William J. T. Brown (1941-2024) was born in South Haven, Michigan, to William Brown and Virginia Eby. Bill graduated from South Haven High School in 1959 and the University of Wisconsin (magna cum laude) and Harvard Law School, where he served as editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, followed by a master’s at London School of Economics. He was a partner at Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine before joining Dewey & LeBoeuf, and he directed a firm practice in Paris for 15 years. He was the first cousin of my father, David K. Drake, through his mother’s sister Gertrude. Bill was like a big brother to me. In the mid-1980s, when I was attending summer school at New York University and about ready to go off to Europe, he called me into his office at the Rockefeller Center and told me his mother, Virginia, had instructed him to give me money for a return ticket to guarantee I would make it back home—which took me two years. At the time he also had a law office in Paris, at 130 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the glamorous address where the fashion designer Thierry Mugler had his showroom (a building that is now the Canadian embassy). I visited him while living in London and stayed at the posh apartment attached to his office. Once I ran into Bill in London at the Portobello Road antiques market, so we went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch—and after he returned to Paris he called to say that a Wedgewood tea set he had purchased was missing its teapot and asked if I would track it down. It wasn’t easy since the booths changed hands depending on the day and the receipts never had the correct names, but after two visits I found it. After I moved to New York City in the 1990s, Bill often invited me for lunch at the Harvard Club, in Midtown, where portraits of notable alumni hung on the wood-paneled walls alongside antlered hunting trophies. We dined together regularly at Italian and French restaurants—often in the West Village, where he lived on Horatio Street overlooking a leafy square—and we were regulars at Il Cantinori, along with Gwyneth Paltrow. My favorite haunt was the 24-hour diner Florent, owned by the French drag queen of the same name. We would go there for late-night dining, often after he would arrive in a firm limousine to fetch me at the Museum of Modern Art, where I was working. I could tell he enjoyed the wild atmosphere immensely, while dressed in his impeccable pinstripe suits. Some weekends I would take the train to visit Bill at his historic stone house, with a spring running behind it among the trees, in Marbletown, near Kingston, New York. It was adorned with oriental carpets, old portrait paintings, and medieval candlesticks that he had purchased at shops, markets, and auctions in quaint towns like Oak Hill, Freehold, and High Falls, in Upstate New York and Connecticut, and at antique fairs in the French countryside. We would also go to used bookstores, eat at places like the Cairo Diner and New World Home Cooking in Woodstock, and take hikes with his Samoyed dog Celia. I remember Bill’s companion, Larry, a prodigious storyteller from Alabama, roasting turkey and baking pecan pie while singing spirituals to entertain us. I heard from friends who had worked at Bill’s firm—where he was a partner—that he was a perfectionist who worked long hours and expected the same from the fledgling young lawyers who assisted him on cases. In the 1970s, Bill represented the survivors of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, who were killed in a 1976 car-bombing in Washington, D.C., carried out by the Chilean secret police (DINA) on behalf of then-dictator Augusto Pinochet. The landmark case, Letelier v. Republic of Chile, established a precedent for human-rights law by concluding that Chile was not immune to prosecution—so foreign states could be found liable for terrorist acts committed on U.S. soil and prosecuted in American courts. Monetary damages were awarded to the plaintiffs, but collecting the funds from the Chilean government proved difficult. So Bill led a case against Chile’s state-owned airline, LAN, whose facilities and personnel had assisted DINA agents in carrying out the assassination, succeeding in seizing its assets. Ultimately the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the decision, ruling that the airline, as a distinct commercial entity, could not be held accountable for the debt of its sovereign parent. That was not the end of it: Chile never agreed to extradite the agents responsible for the murder, but in 1995 Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA, was sentenced to seven years in prison to avoid political ramifications. Finally, in January 1987, after nearly eleven more years of intelligence and military service in Chile, Armando Fernandez Larios voluntarily returned to the United States to face the criminal charges, pleading guilty as an accessory to murder and working out a deal with the Justice Department for immunity by naming names. He now lives in Miami, Florida, without a passport from any country. Bill had a fantastic sense of humor and would recount incidents from life with such an understated tone of voice, just