The Honorable Clarence J. "Bud" Brown Jr.

Clarence J. "Bud" Brown Jr. was born on June 18, 1927, in Columbus, Ohio, the youngest of three children born to Clarence J. Brown and Ethel McKinney Brown. At age 23, Clarence Sr. won the first of two terms as the lieutenant governor of Ohio and later, when Bud was born, he served as the Ohio secretary of state. He became a newspaper publisher, who owned and operated a chain of newspapers throughout the state. The family split their time between Columbus (when the state legislature was in session) and their home in Blanchester, Ohio. In 1938, Clarence Sr. was elected to the U.S. House to represent Ohio’s Seventh District in the west-central part of the state. On the way to accruing more than two decades of service in the House, he became one of the most senior Republicans in the chamber and an important member of the House Rules Committee.

Bud Brown moved with his parents to Washington, DC, at age 12 and spent his teenage years there, after his father won election to Congress. He graduated from Western High School in the capital in 1944. He went to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, as part of the U.S. Navy’s V-12 program, graduating in 1947 (he’d later serve in the Navy during the Korean War from 1950 to 1952). In 1949, Bud earned an MBA at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after graduation began working for the family business, Brown Publishing Company. He’d later serve as president (1965–1976) and chairman of the board (1976–2002) of Brown Publishing. He met Joyce Eldridge of Franklin, Ohio, a concert pianist and composer, and they married on June 11, 1955. They raised four children: Elizabeth (who died in 1964), Clancy, Catherine, and Roy.

When Clarence Sr. died in August 1965, Bud Brown entered the special election to succeed his father in the U.S. House, representing a district in west-central Ohio. With the help of Republican leaders in the House, Bud Brown won the November 2, 1965, special election and took his seat in the 89th Congress (1965–1967). He was subsequently re-elected to eight succeeding Congresses, before announcing his retirement from the House to run for Governor of Ohio in 1982. His campaign was unsuccessful and he left the House at the end of the 97th Congress in January 1983.

Afterward, President Ronald Reagan appointed Bud Brown the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, a position he held from 1983 to 1988—at one point serving as the Acting Secretary of Commerce. From 1993 to 1999, Bud served as the president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society in Washington, DC, an organization created in the early 1960s by Iowa Congressman Fred Schwengel to promote the history of Congress and artwork of the Capitol building. Representative Brown died on January 26, 2022, in Urbana, Ohio.