Suffice it to say that to this day, in the entire United States, there’s only one guy who spells Himan Brown with an “I,” which in a sense, was the kind of showmanship that preceded so many of the things I did.
That’s radio producer Himan Brown, one of broadcast’s most important pioneers, staking his claim to history. And this is Audio Maverick, a podcast celebrating his life and work. I’m Margot Avery. Stay tuned. In our first episode, we learned about radio’s beginnings, and its evolution from a technical breakthrough, to a hobbyist’s dream, to the first dominant entertainment medium. >> Hundreds, thousands, millions of people.
In this episode, we learn about Himan Brown’s beginnings, and how his early life shaped him and his work. Brown was influenced by two worlds: the old world that his parents left behind in Odessa, Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century, and New York City, in which they settled, and where Himan Brown was born. Brown lived to be nearly one hundred, so his history reflects the history of a country in flux, one that was being reshaped and enriched by immigrants.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the old Imperial port city of Odessa was bustling and cosmopolitan, and had an interesting cross-section of residents- merchants, thieves, writers, gangsters. Sort of like the characters of a Golden Age radio piece, come to think of it. But it was not a comfortable place in which to be a Jew. A series of pogroms continued a pattern of violence and oppression that drove many Jews from their homes and communities.
Himan Brown’s parents, Sam and Dora, were among them. They each emigrated to New York City, separately, met there, and married in 1908. They settled in Brownsville, which was one of three New York neighborhoods shaped by this migration. Two years later, in 1910, Himan was born. Brownsville was established as a neighborhood in the late 19th century by a Jewish businessman, who painted it as more desirable than the raucous Lower East Side.
But there was still a socio-economic journey to be made for Jewish immigrants, from poverty to hard-won middle-class security. Brown admired the writer and critic Alfred Kazin, who remembered Brownsville in his 1951 memoir A Walker in the City, describing it as: Alfred Kazin [reenactment]: New York’s rawest, remotest, cheapest ghetto, enclosed on one side by the Canarsie flats and on the other by the hallowed middle class districts that showed the way to New York.
But Kazin also paid tribute to the neighborhood’s vivid energy- a new world emerging from the old. Alfred Kazin [reenactment]: As I walk those familiarly choked streets at dusk and see the old women sitting in front of the tenements, past and present become each other’s faces; I am back where I began. The torches over the pushcarts hold in a single breath of yellow flame the acid smell of half-sour pickles and herrings floating in their briny barrels.
There is a dry rattle of loose newspaper sheets around the cracked skins of the ‘chiney’ oranges. While Brown admired Kazin’s descriptions of their shared worlds, which he called “beautiful" and "dramatic,” Brown himself is more matter-of-fact:
This was the- shall I say?- dumping ground for all of the Jews that came out of Russia.
And the qualifications for entry
limited means, and a demanding trade.
We were very poor, My father was a tailor, a Schneider.
Brown remembered his father as determined. And eventually Sam Brown went from being a lone machine operator to a dress contractor employing as many as 20 or 30 people. The First World War not only established the importance of radio communications, it also stimulated a new urban community of strivers. Here’s Brown recalling the turning point for his father.
The one thing he made that I can remember vividly was a thing called “Hoover Aprons.” Herbert Hoover had created a kind of austerity which resulted in this pattern.
Hoover was the head of the US Food Administration at the time, and was known, both then and as President, for his belief that careful management of resources would lead to prosperity. In this case, the resource was fabric.
Really the first wrap-around that women were wearing. Very simply conceived. Very simply made. Very utilitarian, and very handsome, too.
The design, which still draws admiring reviews from home economists today, completely covered a woman’s dress, and the top overlapped in both directions, so it could be worn for longer. And there was an incentive. Housewives signed a pledge to conserve food, and got free recipes and the pattern in return.
My father, I remember, for two or three years made nothing but Hoover Aprons.
Even though Brown never said it himself, it’s easy to imagine how watching his father successfully tap into the market of women homemakers might have inspired Brown later on in his career in broadcast.
