Ray Gardner BROWN
Biography

Twin to Roy Gafford Brown. Ray was the first born. He was weak and they were not certain that he would live. He was placed in a shoebox and slid under a wood stove to keep him warm while the midwife tended to Roy's birth. Roy cam into the world with a healthy loud cry. Roy was the stronger child of the two and stood up for Ray when they were growing up. They had an older sister, Alta Mae, and a younger brother, Earl Robert. The family returned to Pasadena, California. Charles, their dad, died when the twins were about 12 years old. Their mother, Ida May Gardner Brown, was up at 4 a.m. to fix breakfast for the twins. Ray and Roy would milk their two cows, deliver the milk to neighbors up and down the street, then sell newspapers on the street corner until the school day started. After school, they helped the school custodian clean, the classrooms before returning to the street corner to sell more newspapers. They would return home about 9 or 10 p.m. for dinner and homework time. The twins dropped out of Highschool after their freshman year in order to apprentice in several building trades. Both twins and Earl became plumbers. In their spare time, they hiked and hunted birds and small animals to help feed the family, which was living at a very low-income level.

Ray was married to Clara Atkinson Brown from June 20, 1930 until her death on June 28th, 1983. He missed her terribly after she died of cancer. Ray died just six months after Clara. Ray worked for the Tucker McClure Plumbing Company in Pasadena for several years. Ray and Clara moved to Shanghai, China in 1931. He was sent to China to supervise the plumbing during the construction of a large apartment building in Shanghai. He then went on to supervise other plumbing work and to serve as the American representative on the Shanghai Municipal Council in that fascinating city. They returned to Pasadena in 1936 because of the growing Japanese incursion of Shanghai. In 1940 Ray was hired to supervise the plumbing on new barracks being constructed along the Panama Canal (just before the U.S. entered WWII). He was then hired as the Supervisor of Public Works for the 15th Naval District Headquarters at Amador, in the Panama Canal Zone. The family stayed in Panama until 1948, when they returned to California. He supervised a small plumbing company for a little over a year before joining one of his childhood friends as a partner in Vasbinder Plumbing Company in Pasadena. He retired from Vasbinder's, and moved to Newport Beach, California until Clara and he moved in with his daughter in the San Jose, California area in 1983.



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