Robinson S. Brown Jr (1917-2005)
B
orn in Louisville, Kentucky, on 6 May 1917, Robinson Swearingen Brown Jr, or ‘Robbie’ to his many friends, was the grandson of George Garvin Brown (1846-1917), a pharmaceutical salesman who, with his half-brother John Thompson Street Brown Jr, established J.T.S. Brown & Bro.,
whiskey blenders and marketers, in 1870. What began as a small local concern bottling and selling Old Forester, their original brand of premier bourbon, evolved over time into the Brown-Forman Corporation, today one of the world’s top ten wine and spirit organisations.
Robbie’s uncle, the outgoing Owsley Brown (1879-1952), who started work at the company in 1904,
assumed the management of it from G.G. Brown in 1917. In 1934 Owsley’s younger brother, Robinson Swearingen Brown Sr (1886-1968), joined the company’s senior management team who directed the firm through the precocious years of Prohibition and the Great Depression, enabling the succeeding generation of management to expand the product line beyond Kentucky in the 1950s and 1960s with the acquisition of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey, Old Bushmills Irish whiskey, Southern Comfort and other brands.
Growing up in Louisville during the Depression, Robbie studied engineering at the University of
Virginia. During World War II he was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Honourably discharged with the rank of captain in 1945 he returned to the family firm, where he rose to become Brown-Forman’s first executive director of sales and marketing. He was elected chairman in 1971 and retired from that office in June 1982.
Robbie was also very active in social, civic and political affairs, serving on a number of boards and
committees. In late 1956, while working in Brown-Forman’s public relations and personnel department, he was asked to head a committee planning events for the 1957 Kentucky Derby Festival and appointed the first chairman of the modern Derby. Believing in doing things right, Robbie requested a three months leave from work in early 1957 to ensure it ran successfully. Subsequently he was greatly honoured when, on the eve of his 88th birthday, he was invited to serve as ‘Thundernator’ for the 2005 Thunder Over Louisville fireworks show, the traditional pyrotechnic curtain-raiser to the Kentucky Derby. in 1975 he served as president of the Louisville Chamber of Commerce. He was a former chairman of the board of trustees of Bellarmine College (now University), from whom he received a law doctorate, and was a founding member of the Louisville Zoological Commission. He particularly supported the Louisville organisation Prodigal Ministries, which help men and women released from prison to re-establish themselves by starting a new life, devoid of crime.
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