Brown graduated from Phillips Academy in 1931[5] and went to
Yale, which at the time was a top pole vaulting school thanks to its coach
A. C. Gilbert.[1] As a
freshman in 1932, he jumped 13 ft 10 in (4.21 m) to win the Eastern Olympic Tryouts;[1] at the final
Olympic Trials in
Palo Alto, he only cleared 13 ft 4 in (4.06 m) and tied for seventh with nine other athletes, failing to qualify for the
Olympic team.[6]
Brown helped Yale win the team title at the 1933
IC4A indoor championships.[7] He not only jumped a meet record 13 ft 9+3⁄4 in (4.21 m) to tie for first in the pole vault with his Yale teammate Wirt Thompson, he also tied
George Spitz of the favored
New York University for first place in the
high jump.[7] At the
national indoor championships, Brown shared first place with another Yale teammate, Franklin Pierce, at 13 ft 6 in (4.11 m).[1][8] He capped his indoor season on March 15, jumping 14 ft 1+3⁄4 in (4.31 m) at
Madison Square Garden for a new
indoor world record.[9][10]
At the 1933 outdoor IC4A meet Brown pulled a
tendon high jumping, but still shared first place with four others in the pole vault, including Olympic champion
Bill Miller and outdoor world record holder
Bill Graber.[11][12] Brown won his first national
outdoor title that summer, tying with
Matt Gordy at 14 ft (4.26 m).[13] He broke his own indoor world record on February 17, 1934, with a jump of 14 ft 4 in (4.37 m), again at Madison Square Garden.[9][14][15] That summer he repeated as both IC4A champion[12] and national outdoor champion.[13]
Brown became captain of the Yale track team in 1935, and won both the pole vault and the high jump at that winter's indoor IC4A meet.[16] In his final collegiate competition on June 1, 1935, at the outdoor IC4A Championships – the same meet where his uncle had broken the world record exactly twenty-three years earlier – Brown cleared a bar set at 14 ft 5+1⁄8 in (4.39 m), breaking Graber's world record of 14 ft 4+3⁄8 in (4.37 m).[17][18][19][20][21] (Earlier that spring Graber had jumped 14 ft 5+5⁄8 in (4.41 m), but that jump was void for record purposes since the runway had been elevated by two inches (5 cm).[18][20][22]) Later that summer, Brown broke the
British all-comers record on two occasions and won the
AAA Championships.[23][24] A panel of experts viewed him as likely to make the
American team for the
1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin,[25] but he retired from the sport without attempting to qualify.[4][26]
Later life and political career
In 1946, Brown and his family took what was intended to be a six-week winter holiday in Arizona.[27] They ended up staying there permanently, buying the 40,000-acre
Santa Rita Ranch south of
Tucson in
Pima County;[27][28] Brown thus left behind a job with
Booz Allen Hamilton to become a
rancher.[27]
In addition to his career as a cattle rancher, Brown was
chairman of the board and the leading
stockholder of American Atomics Corporation,[30] a Tucson-based company that used
radioactivetritium to make
luminescent tubes for clocks, watches and signs.[30][39][40] Although the company's then-CEO Peter J. Biehl stated in 1977 that the radioactivity presented no danger,[39] American Atomics was controversially[41][42] shut down in the summer of 1979 by
GovernorBruce Babbitt after high levels of radioactive tritium were measured in Tucson near its factory.[30][41][42] Critics also claimed the firm had been more concerned with profits than public safety.[30]
Brown also served as
director of the Southern Arizona Bank and Trust Company.[36][43][44]
Personal life
Brown married Katherine McLennan, daughter of
Marsh & McLennan co-founder
Donald R. McLennan, at
Lake Forest, Illinois on July 3, 1937.[45][46] The couple had two sons (Keith Jr. and Steve) and two daughters (Julia and Katherine),[47] with the first three children born in Illinois and the youngest, Steve, after the family's relocation to Arizona.[27] They lived on their Santa Rita Ranch until 1967, when they moved to Tucson; they bought another, smaller ranch there after selling the Santa Rita Ranch in 1971.[27] After Katherine's death in 1982, Brown married Mary Lou Stevens. They moved to
Del Mar, California, where he died of
emphysema in July 1991.[27][47]
^
abKramer, Boris B. (March 10, 1933).
"Sport Slants"(PDF). The Taft Papyrus. Archived from
the original(PDF) on April 7, 2014. Retrieved April 1, 2014.
^
abButler, Mark (2010).
"Doha 2010 Statistics Handbook"(PDF). IAAF Media & Public Relations Department. Archived from
the original(PDF) on March 26, 2010. Retrieved April 1, 2014.
Note 1: In 1888 both the NAAAA and the AAU held championships
OT: The 1920, 1928, 1932, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 championships incorporated the Olympic Trials, otherwise held as a discrete event.
2020 OT: The 2020 Olympic Trials were delayed and held in 2021 due to the
COVID-19 pandemic.