There's just one reason for tomato soup’s popularity, and it is this: The magic matchless flavor of Campbell's tomato soup.
Much of his time was spent partnering with sponsors targeting this same demographic of homemakers with contests, novelties, and prizes, and storylines that took them away from the stove for a little while.
Marie, the Little French Princess. That was for Louis Philippe lipstick, which was a Chicago affiliated drug product. I'm talking about doing a series at two o'clock in the afternoon of a romantic daytime serial, no soap opera.
That was Brown’s future, but the present was less romantic. The Brown family moved around a lot in their Brownsville neighborhood. According to Brown, “We lived wherever the shop was.” They started out on Herzl Street, a chancy neighborhood with a gang presence.
Herzl Street abutted Amboy Street. And Amboy Street fostered the Amboy Dukes. The Amboy Dukes were part of the Jewish Mafia, if you please.
The “Jewish Mafia” eventually included infamous gangster Ben “Bugsy” Siegel. “Did you think you could get away with it? Did you think you could steal from me? From Meyer Lansky, Charlie Luciano, and me and get away with it?” Margot Avery” That’s Warren Beatty in the glamorized Hollywood biopic “Bugsy.” But according to Brown, “Bugsy” got his start in the usual way, as the neighborhood bully. And Brown was one of his targets.
We all went to the same public schools. And I’ll never forget that at the end of the month, if you were an AA student, you got an honor card. But it also meant that on your way home, you got a beating, because the kids who didn’t get the honor cards called you a sissy, and said “Look at the show-off” and they knocked your brains in, because you were smarter than they were.
By the time Brown was about eleven, his father had done well enough to move to a small two-family home in Carroll Street in Crown Heights, which his mother Rosa saw as an escape from a neighborhood that:
Spelled juvenile delinquency in the biggest terms possible.
But however much the Browns lived in flux, there was a source of stability, in the neighborhood’s shared language, Yiddish, and the culture it embodied.
I spoke only Yiddish. Yiddish was the first language, and Russian was the second language. Everyone spoke Yiddish. That was it. The grocery, the butcher, the vegetable guy. And that was the language.
Himan Brown entered nursery school as a Yiddish speaker, but emerged as a hybrid, retaining a fluency in Yiddish and a faint Russian inflection in his English, for the rest of his life. He considered this a plus, and in later years became an advocate and activist for this language that embodied a whole cultural past.
I am not sorry, because it was one of the most colorful languages, and still is.
Although Brown was often on call to make deliveries for Sam’s business he managed to excel in the public school system, where the move to Carroll Street placed him in a new school called PS 167. It served him well, creating a context and community for his “third” language, English. He went on to attend the prestigious Boys High School.
It was an Honor School. You had to take an exam to get in.
Brown is in good company. The school’s alums include Isaac Asimov, Aaron Copland, Norman Mailer, and Man Ray. This imposing Romanesque building is still standing on Marcy Avenue. In fact, much of Himan Brown’s physical past is still available to the eye. A street known informally as “President’s Row” [Grover Cleveland is supposed to have lived there once], was lined with mansions.
In one of these, The Brooklyn Jewish Center, located on the broad and busy expanse of Eastern Parkway, was first proposed. It was an institution that would play a key role in Himan Brown’s future. Rabbi Nossum Blumes: The members at that time felt Judaism isn't just going to a synagogue and praying on Saturday. It’s all inclusive. Everything and anything a person does in life could be permeated with Judaism, and they wanted a Center that was built to represent that. That’s Rabbi Nossum Blumes.
He’s the current director of the Brooklyn Jewish Center and its archives. It was the vision of a group of local businessmen: Rabbi Nossum Blumes: And in 1918 in December, there was a meeting in a Mr Gold's home. And they decided, if we are gonna do it, if we're gonna build a center, we're gonna do it right. And make a statement.
