The 104-year-old, 1923 Albright graduate has been repaying his father ever since through the life he has chosen to live.

It all began in the home of his parents, Minnie Ella Wetzel and Rev. William Henry Brown, both 1897 graduates of Central Pennsylvania College, one of Albright College’s founding institutions. They showed their firstborn son, James Good Brown, what was “expected” of him and “the way to live” a respectable life. Brown was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps into the ministry, and he accepted the task immediately.

His father, “a strong man of deep conviction,” showed him the virtues of hard physical work and “studying harder than you worked,” Brown says. As a young child, as he sat beside his father’s pulpit or read with him in his study, Brown says he caught “an insatiable love of learning.”

With his father’s guidance, he took that love of learning all the way to Albright College.

The Happiest Days

His parents’ alma mater, Albright College became both a second home and the place where he says he spent “the happiest times” of his life. There his desire for learning was challenged and he found “the perfect minister’s wife,” in Mary Curry Brown, a fellow Albright student. Together, they raised three daughters – Winona, Leota and Juanita – over the next 52 years of marriage.

As a student, Brown developed his violin talents by studying four years at the college conservatory. He became first violinist with the school orchestra and sang with the Glee Club.

His talent for “working with words” grew through both his studies and writing, and he became the editor of the College Literary Society. Brown “tried everything that came along,” he says, with the exception of athletics, to save his arm and hands for his violin.

Dr. Aaron Ezra Gobble became more than his professor of Greek and Latin languages, he also became a mentor and a friend to Brown. It was Gobble who fanned the flames under his love of learning and literature, which helped Brown to earn his degree with highest honors. Coincidentally, it was also Gobble who married his parents in December 1896.

The Road to the Ministry

After receiving his degree from Albright and on the road to the ministry, Brown earned his divinity degree from Yale University in 1931 and served as minister at the Congregational Church in Goshen, Conn. But his “search for wisdom in the hope of finding understanding,” was not yet satisfied, he says. Going back to Yale, he was awarded a doctorate in 1936.

Now a full-time minister, his graduate studies had changed his earlier view of religion and his personal role as a minister. Still committed to “doing good for God and mankind,” he says at this time he began to find good in every religion, good in the character of every man, whatever his beliefs or religion.

Believing that men have full responsibility for their own actions, he applied the principle to himself, even advising his daughters to “never believe what I say just because I’m your father.” He wanted them to be critical, and challenge anything he wrote or said, “so that I may correct my mistakes.” He believed he had no right to tell anyone what to do, or what not to do, but instead to use their own best judgment.