Of Cabbages and Kings

Reade Brown, from milking cows in Cheney to varied wildlife career and back

By LUELLA DOW

Contributor

Reade Brown has a way with words.

“I'm 86, on my way to 87 this summer,” he said.

His remarks are peppered with quiet chuckles and smiles.

He touched base with Cheney when his dad moved the Brown family from Fairfield to a Cheney farm in 1940. Dad Brown was a cow-milking man. Reade, whose official first name was Ellsworth, did not like to milk cows. He graduated from Cheney High School in 1942 and tried to join the Army. At that time men were fighting the Second World War.

To get into the Army a man had to be drafted. Brown's father was on the draft board. Reade Brown was deferred so that he could continue working on the farm. He said, “Dad was the only one still furnishing milk for the college.” His dad must have had a soft place in his heart somewhere because Reade said, “Dad bought milking machines so I could go.”

Brown did his basic training in California. He was on his way to an Army career when life threw him a curve. He became ill with rheumatic fever. His days in the Army were numbered but something better shone on the horizon.

“Ever since the fifth grade I had wanted to go to the University of Idaho and study forestry,” he said. Brown graduated from the University of Idaho in 1948 with the help of the GI bill and worked that summer for the Washington Forestry Department. “I stayed with them for 30 years and became assistant director in charge of wildlife for the state.”

Brown also worked for the State Game Department, then Fish and Wildlife. After he retired from that job in 1980 he worked for the U.S. Forest Service. “I was the technical editor for a book on Wildlife and Managed Forests in Western Washington,” he said. “Seventy people worked on the book of 17 chapters and 680 pages. It took almost five years to complete. I had to rewrite most of the chapters. You can imagine trying to bring it together and make sense of 70 people writing with different styles and abilities on the same book.”

While working in the Puget Sound area, Brown discovered it was common practice to shoot killer whales because they ate the salmon.

“I was assigned to monitor the 15 to 20 foot captured whales. I could pet them on the nose, but I never dipped my toes in the water,” he said. “They were the most fascinating creatures I had anything to do with.”

And now, is Reade Brown really retired? “I want to put a book together,” he said, “and call it ‘Wild Animals and Birds I've Known.'” He has many stories to tell about his various assignments. For instance, he said, “I just finished a story about a black bear that stayed in one area all summer. We had a radio collar on him. When hunting season opened I went out at daylight and checked to see if he was in the basin where he usually stayed. I saw the hunters going through. That night I wondered what happened to him. I pointed my antenna and came to the middle of the basin. I turned around. The signal went right back to the same place. I got up on a log. There was a hole in the log. I peeked in and heard a “Whoof!” and got out of there.

“We tried to track the bear by flying over and finally found him. He was six miles across the Aberdeen watershed. He had to cross two river drainages, the Satsup and the Wynoochee. The bear was safe in a no-hunting area.”

Apparently the bear read posted signs.

Octavia, Brown's wife of 57 years, passed away two years ago. She was known affectionately as Eddie. Brown said, “I had no immediate family in Olympia and the surrounding area where we had lived for 35 years so I came back to Cheney.”

Welcome back, Reade Brown. We'll be waiting to see your book.

Luella Dow is a Cheney-area author who can be reached at [email protected].