Charles Canfield Brown ’53

Chuck, our freshman football captain who played two years of varsity ball at guard and who gave up the sport senior year to concentrate on his thesis — he was the only music major on the team — died of kidney failure Jan. 1, 2009. He was 77 and lived in Kingston, N.Y.

He came to Princeton from White Plains (N.Y.) High School, sang in the choir, and played bass in his Cannon clubmate Ken Stocker’s dance band. After graduation, Chuck studied musicology at Columbia University and joined Noah Greenberg’s  New York Pro Musica group, researching, producing, and writing about early music. Later he trained in mainframe computers and was a program designer for prominent firms. 

In 1982, he married actress Deborah Gordon, who was known for her role in the play Macbird, a satire of Macbeth. He then became a rare book dealer catering to collectors. His hobbies were playing jazz piano and painting abstracts. He and Peter Benoliel were classical-music aficionados, and with their wives, attended our 55th reunion together. It was Deborah’s first, and she cheered Chuck on as he and the class marched by — just as we salute him now.