Because they wanted to show themselves, they wanted to show their parents, and they wanted to show the future, how important it is to be part and parcel of America, to do things right, and also carry your Jewish beliefs and your Jewish traditions. “Doing things right” meant including a spa, a billiards room, a pool, a gymnasium, a recreation center, a social hall for bar mitzvahs and weddings, and of course a school. The Center opened in 1920.
It was and is supported by the community, and Brown’s parents were members. But except for “high holidays” the family was not observant.
My father was Jewish. We ran a kosher home. But we were not synagogue goers. We didn’t observe every tenet of the Judaic laws, and so on. My father was not above working on Saturday. You had to, if you wanted to exist.
Brown himself was still helping out his father when he wasn’t at school, with little in the way of either religion or leisure in his life. But the Brooklyn Jewish Center changed that: it had a drama club. Brown heard about it from a schoolmate whose father was the Center’s rabbi.
I was determined that I was going to get to this dramatic group, because from the time I was seven or eight years old, when Armistice Day came, the kid who got up and recited, “In Flanders Fields, where poppies grow- “felt dawn, saw sunset glow.” I was the kid who recited that. “And now we lie in Flanders Fields.” I was always doing poems that I memorized, I was not afraid to stand up in front of audiences. And when I heard about this dramatic club, I figured I’d better go see what it is.
But to my horror, when I walked in, everybody was eighteen to twenty-five. Now, here I was, not even a teenager yet. I was twelve. I wasn’t even thirteen. So I quickly blustered my way when I was asked what I was doing there, who I was. I said I was fifteen, sixteen. I was a gawky kid. And I said I was an actor and wanted to be an actor. Fortunately, the man I spoke to was one of the sweetest, warmest guys that ever lived.
That “guy” was the playwright Moss Hart, who became a key figure in Brown’s creative journey. Hart was the author or co-author of such American classics as You Can’t Take it With You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Merrily We Roll Along. And his generous response to an eager teen may have stemmed from his own fortuitous connection to the theatre. He was born into acute poverty, from which he escaped in ways implausible enough to be one of his own plots. “What's your name? / Moss Hart, Sir.
/ Mr Ziegfeld’s secretary. She's on the fifth. You wait for an answer in both places. / Thank you. I can't tell you how much this means. I love the theater. / Well I don’t.” Early in his career, Hart also worked as a “social director” at the adult summer camps that began to propagate in the Catskills. As director, Hart staged plays, musicals, and contests to entertain the guests. Brown was lucky enough to encounter this generous genius of the theatre at a formative moment in his own youth.
This period, the early and middle 1920s, was the heyday of follies, revues, and vaudeville. These productions, which toured the country, had names like “Garrick Gaieties” and “Little Shows.” Back at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, Hart was also reworking these shows for children. It’s an idea that speaks to the innocence of the age, even if it did contain the likes of Bugsy Siegel. There was no sense that these bawdy, flirtatious productions were “inappropriate.”
And Himan Brown got handed a plum role.
Speaking Yiddish as fluently as I did, I knew what to do with the Yiddish dialect in English. And the first thing he did for me was to shove into my hands three or four pieces that Fanny Brice did in Jewish dialect. So here I was, at the tender age of 13 or 14 in drag.
Fanny Brice was the leading female vaudevillian of the day, later immortalized in the musical Funny Girl. Fanny Brice [Barbara Streisand] : ♪ Hey Mr Arnstein, here I am! ♪ Soon, Himan graduated from the kiddie stage in Brooklyn and joined Hart’s troupe in the Catskills, territory that came to be known as the Borscht Belt. It was one of the first “destinations” for hard-working families who wanted to enjoy a little leisure.
At weekends, aspiring and established entertainers would perform at the Catskills’ many resorts and clubs. And for those starting out, many of the “acts” were lifted from the pros. “You’d steal from all the comedians in those days,” Brown reported unrepentantly. And the grand pay scale? “You could earn as much as “25 bucks” a performance, he said gleefully.”