a mere tinge of a twinkle in his eye, that it took you by surprise when you suddenly realized he was joking—but you were never quite sure. Most of all, Bill gave me the gift of feeling part of a fascinating, even eccentric, family with a long history of hardy explorers and pioneers. He inherited a passion for genealogy from his mother. He especially adored telling anecdotes about our ancestors, such as Thomas Welcome Roys (1816-1877), considered the founder of modern American whaling and a pioneer in the industry who dared to go north of the treacherous Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, on the vessel Superior, against all sense as well as the orders of its owner. There he discovered the Western Arctic bowhead whale—a powerful but slow-moving species that was easily apprehended—and harvested 1,800 barrels of blubber in a month, which usually took about two years, reviving the flagging whaling industry for two more decades as others followed. Roys received 16 patents—one for the “whale-raiser,” a device that retrieves sunken carcasses from the sea that is still used today. Red-bearded Roys hailed from an old Yankee family that traced back seven generations in America, and his uncle Rufus was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. This colorful relative inspired a visit to Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, where I found on display the rocket-powered harpoon invented by Roys—similar to a modern bazooka—designed to kill faster species of whales than was possible before, alongside a portrait of him in a formal coat with a handless sleeve. According to Bill, it was so expensive to ignite that it was economically viable only if you scored a whale—and our dear ancestor blew off his left hand while testing it. Alas, Roys spent so much time on the seas that his younger wife took the three kids and left him for a former shipmate. He ended life in Mexico in abject poverty, dying of a stroke after contracting yellow fever and being put ashore in Mazatlán, clutching his autobiography, or so Bill’s story went. He also penned and illustrated the natural history “Descriptions of Whales,” which classified the killer whale for the first time, recovered recently after being stolen from the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News and put up for auction. Yet an employee at the Long Island museum told me: “Roys’s ship logs are even more fascinating than his autobiography!” My favorite ancestor is Mary Salome Johnson Roys, whose diary Bill gave me to read. Born in Boston, she married Rufus Almon Roys, uncle of the whaler, and they lived on the shore of Lake Ontario, in Pultneyville, New York—home to nearly 30 Great Lakes captains and many sailors who crewed on whalers—before arriving in Michigan. Their homestead was between Vicksburg and Schoolcraft, a major station on the Underground Railroad along the route called the Quaker Line, from Illinois and Indiana to Canada across the Detroit River. Bill told me that Mary’s children had woken up one dawn to see her driving a wagon, and the older sibling said: “She is taking Blacks to freedom, but don’t you tell anyone or mother could get in big trouble.” The next stop was Climax, and then on to Battle Creek. Yet during the period of Mary’s journal, 1856-59, just before the Civil War broke out, her account of everyday events evokes a typical life on a prairie homestead. November-December 1856: “this day has gone, as others have, the work, here & there. 2 youngsters here helping pick corn. the Rail Road men are about, they intend to have the track not far from here. … this is the Sabbath, I have been to Meeting, with Husband & Marco, verry thin Meeting. 20 was all that was there. what will become of us, if we are so stupid. … off all stormy days, this beats all. it has snowed & rained with the wind blowing, from the East all day. Marco has rode home from Kalamazoo this after noon. Amanda has done the Ironging. … what shall I say, as to work, I have baked, bread, & done the churning, & run some candles; January 1858: this is the first day off a new year. how shall we live, what examples shall we set before the world. as for work nothing new, except, butchering a beef. … the work to day is finishing cleaning house & taking care off the beef. Mr Clark from kalamazoo here to stay to night to Preach to morrow, as Mr Osburn is at Mendon.” Her husband, Rufus, made a few, more newsworthy, entries in January 1859: “Monday 17th. went to Schoolcraft. Staid till Sunday Night got home at 10 oclock p.m. found Vixburg under the opperation of a Search warrant looking for Schoonover's Tobacco & Whiskey—Wednesday went to Kalamazoo came home on Thursday the 20th in rain & mud—Friday & Saturday cold & blustering. Sunday 23. cold day young Elder Pierce Preached. Monday 24. Mr. Osborn returned Schoonovers compliment with a complaint for selling Liquor—had him fined $10. I went to Schoolcraft. man Murdered near Kalamazoo last Friday.” They were clearly close friends with Mr. Osborn and his family, whom I assume to be the offspring of Charles Osborn, the renowned Quaker abolitionist publisher of The Philanthropist and traveling minister who emigrated from North Carolina to campaign for an immediate end to