Oliver S. Brown ’53

Oliver S. Brown ’53 died April 5, 2013, at the Togus VA Hospice and Palliative Care Unit in Augusta of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was born in Boston on April 10, 1931, and prepared for college at St. George’s School. He was a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. While at Bowdoin, he was a student of Prof. Robert Peter Tristram Coffin and was so taken with his poetry that he collected it and committed many of Coffin’s poems to memory. He went on to earn a master’s degree in education in 1957 and a certificate of advanced graduate study in 1963, both from Harvard University Graduate School of Education. He later continued graduate studies in finance and management at Columbia University. He served to first lieutenant in the Army Transportation Corps in New York and Korea. He spent his professional life in education, teaching at the Emerson School for Boys in Exeter, N.H., teaching and serving as principal in the elementary schools in Weston, Mass., and serving four years as superintendent of schools in the Addison-Rutland Supervisory District in Fair Haven, Vt. He later became director of the Financial Planning and Budgeting Project for the Philadelphia Public Schools. In 1970, he joined Price Waterhouse & Company in Philadelphia and New York as a management consultant primarily in urban school districts. In 1973, he became deputy superintendent of schools in charge of financial planning and management in Cambridge. He retired in 1987 after fourteen years in the Cambridge School System and founded Oliver S. Brown Associates, Inc., consulting for another 10 years in public school systems in many parts of the country. He served as editor of the Massachusetts School Principals Association Bulletin and president of the Massachusetts School Business Officials Association and wrote many articles on school finance for local, state, and national publications. From 1978 to 1991, he taught school finance and management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was a founder and president of the Friends of Peary’s Eagle Island in Casco Bay. He was a communicant at St. Paul’s Church in Brunswick and All Saints Chapel on Orr’s Island, where he served as treasurer for many years and as chair of the Memorial Garden Committee from its inception. He also served on the board and as a volunteer at the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program. He is survived by his wife of sixty years, Eleanor Buxton Brown; brother George Alvin Loud Brown; sisters Phebe Haskell Chase and Glennie Wilding-White; sons Edward Olcott Brown and Calef Rogers Brown; daughters Phebe Hart Brown and Eliza Baldwin Brown Cobb; and seven grandchildren. He was predeceased by sister Ellen Chantal Field and brother Amos Howard Calef Brown Jr.

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