Brown thought he was on his way to a comedy career, but I would argue that what he was really doing was perfecting his ear for comic dialogue and pacing as an eventual creator of programming. Even though performance gave him an entree to broadcasting, something we’ll hear more about in our next episode, Brown realized at some point that acting was not his destiny. Passionate as Brown was about the theatre, there was a side of him that was strategic and shrewd.
He graduated from Boys High School at sixteen, did an undergraduate degree at City College, and jointly enrolled in Brooklyn Law School. “I was determined to be a lawyer,” he recalled. But his father had other plans for him.
He said, “You go under your own steam. You pay for it yourself,” and so on. He wanted me in the shop to continue on and make life a little simpler and easier for him. Well, I was certainly determined not to become a dress contractor or stay with that kind of world.
Brown had an ambivalent relationship to his childhood neighborhood. On the one hand, it represented the place where his family was able to find a home and aspire to middle class security. One the other, it was his father’s domain, and part of a world that Brown was determined to escape.
I wanted to be in theatre.
His father couldn’t see the point of a degree, or the theatre. “Hymie” was destined for the shop. “Himan” knew he belonged in a different world. And, as it turned out, a different borough. The journey was both physical and symbolic. From one borough, and one world, to another. In Brooklyn, he was linked to the past. In Manhattan, he could knock down doors, become an active part of a new culture, and make “radio” a real place in his life, not just a crystal set.
One thing that’s hard to grasp in our era is how separate neighborhoods and the people in them were. Brown recalls that he didn’t even know there were other boroughs until he was in his early teens. Alfred Kazin makes the same point in A Walker in the City, conveying the pull and mystery of Manhattan: Alfred Kazin [reenactment]: When I was a child, I thought we lived at the end of the world. It was the eternity of the subway ride into the city that first gave me this idea.
I saw New York as a foreign city. There, brilliant and unreal, the city has its life, as Brownsville was ours. But Himan Brown was planning to close the gap. The subway system had been extended into Brooklyn in 1909, and by 1920, was firmly established with three lines. And for five cents- Brown travelled to his future. The boy who was fascinated with the crystal radio set got a chance to be on the other side of the magic box. And he’s happy to tell you how he did it.
Now, how do you get on the radio? What do you do? Here I am. I’ve just about discovered what New York is, Manhattan, and how to get there with the subway.
What you hear in Brown’s voice is a determination to succeed- on his own terms.
I was determined to get on the air.
Up to this point Himan Brown’s story is unique, but also emblematic, which is why this is a history of a neighborhood as well of the man and his family. But soon, he crosses the threshold into a life entirely his own. Next up, we will learn more about how Brown became the “Boy Wonder.” This is Audio Maverick, and I’m Margot Avery. Stay tuned. Audio Maverick is produced and directed by Sarah Montague, who also writes the scripts. Our Executive Producers are Melina Brown and Sarah Montague.
CUNY TV's Executive Director is Chiqui Cartagena. The Director of Production is Susan Iger and Deborah Labadie is CUNY TV's Chief Operating Officer. The Associate Producer for Audio Maverick is Corinne Wallace, and our Audio Production Intern is Lucia Funaro. Audio Maverick is narrated by Margot Avery. Excerpts from A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin are used by permission of the Wylie Agency. The reader is Paul Hecht.
Our technical team at CUNY includes Senior Audio Engineer Richard Kim and Audio Engineer and Program Mix Engineer Lisa Gosselin. Our Staff Photographer is Laura Fuchs. Our Archivists are David Rice and Catriona Schlosser. Our Closed Captioning Coordinator is Amy Monte. Script Editor is Allison Behringer. Our theme music is composed by Allison Layton-Brown. Sound Design and Final Mixing are by John deLore and Bart Warshaw. Multituse Productions handles our publicity and marketing.
Excerpts from the Himan Brown Oral History courtesy of the Director's Guild of America, Inc. www.dga.org All rights reserved. The material from a broadcast version of Empire of the Air is used courtesy of Other World Media. Audio Maverick is a production of CUNY TV.