Herb Brown, prolific Clearwater entrepreneur and philanthropist, dies at 100

Herbert G. Brown, an entrepreneur who built multiple business empires and spread his fortune in Clearwater while advocating for polio vaccines around the world, died Tuesday.

He was 100 years old.

Brown was a child of the Great Depression, raised in a wood shack in rural Louisiana, but launched his first enterprise while in high school by selling appliances door to door. He went on to establish furniture stores, one of the first discount drugstore chains in the country and a bank before he was recruited to Clearwater in 1970 to work as senior vice president of Eckerd Drugs.

He built a real estate empire in the Southeast with mobile home parks, shopping centers and storage facilities. He also took three failing restaurants in Alabama, moved the headquarters to Clearwater and built the national Checkers Drive-In chain.

Through leadership positions with Rotary International in the 1980s and 1990s, Brown traveled the globe with his wife, Diane, promoting polio vaccines to former Indian President Shankar Dayal Sharma, former South African President Nelson Mandela and other world leaders, bolstering mass vaccination campaigns.

“You see people like Herb Brown who, my golly, was successful professionally, but that wasn’t the end of Herb Brown,” said Robert Hall, vice chairperson of fundraising for Rotary International’s polio eradication committee. “Herb Brown was about doing greater things through others, a person of vision.”

Friends and family said it was his kind nature, constant smile and insistence on connecting with strangers that made Brown’s businesses and philanthropy thrive.

His donations to charities in Clearwater and beyond rank in the millions of dollars, according to his son Jared Brown. But he also personally delivered toys by the truckload to children at churches, schools and the YMCA.

He kept toys in the trunk of his car and would pass them out to kids at restaurants, earning him the nickname “Cajun Claus,” said friend and former Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard.

Brown also was known for private acts of helping people struggling with their mortgage or car payments and standing to open doors for women well into his 90s.

“Just incredible honesty and integrity, and he always wanted everybody to win,” Hibbard said.

After starting his furniture and appliance businesses in Louisiana, Brown served two years in the U.S. Army domestically during World War II. In 1961, he opened Brown’s Thrift City in Lafayette, Louisiana, one of the first discount retail stores ahead of Sam Walton’s Walmart.

Concerned about the cost of prescription pharmaceuticals, he expanded his discount drugstore to 40 locations in Louisiana and Mississippi in five years.

It caught the attention of entrepreneur Jack Eckerd, who was running his family’s national drugstore chain based in Largo and saw Brown filling three-times the volume of prescriptions. Brown agreed to a merger and moved his family to Clearwater to serve as vice president of Eckerd Drugs.

But tragedy soon changed the family’s life. The Browns’ oldest child, 15-year-old Herbert Graham Brown Jr., died in 1971 after hitting a dock while on an inner tube behind the family’s Clearwater Beach home.

The loss prompted Brown to leave Eckerd Drugs to focus on his wife and four surviving children.

While his talents led him to work long hours on his businesses, “he always was there for us,” Jared Brown said.

Their grief drove Diane Brown to launch the Our Lady of Divine Providence House of Prayer in 1980, what is now a 12-acre compound that hosts prayer retreats and a school that teaches spiritual development to lay people in affiliation with the Catholic Church. It’s been supported through millions of dollars from the Brown family, according to Alicia Goodwin, president of the organization’s board of directors.

Over the decades, Brown grew his real estate business primarily throughout Florida and Louisiana with his “uncanny knack” and vision for development, said Lee Arnold, executive chairperson of Colliers International Florida and Brown’s son-in-law.

The two formed a partnership that spanned 50 years and countless developments, including 3,000 acres in Wesley Chapel that is now the Meadow Pointe community with multifamily and commercial development.

“His acumen and excitement to be actively involved in new businesses was unstoppable,” Lee said.

After Jared Brown graduated college in 1982, he joined his father’s real estate business and said he witnessed firsthand the philosophy for fairness that created such a sustaining career.

“I’ll never forget, after we negotiated this deal I said, ‘Dad, I think we could have gotten more per square foot for this lease,’” Jared Brown recalled. “He turned to me and said, ‘Son, a man does not have to leave the negotiating table and think he got the best deal and the other side didn’t. Those deals don’t last.’”

Brown also played a fundamental role in Rotary International’s work on polio eradication, which began in 1979 and later joined with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and UNICEF. As chairperson of Rotary’s PolioPlus campaign committee from 1986 to 1990, Brown helped raise over $125 million in the U.S. and $240 million worldwide to immunize more than 2 billion children, according to Clearwater Rotary’s website.

It came at a time when leaders in India and parts of Africa were suspicious of western medical aid. As Rotary International president from 1995 to 1996, Brown met with global leaders to boost acceptance of the vaccine.

This impulse for service came from his upbringing during the Great Depression, where he saw so much suffering, Brown explained in a 2012 interview with WEDU’s Suncoast Business Forum.

“It just made me feel that if God could give me the health and the strength, I want to do all I can for my fellow man,” Brown told host Geoff Simon. “I dedicated myself to that when I was a young man, actually probably still almost a kid. That was my greatest satisfaction is trying to help others in need.”