlie was helping to install a septic tank, and while he was down in the hole, “somebody turned something on and he just got plastered.”
After going home to shower, he went into Coburns’ and told them all the grisly details about the experience.
“Only you, Charlie Brown,” said Sue.
Sometimes he’d even land himself in real danger, though his lucky streak carried him through most of his scrapes. One night when he and Tony were bringing the cows back in, a bull started giving Tony a hard time and he had to call in his dad for backup. Charlie ran back into the barn, “grabbed a hammer off the wall, and went and hit that bull right in the head,” Tony said.
In return, the bull rammed him right in the midsection, knocking him flat and breaking a couple of ribs. If Tony hadn’t distracted the bull long enough for Charlie to roll under the fence, he might have been injured worse.
It’s a good thing he wasn’t — not just for his family and friends, but also for the hundreds of couples he would marry over the years as a justice of the peace. It was a service he loved providing, his family said, and he took it seriously.
At every wedding, he would perform a special candle-lighting ceremony that harkened back to his and Ellen’s own wedding, and had become a ritual for them: Each year on their anniversary, they would light the candle and think back to the day they made their vows.
He’d give the newlyweds a candle of their own, and tell them to keep it safe. It was not just to commemorate their special day, Falzarano said, but also to serve as a reminder that despite the inevitable bumps in the road, a loving marriage is a warm and beautiful thing.
After the funeral, some family members took a walk up to the small pond that sits at the far end of the field, the one where Charlie used to give swimming lessons.
“Out of nowhere, a butterfly — I think it was a monarch — came down and landed on (a great-granddaughter’s) finger,” Ellen said. Falzarano said the butterfly lingered close by, lighting upon a few other grandchildren and great-grandchildren, before flying away.
“I’m telling you, it just stayed and stayed,” said Falzarano. The incident made her reflect on how, though her father’s physical presence may be gone, his vibrant spirit will remain a part of the South Strafford land and community he loved so much.
Coincidentally — or not, depending on one’s point of view — Tony had had a similarly profound experience with another winged creature a few days earlier, when he was out working on his own farm in Randolph. It was a beautiful day, he said, but he was thinking of his dad.
Then, he looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk.
“It stayed with me for about an hour. I kept looking up at it to make sure it was still there,” he said. “It came down a couple times, caught some mice, and moved on. I couldn’t have asked for a better sign: Life … just keeps going, and you’ve got to keep going right along with it.”
Or, as Charlie was fond of saying, “Load the bite. Bind tight. Go like hell.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.