RIP Professor Ray B. Browne

You probably never heard of Ray Browne. Chances are though that you've heard or read him quoted before.

I learned yesterday that Ray Browne died last week. I read it in the Anniston Star - a paper from the not-too-far-away town of Anniston, AL. I was saddened to read of his death but even more saddened by the shitty AP article the Anniston Star published instead of a proper obituary. The article didn't even mention that Ray was from Alabama or that his first work in the field of popular culture was done here. Not just "here" in Alabama, but "here" in rural east Alabama - where hardly anything of note ever happens. I'm guessing no one at the Anniston Star even knew who he was. Probably just had some empty space left on the obituary page and pulled something off the wire.

Here's another - much better - obituary that was published in the Toledo Blade. And, unlike the Anniston Star, the Toledo Blade doesn't require a subscription to read it. But I'll put the text here anyway for those of you too lazy to click. Go ahead. Read it. Then I'll tell you what this has to do with Spenardo del Sur.



RAY B. BROWNE, 1922-2009
BGSU professor began popular culture center

BOWLING GREEN - Ray B. Browne, 87, who created an academic discipline and a national movement by studying the stuff of everyday life - whether comic books, fast food, pop tunes, or situation comedies - died Thursday in his home of congestive heart failure.

"He's the father of popular culture studies," said Gary Hoppenstand, a professor of American studies at Michigan State University, and a popular culture graduate student at Bowling Green State University and protege of Mr. Browne's. "He's done more to affect studies in the humanities than any other individual the last 30 or 40 years."

Mr. Browne began the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968 at BGSU. The Popular Culture Library followed.

In 1973, despite detractors, he began a distinct department of popular culture. His history of the popular culture movement's early struggle is called Against Academia.

"Ray opened the windows of the academy, just opened them up," said Michael Marsden, one of the department's first faculty members, now dean and academic vice president of St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wis. "We have the people's culture being studied, and we're learning how complex and wonderful and significant it is."

The BGSU department was the first of its kind.

"Today there is a course in popular culture studies in every major and minor university in the country," said Mr. Hoppenstand, also editor of the Journal of Popular Culture Studies, founded by Mr. Browne in 1967.

Mr. Browne's expertise landed him in the popular culture. Reporters from all media, worldwide, sought him out to decode the latest pop phenom or the enduring - detective novels, soap operas.

"My dad was very much a populist," his daughter, Alicia Browne, said. "While he loved Dickens and Melville and Shakespeare, he thought it was far too hoity-toity to think that only those few people created anything of value."

"He might not personally have liked it, but if someone is reading it, if someone is singing it, or saying it, he believed there was value to it, or at least we should understand it," she said. "[He was] endlessly curious about anything." He arrived in 1967 at the BGSU English department intending to bring the study of popular culture to the academy.

He retired in 1992 and was a distinguished university professor emeritus. He worked until recently and had agreed to write the foreword to an anthology being edited by BGSU popular culture faculty, said Jeremy Wallach, an associate professor in popular culture. The book will be dedicated to him. "He has a very robust legacy," Mr. Wallach said.

Mr. Browne was born Jan. 15, 1922, in Millport, Ala. The Depression ruined his father, a banker, and the family was poor. With the help of an older sister, he went to the University of Alabama and received a bachelor's degree. He served in Europe during World War II in an Army artillery unit.

Afterward, he studied at universities in Birmingham and Nottingham, England. He received a master's degree in Victorian literature from Columbia University in New York City. He taught at the University of Nebraska before he attended the University of California at Los Angeles, from which he received a doctorate in English and folklore.

He taught at the University of Maryland and Purdue University.

Surviving are his wife, Maxine "Pat" Browne, whom he married Aug. 25, 1965, sons, Glenn and Kevin, daughter, Alicia Browne, and three granddaughters. Visitation will be from 6 p.m. to 8 pm. Tuesday in the Holman Funeral Home, Ozark, Ala. Graveside services will be at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Woodlawn Memory Gardens in Ozark. Bowling Green arrangements are by the Dunn Funeral Home.

The family suggests tributes to the Browne Popular Culture Library at BGSU.




Back in the early 1950s, Ray Browne traipsed across Alabama, collecting and recording rural folklore from rural folks. One person he interviewed during his travels was my grandmother.

About five years ago, when I first started going through the things left in my grandmother's house, I found the following letter from Ray Browne sent in the summer of 1953:

Dear Mrs. Mitchum,

Thank you very much for your answer to my article in the paper about folklore.

I don't know at this time exactly when I shall be up to see you but surely intend to come in the next few weeks. I would appreciate your thinking about this old material at your leisure during the next few weeks, and I will surely see you before too long.

Very truly yours,
Ray Browne



He did come to visit her. Over a dozen stories she told him that day were eventually published in his book "A Night with the Hants and Other Alabama Folk Experiences." (By the way, Amazon still has one copy in stock if anyone is wondering what to get me for Christmas...)

I can just imagine the two of them in the kitchen, Ray with his tape recorder and grandma with her endless stories. That kitchen is now the East Wing of Frankencoop - home to twenty of my chickens. So you see, this was relevant after all. (Though sometimes I think I can make any subject come back around to my chickens.)



In other news, I am oh-so-pleased to announce that I have a new computer! Well, new to me anyway. My friend, Dean, and his wife in San Francisco donated their Mac Powerbook G4 to me when they bought a new laptop. It feels great to have one foot back in the 21st century again. I'm looking forward to finally being able to post photos again. That clunky old Windows 98 dinosaur is going back into storage, hopefully never to be used again (except maybe for target practice).

