Reconnecting With My Absent Father Who Was Presumed Dead

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And we love to tell stories about faith whenever we can and redemption. And this is one of our best redemption stories, brought to us by our very own Joey Cortes. Ron Brown grew up on the West Side of Chicago.

00:00:46
Speaker 2: I grew up in a family where my uncles were drug dealers and pimps, and I saw that growing up as a kid, and it never appealed to me. I can remember as a kid seeing my uncles get shot and different things like that, and you know, one guy tried to murder my uncle, and just seeing it and just being a kid, like five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, growing up being like, “This ain’t the way this is supposed to be.” I watched certain stories, and kids say growing up in the inner city how they saw drug dealers, and that’s the only people they saw. And for them, they saw that as a means to an end to get out the ghetto. Or, as a kid, I don’t know what God blessed me with, but He blessed me with the ability to see that I was wrong and that wasn’t the way for me to go about my life.

00:01:30
Speaker 1: He was also blessed with a strong mother who divorced his biological father when Ron was a kid.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: I can remember he was a part of an accident for his scheme, and I remember being a kid telling him, I was like, “Hey, man, you’re gonna get in trouble.” He’d say, “Son, you know what, I’m making my living the best way I know how.” And eventually he ended up going to prison for a few years for that. And I can remember being a kid and him writing me letters and saying, “Hey, you know, when I get out, things are going to be different. I’m going to spend more time with you. I think it’s important.” And the thing was, he got out and nothing never changed. He went back to what he knew, and he ended up being in the streets for a few more years, and he went to jail. My dad was like the real, you ever seen the movie Catch Me if You Can? He was like the real Catch Me if You Can. You understand what I’m saying when it came to doing checks and stuff like that. And so I can remember having that example from a very young age and seeing all the cars and houses, and I was like, “It just never appealed to me.” My mother was fortunate enough, and I was fortunate enough. She got married when I was about three or four years old to a great man by the name of Lawrence Hunt, and he was my stepfather, and he did everything in his power to just raise me the right way. And I’m so appreciative for the influence. Even right now, as a forty-five-year-old man, I think about the lessons in what he taught me and just different things about manhood and responsibility and all those things. And so I think having a father made a drastic difference in my life. My mother was a pretty tough lady. She’s about six-two, six-three, and she didn’t play. And my stepfather was about six-four or six-five, eat and played. So I grew up in a home where my parents were really about education. I remember being a kid and saying, “Hey, you know, I want to be a professional athlete. I want to do this, I want to do that.” And my parents were always like, “Look, that’s a great goal. But let me give you an amazing dream: whatever you can do with your mind instead of your body will facilitate you to have a very, very lengthy career.” I can remember my father getting tickets to take me to go see the Chicago Bulls, and I was sitting there watching them playing, and Michael Jordan was lighting them up that night; the arena, everybody was yelling and screaming, and I’m eating my popcorn, and I’m looking, and I got a pretzel on one hand and popcorn on the floor and drinking and drinking on having my best time ever. And he tapped me on the shoulders when the Bulls called a timeout, and he said, “So to me, ask you something.” I said, “What?” He says, “Who has the greatest job in this whole arena?” And I kind of looked at him because I thought it was a crazy question. And I was like, “Michael Jordan.” And he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, “You see that box up there with those guys walking around, eat those hot dogs?” And I said, “Yeah.” He says, “They have the best job in the building. They’re the ones who pay Michael Jordan.” And so, even though people may not be screaming for them, they’re the reason why all this is going on. “So I want you to learn the big picture approach to life.” And so that just really kind of got me thinking in light. They said, “You know what, Mike’s gonna retire one day, but the Bulls are still going to be here. Mike’s gonna have an injury one day, but guess what, the Bulls are still going to be here.” And he’s like, “That’s what I’m getting. I want to, I want you to learn about life being the guy that’s still there as transitions continue to happen through life.” And that lesson really, really stayed with me all through life. My father, I’m gonna tell you something: it wasn’t a good experience with him growing up, but those bad experiences with him made me, I think today, a much better father. So he would say, “Hey, I’m gonna pick you up, you know, so get dressed; we’re gonna go. We’re gonna hang out for the day.” And so my mother would say, “Hey, look, no, don’t make this kid promises. And you and I show up,” and I can remember one particular time getting dressed up. I mean, I had on my pants and my shirt and my tie. I paged, and he called me, and I said, “Hey, I’m ready.” He says, “Okay, I’ll beat it in a little while.” And I can remember sitting in the window dressed up and waiting on my father to come, and waiting on him to come until the point that I fell asleep, and my stepfather picking me up and putting me to bed and taking my shoes off, and kind of woke up as he was picking