Brown community activist until death came Monday

Chapel Hill Herald, Feb. 13, 1996

By MARK SCHULTZ

CARRBORO -- Lightning Brown always liked to have the last word.

On Monday, just hours after he died, the AIDS Service Agency of Orange County released his obituary.

He had written it himself.

Born Allan Brown, the 48-year-old lawyer and community activist picked the name Lightning in a bolt of independence after he told his parents he was gay and they temporarily disowned him.

"It's just my favorite thing," Brown explained of his chosen name last year. "It's so exciting. I used to take people out in rainstorms just so we could see it."

Best known locally for his tireless advocacy on behalf of Bolin Creek, a frail Brown visited Chapel Hill Town Hall last year to ask Town Council members to name a portion of the Bolin Creek Greenway after him.

The Greenways Commission is scheduled to discuss the request on Wednesday, chairwoman Andrea Rohrbacher said.

"I am strongly in favor of it," she said Monday afternoon. Commission members will discuss several options, including naming the entire greenways or just a portion. The existing portion, from Airport Road to Elizabeth Street, is already named for early preservationist Alice Welch, though the sign with her name has not yet been installed.

The Greenways Commission was supposed to have taken up Brown's request last month, but because of bad weather postponed the meeting, Rohrbacher said.

"I still feel badly, though I'm not sure it would have gone all the way [through the approval process] by now," she said.

The commission will make a recommendation to the town's naming committee, which will make a recommendation to the Town Council.

Brown died about 12:50 p.m. with family and friends at his bedside in the residence for people with AIDS on North Greensboro Street and Robert Hunt Drive in Carrboro.

His brother, Andy Brown, said he hopes people will remember Brown for his honesty, integrity and commitment. "I'm 16 years his junior," said Andy Brown, a law student. "Much of the character that drove him to do those political things I found admirable and hope to emulate."

A leader in both the Democratic Party and local gay and lesbian politics since 1976, Brown served on the Chapel Hill Planning Board, Greenways Task Force, the county's Low/Moderate Income Housing Task Force and the Chapel Hill Stormwater Management Task Force.

Friend Joe Herzenberg wasn't surprised Brown had written his own obituary, or that he chose to live his final months in the public spotlight.

"It fits into the context of his life very well," Herzenberg , a former Town Council member, said. "Because he was a public person. ... He was always open and out about everything."

Brown graduated from law school in 1991. That same year he brought a 10-minute video to the Town Council showing sewage debris and cracked manholes along the Bolin Creek sewer line down the hill from his Clark Road home.

The line had been overflowing after heavy storms for 15 years, Brown said. His persistence -- he threatened the Orange Water and Sewer Authority with the state's Clean Water Act -- pressured OWASA to finally make repairs.

Ironically, Brown was appointed to the OWASA board of directors last year, but could serve only a few months.

Brown had been frank about having AIDS, which he got from unprotected sex, saying he wanted to tell people so that they could protect themselves. He suffered from renal failure, lymphoma and a yeast infection that affected his entire body.

"His family is just the most amazing people I have ever met," said Sarah Butzen, a caregiver at the house on North Greensboro Street and Robert Hunt Drive.

Indeed, even after he was confined to his bed, Brown continued to hold court. At the AIDS Service Agency's Christmas open house, guests had to line up in the hallway outside his room in order to see him.

More recently, Herzenberg said he just popped his head in to say hello so as not to disturb a conversation Brown, who liked to write poetry, was having with noted author and Duke University professor Reynolds Price.

"It was wonderful the way his community rallied to support him," Butzen said. "He actually was never alone."

But his death may have brought Brown relief. Asked the hardest part of having AIDS during a 1995 interview, he did not hesitate.

"Wanting to die ... and knowing it's going to take a while," he said. "I want peace."

The son of Marie and Byron Brown of Encino, Calif., Brown is survived by two sisters, Susan Penrod of Piedmont, Calif., and Nancy Brown of Sherman Oaks, Calif.; and two brothers, Peter Brown of Decatur, Ga., and Andy Brown of Sacramento, Calif.

A memorial will be held at 4 p.m. Thursday at the Friends Meeting House in Chapel Hill. Donations to ACT-UP Triangle may be made c/o Stuart Fisher, 4201 University Drive, Suite 102, Durham 27707.