Foundation for Mind-Being Research
Jeffrey Mishlove's remembrance of Dean Brown captures a sense I have, but didn't know quite
how to capture it. Some of the most delightful and substantial moments of my life have been spent
with Dean, walking through a wetland occupied by moose in the Arcata area, waking in the morning at
his Aunt's house to poems that matched the spring air, walking through the garden he loved at Filoli,
he noticed that my Irish blue wool cape is the color of the morning glories. I remember Dean
noticing that my dog was very devoted to me, staying by my feet, and inviting me to bring him
to Picodyne so we could be together. I remember his making a place for my little girl, Sarah,
so she could be at home at the office, too. He had a book on the shelf that you have probably
all read with him--it was about an egg that hatches in some cosmic way. He had a drawer where
all the smells known to man were listed and distinctions made between them. Adrienne Kennedy,
a wonderful teacher of young children as well as teachers, worked with Dean at SRI on a project
called Computers in the Affective Domain, and I think Doug Crane sat on Dean's lap as a little
boy during that project. Children could enter exponents in quadratic equations on mainframe
computers and watch the plots. Adrienne taught me that "A computer should never tell a
child that she is wrong." That spirit guided the founding of the Learning Company, and
only years later I met Dean at last. I showed him the first program I helped design at TLC,
and he watched more quietly and with much higher intent than others had, and only at the end
he asked, "How many programmers did you go through before you reached that level of
elegance." It was a $1K project funded by Apple Foundation, and I had gone through six
programmers. Dean was present with anyone he was with, really present in a rare and wonderful
way. I felt special with him, and I think everyone did. One of the things he taught me was to
notice what others did very precisely and tell them explicitly, so they also are noticed. That's
a tremendously valuable lesson, if it were the only one I learned from Dean, which of course, it
is not. Once, the fledgling Learning Company won a contract to translate Rocky's Boots, and all
our other titles at that time, to the IBM PC, and I didn't want to even take this on unless we
could do it well. Dean introduced us to Doc Hurd, and Doc gave us a place to do the translation.
When the IBM security guys came from Boca Ratan in Florida to see the house where this work would
go on (for a computer not yet released), Dean and Doc showed them the cube that Doc had from
Tiffany's with a gold replica of the anti-trust brief on the cover, a tribute to the testimony
of Doc, and maybe Dean too, in that famous case, and pictures of Doc with the founder of IBM.
That satisfied the security guards, who thought a house in California couldn't be a suitable place
for IBM development. It makes me chuckle because Dean always did things in the quietest, most
subtle way, yet he had an outrageous side, too. At least it seemed outrageous because he had
his own thoughts about things. When his Aunt was old, he lived with her but saw to it that she
did things for herself so she would stay strong. For years I've run into Dean from time to time,
and it's hard to realize he won't be "in the body" any more during this lifetime, but
I too think that someone who means this much to me must be in a circle of friends that extends
beyond one life.
Ann Hathaway McCormick (aka Piestrup)
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