me up. I said, “Did he come?” He said, “No, he didn’t come.” He says, “But you know what, I’m here.” And I always remember that memory, you know. And so for me, anything with my children, I don’t care if it’s a basketball game, I don’t care if it’s a football game, if I tell them I’m coming, I’m coming. And so through the years, I never hated my father because he was my father, but I didn’t understand. And so with that, I was able to find out how he grew up, that, you know. His father one day said he was going out to the store to go get a pack of cigarettes, and he asked him and his brother what did he want, and they said they wanted some candy. He said, “Okay, I’ll be back.” His father never came back. He had been like six, five or six. He never saw his father again. And so at that point, I kind of realized that my father didn’t know how to be a father because he never had that example. So I grew up with those things, and I’ll tell you something. Of course, they shaped you, but I didn’t let them break me. And I think some of these situations in our lives, they break us, and they turn us into broken people. And so, from from that moment on in my life, as I went up, I had it. Like I said, I had a great stepfather. I was just very determined that I would never do that to my kids. And so no child of mine can say, “Hey, I sat there on the doorstep and waited for my dad to come, and he didn’t come.” And that’s important to me.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Ron Brown and his real dad, his biological dad. Well, he was a character right out to Catch Me if You Can, just a Black version, passing checks, living a bad life, making bad choices. He grew up, though, in a home that was all about education, a stepdad that really loved him, right? He said, “Those bad experiences with my biological father made me a better father,” and, “I never hated my father. I didn’t understand him until I learned about how he grew up: his father’s father, when he was five or six years old, went to the corner store and never came back.” When we come back, more of Ron Brown’s stories here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com, and we’re back with Our American Stories and Ron Brown’s story. We left off with Ron describing his difficult relationship with his absent father and the lessons he learned from that. Back to Ron with the rest of this story.

00:08:23
Speaker 2: The funny story about it is that he came to my high school graduation in Holy Trinity, and he made a big deal about it, and he told me he was so proud of me for graduating high school. And I think I saw him a little bit over that summer, and I never saw him again. I didn’t see him again until twenty years later, which is really kind of crazy because he had a brother, and his brother had died. And so I think I was living in Atlanta at the time, and I got word that my father had died, and I thought he had actually died, but it was kind of some confusion, so for years I thought he was dead. A few summers after that, my wife sent some information in Firs to be on the fan, and so we became contestants on the Family Feud with Steve Harvey, and they tape it up in Atlanta, and we go ahead and we have this show, and we lose by one question. And we were like, “Man, we came all the way up here! We had a good time, but it would have been nice if we would have won.” And so this is why I think about how everything happens for a reason. Well, fast four years later, because after you do a Family Feud episode, they keep playing the episode over and over and over and over again, and so it stays in rotation for years. And so I had just started law school, and I was making a trek from Atlanta to Birmingham three nights a week for school. And it was one particular night I was leaving criminal law class, and I get a phone call from a number I’d never seen before. And I was like, “Who’s just calling me this late? It’s about, I don’t know, eight-thirty, nine o’clock at night.” And I answered the phone, and it’s just something about your parents’ voice: you never forget it. And even though I hadn’t heard my father’s voice for twenty-plus years, the phone rings, and I answer it, and he says, “Hello, son.” And at that moment, I just broke down and cried. I had to pull over to the side of the road of Highway Twenty, and I was like, “Dad!” And he was like, “Son, I’ve been looking for you.” And I was like, “I’ve been looking for you! I was like, how did you get my number?” And it was a kaleidoscope of emotions, and I was crying, and he was crying, and he said, “You know, I went did some time, and you know, I lost track of you when I got out, and I didn’t know where you were.” He said, “I always knew you. You always said you wanted to be in business. You wanted to be a businessman.” And I looked and looked, and he says, “I’m gonna tell you something. I actually was sitting down with my girlfriend the other night. We were watching Family Feud.” He says, “I never watched Family Feud. It’s her favorite show.” “And it came to you, and you said your name,” and he said, “That’s my son!” And she said, “That’s not your—” She— He’s like, “No, that’s my son. That’s who I’ve been looking for. That’s my son!” He’s like, “She didn’t believe me.” He says, “Well, what he did was, he listened to my mother-in-law, Don White. When you do that, the family, they ask you what you do and where you live and all that.” And so, at that moment in time, she was a Senior VP for Coca-Cola, and she said that. And so his girlfriend and he called Coca-Cola. They got in contact with her, and she did some vetting—and I didn’t even know this was going on—but she did some vetting to make sure who he said he was. And then they called my wife, and they went on three-way, and my wife was like, “We thought you were dead!” And he’s like, “No, that’s my brother.” And