Resident fondly recalls old Simi Valley
By Billie Owens
bowens@theacorn.com

BILLIE OWENS/Simi Acorn PAST AND PRESENT-Simi Valley's Frisbie Brown, shown sitting at his kitchen table, is a rare breed. The retired farmer turns 85 next month and has spent his entire life in the local community. "I feel very blessed to start out here in the Valley and stay with it," he said. "There aren't many of us."

Frisbie Van Duyne Brown doesn’t get around as good as he used to. At almost 85, the old gentleman uses a walker, tires easily and says he can’t trim trees or do outside chores anymore.

And in conversation it’s clear that his once robust body is no match for his still nimble mind.

"It’s a God-given ability to retain and add to what you know," said the Simi Valley pioneer whose family has a long history of community involvement.

Frisbie, who is also called Fritz, lives in a wooden house that he built in 1951. It sits on three acres near the concrete banks of the Arroyo Simi, not far from the bustle of Los Angeles Avenue and Sycamore Street.

Sitting at his kitchen table, Brown fingers the pages of a battered, brown-leather scrapbook. The memories of his life.

"The thing is like I am, it’s getting kind of worn out," he said.

It bulges with memorabilia such as old Pan American airline ticket stubs and autographs from politico Willie Brown (who wrote "the same last name" above his signature), singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson and the late Barbara "walkies" Woodhouse, the British dog-training maven.

The pictures that mark his past include a shot of Amelia Earhart with officials at his alma mater, California Polytechnic University. There’s an old photo of the 32-member Cal Poly Glee Club he belonged to and a picture of him with his Sunday school class in which he’s wearing short pants and a long neckerchief tied around his shirt collar.

"I, of course, had nothing to do with it," he said regarding the outfit. "That’s the way your mother dressed you."

Once, he visited a fairytale German castle with his beloved wife, the former Kathleen "Kay" Jones, and that picture is in the album, too. His wife died five years ago.

The scrapbook also holds memories of his 1972 stint on a county Grand Jury.

"It was a terrific ego trip you might say, oh my gosh yes," he said, recalling that the panel investigated a county administrator who was suspected of larceny.

Brown pauses on one of the pages to give recognition to the Simi Valley High School baseball team of 1935, which won the Ventura County championship. Brown was the first baseman and catcher.

A favorite dog named Sport holds a place in the old man’s heart, too.

"He was a mongrel my sister and I found at the edge of the farm," he recalled, "that was in the 1930s. We had him 10 years. Janoff the Bulgarian shot him when he ran through his tomatoes. He didn’t kill him, but he had BBs in his front legs."

Amid the yellowed newspaper articles are stories about family members and their different activities over the years, including Frisbie and Kay’s two daughters, Nancy and Rosemary, and Rosemary’s 6-year-old daughter Laura, the only grandchild.

"Your children go right by you," he said wistfully.

The Browns were active in church, school and community— everything from scouting, playing instruments, serenading the elderly and donating to the battered women’s shelter—to providing land for a public bike path and serving on the Rancho Simi Parks and Recreation District’s advisory committee and the city’s neighborhood council.

In 1980 they made big news when they split their wooden house in two and hauled it on oversized trailers from the family’s original 30-acre farm near Los Angeles and Sequoia avenues to its current location.

Half a dozen orange trees in the side yard are all that remain of the once bountiful groves and farmland tended by his pioneer father, Irving V. Brown.

Irving won first prize for produce at the Ventura County Fair in 1929-30 and that achievement is duly noted in Frisbie’s scrapbook as well.

The senior Brown graduated from Yale University in 1902 and settled in old Simi Valley two years later after visiting a cousin there. Unlike many fledgling communities in Southern California, Simi Valley boasted many settlers with college educations and Irving Brown was one of them, said Pat Havens, president of the Simi Valley Historical Society.

Along with his wife, the former Alice Frisbie, the senior Brown became a grower and member of the Sunkist cooperative. Besides Frisbie, the couple had three daughters. Frisbie admits all the womenfolk spoiled him rotten.

Frisbie also was the name of a pie factory in Connecticut where employees sometimes made a game of throwing pie tins and catching them. This was basis for the famed "Frisbee" toy created by Wham-O Toy Co., Brown pointed out.

As a boy, he often got up at 5 a.m. and milked the family cows.

"I grew up picking walnuts and hauling oranges and bailing hay," he said. "I learned responsibility early."

The family always had plenty of good food to eat, even during the Great Depression.

"Hobos would come along on the train and if they cut wood or did some other chore, my mother gave them food," Brown said. "It was hard to turn people down when they were down on their luck."

He remembers other historical tidbits, too. Like the colorful actor Ray "Crash" Corrigan who "wore a big hat and was a cowboy type for sure." Crash created "Corriganville" a park located at the bottom of the Santa Susana Grade where several Hollywood movies were made.

Brown went to Simi Elementary School, where his friends nicknamed him "Fritz," and graduated with 11 others from Simi Valley High School in 1935. In college, he was poultry major, earning a degree in agriculture in 1938 at age 19.

Years later, a sister met Kay’s parents at a hardware show where they were displaying goods from their business, P & C Tool Co. of Oregon. Their daughter made a good impression and it was suggested that Frisbie travel to Los Angeles to meet her. One Saturday he put on his "good bib and tucker" and drove to a get-together at a duplex near the Coliseum where Kay lived.

When Kay opened the door and tried to turn on the porch light, the light wouldn’t work. By taking the opportunity to be helpful and fix the light, he figured he "made a few points" with Kay.

"She was wearing a peppermint stripe dress, she had new shoes on and she played the piano," he recalled. "I was impressed with Kay over any of the rest of them. I asked them if I could see Kay alone for a minute and I asked her for a date in June and by July we were going steady."

They used to go to L.A. haunts like the Pig and Whistle, L.A. Theater and Hollywood Bowl. When they married, she was 38 and he was 35, older than most newlyweds at the time.

The marriage was successful, he says, because they had common interests, such as music, and they both came from solid families with a strong Christian faith. He was a Methodist and she was a Baptist, but he eventually switched to her denomination.

"Those Baptists don’t give up," he said jokingly.

Over the years, neither has Frisbie Brown.

To this day he remains one of Simi Valley’s most revered senior citizens and part of the community’s long and colorful past.