By Gary Ruegsegger
Downtowner Contributing Editor

The holidays are the season for giving, but—for Dr. Robert

S. Brown, Sr.—the yuletide lasts all year round.

The son of Johnny Louise Beale Brown and her husband George, our man for all seasons was “born on 11 July 1931 in the Norfolk General Hospital, courtesy of the Department of Public Welfare, a typical ‘depression baby.’”

But there’s nothing typical about the man.

The 1950 Maury graduate has served this country as a son, father, grandfather, educator, physician and soldier. His credentials include a Ph.D., an M.D. and the U. S. Army’s Legion of Merit.

Dr. Brown’s taught at both UVA’s Curry School of Education and School of Medicine. He’s achieved the work of several lifetimes in just one. And what a lifetime it’s been.

But our story doesn’t begin with the noted scholar and healer, it begins little Bobby Brown of Lamberts Point holding his sister Edith’s hand in Gray’s Pharmacy on Dec. 7, 1941.

A radio message by President Franklin D. Roosevelt filled the 25-feet- wide by 15-feet-deep store. At first, the president’s words had little meaning to Bobby until Roosevelt said the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Then the ten-year-old “gripped with fear” began imagining “the Pacific Ocean ruby red with the blood of our Sailors.”

Bobby remembered the “large brightly colored tray displaying a map of Pearl Harbor sitting on top of an old mahogany dresser” and the other gifts from Hawaii—the yellow silk shirt, the pearl-handled cap guns and the table clothes with exotic Hawaiian designs.

His older brother Randolph was stationed at Pearl Harbor aboard the destroyer USS Craven. For weeks, they didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Finally his mother’s prayers were answered.

Earlier that morning, Norfolk’s Irvin Anderson, an African American sailor, perished aboard the USS Arizona. A couple of blocks in either direction that evening, Norfolk teenagers Charlie Levitin and George Hughes sold copies of the Virginian Pilot Extra announcing the war.

In two months, a marble monument to Anderson would be erected at Booker T. Washington High School. In less than four years, Pfc. Levitin would storm across Remagen Bridge into Nazi Germany and Sgt. Hughes would fire .50 caliber machine guns in the skies above Japan.

Edith, who could jitterbug with the best of her generation, remembers her younger brother “in rags with a stick as a rifle playing soldier in Lamberts Point.” Dr. Brown still recalls the Soldiers at the 38th Street Armory and their generosity to children. In a couple of years, Norfolk’s 111th Field Artillery would be storming the beaches of Normandy.

Cast from the furnace of Pearl Harbor, the battleship USS Wisconsin, Norfolk’s monument to World War II, slipped into its berth alongside Nauticus on Dec. 7, 2000. Dr. Brown’s hometown knows full-well the cost of freedom. Young Bobby always dreamed of being a soldier, but he never dreamed the battles he would eventually fight.

Six years ago, Dr. Robert S. Brown gave up his successful medical practice and started treating wounded service members from Afghanistan and Iraq at Fort Lee’s Kenner Army Health Clinic in Petersburg.

Dr. Brown walks beside the men and women he calls “my Soldiers,” insisting on the capitalization out of respect. He has no thoughts of ever retiring.

Through the eyes of his Soldiers, he witnesses the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the battlefield—the fear, the bullets, the explosions, the loss of close friends.

“I treat each of my Soldiers like a hero,” Brown said. “I’ve never had a job as emotionally gratifying.” The good doctor comes by his gift for healing honestly—he inherited it from his mother.

“She was the unofficial triage nurse of Lamberts Point,” he said. “If someone in the neighborhood was injured, they’d come to her first. She’d give them first aid and decide if they needed to go to the hospital.”

Mrs. Brown never dreamed her son would be a healer— her wish for him was a career in country music. In other things, his mother always kept the same tune, reminding her Bobby to never forget where he came from. And he hasn’t.

Dr. Brown says that for Soldiers, recognizing where they’ve been is a crucial milepost on the road to recovery. His office walls are lined with maps of Afghanistan and Iraq.

He asks his Soldiers to point out where they served in combat. Together they return to the battlefield.

“Thank you for serving,” he tells each new patient. “I feel like I’m standing on sacred ground when I speak to you.”

He learns about their visible and invisible wounds as they describe combat traumas.

At the clinic, Brown uses individual and group therapy to treat combat-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He teaches patients to strengthen their attachment to one another and to their families.

“Only a Soldier can know and understand another Soldier,” said Brown, a 24-year Army Reserve veteran. “I only see people who have been in combat.”

He still lives in Charlottesville where his wife Dottie prepares, labels and freezes meals for his days at Fort Lee. She also visits her husband and his soldiers from time to time.

“The Soldiers love Dottie,” Brown said, “and they may love her vegetarian chili more. She comes here and prepares and serves it along with a tossed salad and a very special cake.” Behind Dr. Brown’s selfless actions are still the eyes and the heart of that little boy grasping his big sister’s hand in Gray’s Pharmacy on Dec. 7, 1941.

Although technically not a member of “America’s Greatest Generation,” Dr. Brown has rubbed shoulders with them his entire life. Today, he helps to heal their grandchildren and great grandchildren.