STEPHEN ROBERT BROWN, 83
Insurance man aided Pedro Pan kids
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER
ebrecher@MiamiHerald.com
Stephen Robert ''Bobby'' Brown, a longtime Miami-Dade County insurance
agent who fled Cuba in 1960 with his wife and four of their children,
then dedicated himself to the kids of Operation Pedro Pan, died on July
3 of pulmonary fibrosis. He was 83.
''He was a counselor with Pedro Pan,'' said son Don Brown, incoming
president of the 3,800-member Florida Association of Insurance and
Financial Advisors.
Operation Pedro Pan was the early 1960s airlift that brought 14,000
Cuban children to the United States, sent by parents who feared the
Castro regime. Most later reunited.
''He was always taking the kids everywhere, picking them up at the
airport, taking them to their families if family was found,'' Don Brown,
52, said.
``He'd take them to all their activities, whether it was going to the
eye doctor, the dentist, running to the hospital with them.''
Some -- now in their 50s and 60s -- were so grateful that they became
insurance clients, Don Brown said.
``He was their father away from home.''
Brown's Irish grandfather, a veteran of the Boer War, settled in Cuba in
the early 1900s, transferred by his Canadian insurance company employer.
The family was ''upper middle class'' in Cuba, Don Brown said. ``My dad
was starting to prosper. We had a home, two cars, and horses. We lived
in horse country.''
They left everything when they fled, ``but he never looked back.
Material things were not as important as being here with the entire
family.''
In the early '60s, however, noncitizens couldn't legally sell insurance,
according to Don Brown, so his father couldn't reconstitute the family
business until 1964. In the interim, he worked at a Dr Pepper bottling
plant.
He liked selling insurance because ``caring for his own family was
significantly important to him, and he liked helping others do the same.''
Bobby Brown's funeral took place Thursday.
In addition to son Don and brother Fergie, he is survived by his wife of
59 years, Ann; daughter Mary Ann Jones, sons Bob, Steve and Malcolm
''Buster'' Brown, six sisters, 14 grandchildren, and a great-grandson.
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