slavery. His whole family, 16 children and their spouses, participated in organizing shelter and safe passage for escaped slaves through the region. Michigan was a free state with a population overwhelmingly sympathetic to the cause, so many fugitives and freed slaves chose to settle down on land donated by Osborn’s son-in-law James E. Bonine, south of M-60 west of Calvin Center Road in Cass County, in a community called Ramptown. Mary Salome’s daughter Mary Sarepta Roys married my great-great-great-grandfather Clark Pierce, considered to be the first White settler in Geneva Township. The wider area was established in 1787 by the Ottawa, Miami, and Pottawattamie tribes, who called it Ni-Ko-Nong (“beautiful sunsets”). In July 1845 he constructed the first frame house built west of Bangor, at the mouth of the Black River on land previously owned by Jay R. Monroe, operating a boardinghouse. Mary and Clark soon returned to their log cabin on the homestead, where the first three terms of school were taught at before a school¬house was built. Their eldest son, Almon Joel Pierce, fought in the Civil War and inherited his grandmother’s dedication to recording his life experiences. Found in 2022 among items in an estate in Oregon, 37 of Almon’s diaries were given to the Michigan Military Heritage Museum, among them “My Time of Service in the US Army—from the time of first enlistment to the time of discharge, August 15th 1862 to January 17th 1865, 2 years, 5 months, 2 days.” He wrote: “There isn’t another one in the company nor the regiment as I can learn that is keeping so extensive & complete an account of daily transactions as myself. There are a few who occasionally make short notes of the most important events only. It’s more important I think, or as much so at least, as letter writing.” He served in the Mississippi Marine Brigade, which met the fleet in Louisiana during the siege of Vicksburg in June 1863 and skirmished with Confederate troops, suffering three wounded and burning the town of Richmond. “The events recorded in this book were written or sketched down generally under trying circumstances … late at night by the campfire or early in the morn.” Almon’s perseverance, good grammar, and feel for narrative flow are impressive, and I wonder if I inherited his talent for writing and proclivity for adventure. Bill claimed that he also wrote for The Hatchet, a newspaper published by legendary temperance crusader Carry A. Nation, notorious for using a hatchet to demolish barrooms. Clark and Mary Sarepta Pierce’s daughter Gertrude Lenore (“Nellie”) married George William Eby in 1869, whose parents came from Lititz, Pennsylvania. Our cousin John Eby was inspired by a family genealogy titled the “Eby Report,” procured from Aunt Virginia, with a chapter outlining several theories about our origins in Switzerland. The one Bill’s mother favored was that Mennonite shepherds Theodorus Eby (b. 1663) and his brother went down the mountain with their flock one day and found the village destroyed. Religious wars were raging one after another in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, and Anabaptists were being hunted down like animals and imprisoned or killed by the hundreds. So they sold the flock and left, ending up in America via Germany. One day in 2001, John drove up to visit Bill at his place in New York—and then, on a whim, headed south and west to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to find the home of our ancestor Christian Eby, based on vague instructions written in a note by Virginia. “While approaching Lititz I noticed a lot of newer homes and buildings, and I thought there was a good chance that the old home could have been torn down and my crazy drive was in vain.” But by asking people he encountered he tracked down the house, north of town off Hammer Creek, along with its current inhabitants, still operating the mill, who instructed him how to reach the old cemetery by following tractor paths through a cornfield. There, in a lush clearing surrounded by high stalks, he found among the tombstones a memorial tablet dedicated to “Our immigrant forefather Theodorus Eby 1663-1727” with the inscription: “We thank Theodorus for coming to this great country where his descendants have been able to practice religious freedom.” In 1849 Clark Pierce and his family and friends went on horseback and ox wagon to the house on the lake, where they celebrated the first Fourth of July in South Haven. In 1999, one hundred and fifty years later, Bill was excited to be appointed Grand Marshall of South Haven’s Fourth of July parade, and the extended family rallied around him, following in an ox-driven cart—his idea of course. Later we all gathered for a pork roast at the old Pierce homestead on M43, next to the tiny saltbox house he had bought just to keep a piece of history in the family after the death of the distant cousin who had lived there from birth until the day he died. After retiring, Bill returned to the house he grew up in, on Pearl Street, where he kept company with relics of family history and a little dog named Stella. And I’d like to think Bill would have been pleased to have the stories of our ancestors he passed down shared along with his own.
