Grocery founder Brown dies

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To generations of eastern Maine shoppers, going to the supermarket meant going to Doug’s.

By the late 1980s, there were eight Doug’s Shop ‘n Save stores located in Bangor, Brewer, Old Town, Bucksport and Ellsworth.

The owner was Doug Brown, whose life began in modest circumstances on a farm in Lubec in 1929, the same year the Depression started. But these circumstances did not slow Brown, whose hard work, native intelligence and readily apparent honesty proved a winning combination in the business world. He became one of Maine’s most influential businessmen.

He was a community leader, saving Husson College from financial collapse in the 1980s. And he was a forceful board member and adviser to scores of other institutions, including Eastern Maine Medical Center, Bangor’s YMCA and YWCA, and the Training and Development Corp. He was a generous benefactor and regular member of the congregation at Bangor’s Columbia Street Baptist Church.

Doug Brown’s successful journey through life ended Thursday, when he died after a yearlong fight with cancer.

But his story will always be inspiring.

Facing the Depression-era difficulties of life in Lubec, Brown’s family moved to South Portland when he was a teenager.

While in high school, he went to a new Red and White store seeking part-time work. When he was turned away, he said he would work for nothing for the experience. When the next payday came, he received a paycheck with everyone else.

When Brown was graduated from high school, his father wanted him to go to college. But the young man knew what he wanted, and that included a wife and a job.

He soon married Ana Brewer, who had moved from Houlton to Portland and worked in the store with the young Brown.

The job came in Thomaston, where Brown ran a Red and White store for Hannaford Bros. At 18, he had the wife and job he wanted. Both would prove great choices.

Subsequent jobs included managing a store in Camden, salesman for International Milling Co., store developer for T.R. Savage Co. and director of retail operations for Hannaford.

Firmly entrenched in the grocery business, in 1960, when he was about 30, he decided he wanted to go into business for himself. With Hannaford as a partner, he opened his first store at the corner of Third and Union streets in Bangor.

While building the Bangor facility, Brown met Ralph Leonard of H.E. Sargent, the Old Town company that was doing the groundwork. They formed a longtime friendship that would find them meeting in boardrooms, fishing rivers and over cribbage boards.

Leonard says he will remember Brown most for his caring nature.

“We was a great friend who cared a lot for people,” Leonard said. He said he saw evidence of this while working with Brown for the Boy Scouts, the United Way and YMCA.

Arthur E. McKenzie, now retired longtime general manager of the Bangor Daily News, said Brown was simply brilliant. McKenzie served with Brown on several boards and said he was very good at putting his intelligence to use.

Brown’s effort on behalf of Husson College is a good example.

William Beardsley, president of Husson, said that other than founder Chesley Husson, the success of the college can be attributed to Brown and just a few others.

Husson built a new campus in the late 1960s and assumed $10 million in federal debt. When enrollments languished in the 1970s and 1980s, the school was chugging along with an annual budget of between $2 million and $3 million. The $10 million debt loomed large.

Eventually the government threatened foreclosure. Brown went into action, raising money and figuring out how to refinance the debt. The combination, with a timely loan from Bangor Savings Bank, kept the college going.

Brown didn’t stop there. To keep Husson healthy and growing, he helped convince the Training and Development Corp. to locate Job Corps on the campus, where it stayed for about a decade and provided badly needed rental revenue.

When Eastern Maine Medical Center decided it needed to turn its diploma nursing program into a degree program, hospital board member Doug Brown helped convince the hospital to turn to Husson to develop the program.

Today that program is successful, and Husson is flourishing.

Beardsley, who came to Husson in 1987, credits Brown with giving him a fruitful lesson or two about fundraising.

One day he went with Brown to the home of a prominent businessman in the Bangor area. Brown talked with the man’s wife about cooking and the group quickly got comfortable. In a short while, Brown and Beardsley left with a $15,000 check made out to Husson.

“I learned that he had power and knew how to use it,” Beardsley said. The college president also said that Brown always led by example, himself donating large sums to fund drives he worked on.

Although Brown was busy in the community, generous and energetic on behalf of many causes, he was foremost a grocer.

His contemporaries tell of vacationing with his family in places such as Europe and finding themselves following Brown to grocery stores, where he proceeded to see whether there were any retailing methods he could adopt back home.

Touring Brown’s stores with him was an educational experience of no small order. Several BDN reporters, now editors, remember the experience.

Brown could relate the retail history of every item on the shelves, why they were packaged the way they were, and where the raw products were produced and processed.

He also knew the social and economic history of the goods, how tastes changed and how better refrigeration, including in trucks, helped increase off-season produce offerings in cold climes such as Maine.

When Brown retired in 1989, Hannaford took over his stores, but he remained active as a consultant.

Ana and Doug Brown had a marriage that lasted 53 years, until she died in 2001. They had two children, Ron Brown of Bangor and Debra Additon of Hampden, four grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Brown remarried, living in Camden in recent years with the former Barbara Bryant, who had been a family friend for 50 years.

A service for Brown will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 7, at the Columbia Street Baptist Church in Bangor.

Doug Brown stands in front of one of his stores in 1984.