they gave him my number, and we talked for about an hour, and I just told him, “You know what, despite everything in the world, I still love you, and you’re my father. You’re the reason why I’m here.” And that was very important to me because I lost my mother back when I was twenty-seven years old. So he and I kind of reconnected when I was probably like around thirty-eight. And so that was a powerful moment for me because as a man, even though I had a wife and children—I had—you still feel a level of loneliness because my parents. You know, I felt that both my parents were gone. And it just… I would always ask myself, “Well, who buries me?” You know, if something happens to me, you know, I guess with him. But due to the fact that he was still alive, we went ahead and put our relationship back together that night. I actually ended up flying to go see him two days later, and I spent my birthday with him. But I can give you irony of that.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: Though.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: My wife had had our second son, Jackson, and so she said, “What do you want to name him?” When we got some names, I said, “We want to name him Jackson.” I said, “But his middle name is going to be Owen.” And so my wife was very surprised. She was like, “Why would you name him on your father? And you guys don’t have the best relationship! Why would you name it Owen?” I said, “You know what, despite us not having the greatest relationship, I still loved my father, and I wanted him to be better, and at that time in his life maybe he couldn’t be.” I said, “But you know what, I forgive him for everything that’s happened in my life.” “I just forgive him, and I can’t hold on to it.” And I said, “You know, Jackson Owen Brown—you know, he’ll make that name good. This kid will never go to the penitentiary. This kid’ll do something great with his life and don’t have his grandfather’s name.” And so my wife thought that was very powerful, and she said, “Okay, his name will be Jackson Owen Brown.” Well, the irony of that is that my son was born like about two weeks before my father came back in my life. So I don’t know if people think about life and let things go and getting right with God or getting right with who you are as an individual. But I actually believe in my heart that of me making that decision to forgive my father for everything that’s happened to past, every hurt, every hardship, every disappointment, and giving my youngest son his name, I think for somewhere that opened the door and that allowed us to find each other. And that’s been seven years ago, and so now we talk every other day. That’s my guy. He came to my law school graduation, and he was very proud, and he looked and said, “You know what, to see how I did everything wrong in life and to see that you did so much right, I’m just so proud of you.” So that’s a big part of my journey. So even though he didn’t start off being the most amazing dad in the world, years later he’s become a great, great, great dad, and a great grandfather. You know, something my parents would always see me. My mom always talking me was the importance of forgiveness. That nobody’s perfect. Everyone does something wrong, and she would always talk about, you know, when Jesus would say, “Who could throw the first stone?” And no one can throw the first stone. And even though he didn’t get it right, I was open to allowing him to get it right. I was open. I think you have to be open sometimes, and it’s a big thing you have to forgive, because here you are carrying that around with you. I just really think that it just really, really erodes your spirit. It erodes everything in you because you’re carrying around the baggage and the hurt of something that happened years and years and years ago. And when you can’t get over it, and you can’t move past it, it keeps you locked in that place. One of my good friends, he’s a mentor of mine, he always said that anger is a wasted emotion. Anger will cost you a lot in your life. There are a lot of people sitting in the penitentiary right now because they were angry in a second, and they did something that if they could take back, they would. And so I just learned the importance of just, you can’t hold on to it. Sometimes you got to move on and move past it, but you can’t hold on to it because it keeps you stuck. So there’s a line in the Bible: Jesus said, “How many times should you forgive somebody?” And it’s an enormous number: it’s like sixty times, sixty times. You know, it’s really kind of crazy that that’s what the Lord and Savior says that you should. And I’ll give you the greatest story of that: is that Jesus knew that Judas was going to be a Judas. You know, Jesus knew that He was going to be betrayed by Judas, but Jesus still continued the journey with him. And so it was all the fact that He knew he was going to betray him, but He still loved him. And that’s an important message right there. He still loved him. He knew he was going to do what he did, but He still loved him, and He kept him around. If you read the Bible, you know there were points where, you know, they kind of felt that he was stealing, but Jesus was so in love with the man and the relationship that that didn’t even matter. And that’s pretty tough in this day and age: someone to still love someone even though that’s the way it is. But you know what, I equate that to like a true father’s love. You know, our kids don’t always do what we want them to do. They’ll always go the way we want them to go, but they’re still our children, and we still love them, and we still desire relationships with them, and we still wish them well. And I think that’s how God looks at us on the throne, even though we get up in the morning and maybe we have great intentions, and some people have b…