Post #14 - It wasn't all that bad.

The parents left this morning. Just a short weekend visit. It was much easier to handle than a long visit. I have a pretty low threshold for lecturing, beratement and interrogation. A weekend is about all I can handle.



The newest baby chick, only 10 days old, has just started investigating the great outdoors. Keep your fingers crossed that it can make it through the next two weeks without being eaten by anything. Those first couple weeks outside are pretty dicey for little chicks - little bite-sized morsels just running around out in the open.

The only other equally dangerous time for them is the first 24 hours. The large factory farm refugee hens have a tendency to accidentally squash their newly hatched babies. The newest baby chick had three siblings who were all squashed by their mother.

Another factory farm refugee is currently sitting on eight eggs. If all goes well, they will hatch in two weeks.

Post #13 - The parents arrived this afternoon

It only took my Fox News-loving father 3 hours to start bitching about stupid Democrats. We weren't even discussing anything remotely political when he suddenly hijacked the conversation and turned it into a monologue about how dumb liberals are.

Sigh...this is going to be a long weekend.

Post #10 - As if there wasn't enough already on my plate

I have a hundred projects going on right now.

It seems like I've been painting the bathroom forever. It's mostly done but I still have a bunch of trim and hard-to-reach areas to finish.

I'd pulled a couple boxes of my grandmother's old papers out of the closet and started sorting through them. The livingroom is littered with piles of bank statements, phone bills, letters, greeting cards, receipts and other 20th century ephemera. Everything I choose not to keep goes in the shredder and then onto the floor of the chicken coop. (All those colorful greeting cards and envelopes have given Frankencoop a very festive feel.)

The gardens are in disarray. Non-stop rains in May kept me from planting as much as much as I wanted. Non-stop sun and 100-degree days in June killed about half of what I had managed to planted. Blueberries dried up on the vine. Peaches shriveled and dropped from the trees. Even the wild blackberries have turned to dust. Locals are saying the deer are eating more than usual from their gardens. One neighbor lost an entire 1/4-mile row of peas the night before they were to be picked. So far the deer have left me alone. They probably can't see my veggies because of all the weeds.

Mowing kudzu is an ongoing chore. The kudzu is the only thing that doesn't seem to be affected by the drought. The goat shed is in dire need of repairs. Frankencoop needs a lot of work too.

The dry weather has also made the ants organize search parties into the kitchen. No matter how clean I keep it, they keep patrolling until they find some crumb on the counter or a dirty fork in the sink I didn't wash right away. Somedays, I mop the floor twice. I follow their parades to locate the tiny hole they're coming from so I can plug it up. But they just find another tiny hole. Last night, they started coming through a wall socket. They're like an unstoppable zombie horde. I'm worried my kitchen will be completely covered in electrical tape before the summer is over.

I'm having to store my garbage in the freezer. It's been too dry to burn it but, if I leave it out, the ants will get into it. Fortunately, it rained today so I can burn the garbage tomorrow. Hopefully the rain will also get the ants to let up a little.

Anyway, all this crap (and more) is going on. Everything is a mess but that's okay because I'm basically a hermit so nobody has to see it. Or so I thought...

My parents called last night to tell me they're coming for the weekend - THIS weekend. My father has decided to go to his high school reunion on Saturday - the first one he's ever attended. They will arrive Friday.

So now I have to drop everything and whip this place back into parent-friendly shape. They are going to flip when they find out they can't watch TV. I lost all the network channels in the DTV switch. I only get half a dozen PBS stations and couple Jesus channels now.

Well, this sucks.

The elderly shut-in that I've been helping to care for took a turn for the worse today. She was fine when I left today at 1pm. By 3pm, she had trouble breathing and called her nurse on the phone. By 6pm, she was completely unresponsive. She's not expected to make it through the night.

Nobody's sure what happened. Perhaps a blood clot. Perhaps her one good lung collapsed. Can't even really call it a "good" lung since that's the one with cancer.

Not to sound like a callous asshole, but this throws my finances into the toilet. This job provided more than half of my income. Even with this job I was living well below the poverty line, but I was starting to get a grip on my finances. Not only were my bills all current for the first time in a while, I had just picked up another house cleaning gig that throws me an additional $40 every three weeks.

Another monkey wrench in the works is the fact that the old woman's son and his wife are the neighbor-cousins I'm supposed to be riding with to Michigan this coming weekend to attend my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party. So now that whole trip is up in the air at the moment.

If the neighbor-cousins can't go, my parents would surely offer to pay for the gas for me to drive myself. Can't say I'd look forward to a 36-hour round-trip solo drive in a truck with shitty brakes. But it's not like I can miss this family occasion.


Sigh...there's a white-tailed deer in my front yard right now, raiding my garden. I've been seeing quite a few deer lately. This is the third one I've seen in the last 24 hours. Could be the same deer for all I know.

There's only a few wild citizens of Spenardo del Sur that I can recognize on sight. There's one turkey vulture with a distinctive mark on its wing. Of the dozens of vultures that circle above, that's the only one I can pick out of the crowd.

There's also a family of crows that live in my woods. Last year, I would see two crows wandering around my yard almost every morning. Eventually, I realized it was the same two crows. This spring, they had three babies. Hardly a day goes by that I don't see them on a family outing.