Golden Owl Charles D. Brown, founder of 'Transportation Table,' dies at 102

The Club lost one of its oldest, longtime members when Charles D. Brown, of Fairfax, Va., died March 22 at the age of 102.

Brown, a Golden Owl, had been a Club member for 61 years. He was noted for founding and hosting the “Transportation Table,” a weekly forum for discussion of transportation issues that for many years was a Club institution.

He launched the event while he was a spokesman for the Regular Common Carriers Conference, a Washington-based trade association of the trucking industry. Earlier he had been an aide to the assistant postmaster general for transportation.

Born in Kansas City, Brown began his journalism career on a weekly newspaper in Perry, Iowa, in 1936. He next worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where he met his wife, Frances, also a reporter. The two later moved to Martinsville, W. Va., for jobs on the Martinsville Daily Bugle.

In 1940 the couple returned to the Midwest to found a small weekly paper, The Hays County (Kans.) Herald. They operated it for two years.

While serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Brown moved to Washington, where he was posted with Trans-Radio Press with an office in the National Press Building. After the war he covered Capitol Hill for NBC and worked in radio and television for the Veterans Administration.