Brown L. Murr

Murr, Brown

Brown L. Murr Jr. was born on February 23, 1931 in Atlanta and died from complications of dementia and pneumonia in Los Angeles on June 5. The retired Johns Hopkins University Chemistry professor moved from Baltimore to California in the last weeks of his life after his beloved wife, Joan, passed away in late March.

When he and Joan found each other in the 1970s, they began a more than 50-year partnership built on enduring love and affection. They found joy and comfort in routines which they could count on-tennis and golf and dinners with long-time friends. They spent each summer at a beach house on the Jersey Shore, with daily walks precisely at 1 p.m. topped off by martinis at 2; and holiday dinners featuring a whole roasted filet. They each valued certainty and repeated traditions, perhaps because in their childhoods, they had neither. Brown's mom was alcoholic; Joan's mother died very young.

Born in Depression Atlanta, Brown survived a difficult childhood. He credited his success to education, and his education to teachers like Father Hageman, a taskmaster English instructor who required students to produce a 200-word essay every day of every week of the school year. "If you turned in a poor effort, he'd read it to the entire class," Brown remembered decades later. It was a procedure that minimized goofing off. A football star with broad shoulders, blond hair and deep blue eyes, he went on to study chemistry at Emory and Indiana Universities.

He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1962, launching a 35-year tenure as teacher, department chair and researcher. He taught organic chemistry to generations of Hopkins undergraduates, starting each semester with the unpopular disclaimer that he wouldn't teach them chemistry; they would have to learn it. He wasn't shirking his duty or being unduly modest about the quality of his teaching, which won awards. He was offering a frank warning that no student ever mastered organic through lectures alone.

He published research articles for nearly a half century, on arcane topics such as "Gamma-deuterium isotope effects on the solvolyses of norbornyl brosylates." The first appeared in 1955, written with an Emory professor; the last came in 2003, three Taiwanese co-authors. After retiring in 1997, Brown liked to solve differential equations for fun.

He had a wry sense of humor. He loved sailing, and named the family sailboat "Get It Right" to remind him that bad things happened when one didn't. He read history and journalism and liked to quote H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Mark Twain. Once, irritated by a couple of glib undergraduates who espoused the postmodern belief that history didn't really exist, he challenged them to visit the Antietam battlefield. Go view the rows and rows of dead soldiers he advised them, and then tell me that history wasn't real. Later, he was amused to learn that the first of his family to come to America traveled to Philadelphia on a ship with a German church organist who promptly fled back to Germany to write a screed damning Pennsylvania as full of danger and loose morals.

Many of his stories were self-deprecating. Raised in the racist South of the 1930s and 40s, he sometimes told the story of his sudden realization that he had swallowed a giant lie. At a chemistry conference he attended as a student, a Black chemist from Iowa State University presented a paper on his latest research. Brown was stunned. "That man spoke chemistry better than I did," he said decades later, still chagrined at his own blind side. "I had been taught that was not possible."

Brown is survived by his sons, Andrew (Amy Forbes) and Peter (Angela Lykos) from his first marriage to Dawn Stewart Murr that resulted in divorce in 1972; step-daughters Lisa Smith (Wesley) and Marjorie McKibbin (Michael Kaufman); 9 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren.