By Bill Reed
Correspondent
Norfolk in the late 1930s and early ’40s was a gritty town that harbored what was to become the world’s most formidable Navy and a corps of hard-nosed teenage athletes whose names still resonate in local lore.
Among the first was the legendary Johnny Brown, a three-sport standout at Maury High School and later at the Norfolk Division of William and Mary and then the College of William and Mary, where he would earn a master’s degree on the GI Bill.
Now a 93-year-old Virginia Beach residen, Brown has authored his third book on those early days.
This one, titled “The 16th Cavalry Spearhead to the Rhine with General Patton,” is a lively account of his transition from schoolboy jock to a tank commander under the fiery Army leader.
Brown will autograph copies of this 178-page, soft-cover book from 3 to 5 p.m. today at the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library and from 3 to 5 p.m. Nov. 4 at the Ocean View Station Museum in Norfolk.
“This is really my biography – growing up and going into the service,” Brown said. The story begins on Page 23, describing his early childhood playing soldier along Steamboat Creek in Colonial Place in Norfolk and his gradual shift in interest to sports.
From sports to war
At Ruffner Junior High School and Maury High School, Brown made a name for himself as a track athlete, specializing in the broad jump and pole vault events, and later on the football and baseball fields.
Local sportswriters of the era dubbed him “Norfolk’s Jim Thorpe” for his versatility in all three sports, an honor Brown proudly alludes to in prefaces to all three of his books.
The outbreak of World War II saw Brown enlist as an Army private in October 1941. He was selected for Officer Candidate School shortly afterward and transferred to the 16th Cavalry, managing along the way to play football at Fort Riley, Kan., with a group of college All-Americans of the day.
Eventually, Brown and his unit were shipped to England from the port of New York City aboard the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted to a troop ship.
“It was snowing when we pulled out and I saw the Statue of Liberty off our portside,” he wrote. ‘Suddenly a chill went down my spine. She was beautiful.”
From England to France to Germany
After spending weeks in a drizzly, muddy encampment in England, Brown and fellow GIs were shipped to the coast of France following the June 6, 1944, Normandy landing, and were assigned to a tank unit that was part of Gen. George S. Patton’s drive to the Rhine River and Germany.
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