Although Brown had tried pole vaulting early on, he only took it up seriously after being cut from the basketball team of his high school, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In May 1931, he cleared 13 ft in at an interscholastic meet at the Harvard Stadium, a new national high school pole vault record. By doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his uncle Bobby Gardner, who in 1912 had become the first jumper to clear 13 feet. Brown graduated from Phillips Academy in 1931 and went to Yale, which at the time was a top pole vaulting school thanks to its coach A. C. Gilbert. As a freshman in 1932, he jumped 13 ft 10 in to win the Eastern Olympic Tryouts; at the final Olympic Trials in Palo Alto, he only cleared 13 ft 4 in and tied for seventh with nine other athletes, failing to qualify for the Olympic team. Brown helped Yale win the team title at the 1933 IC4A indoor championships. He not only jumped a meet record 13 ft in to tie for first in the pole vault with his Yale teammate Wirt Thompson, he also tied George Spitz of the favored New York University for first place in the high jump. At the national indoor championships, Brown shared first place with another Yale teammate, Franklin Pierce, at 13 ft 6 in. He capped his indoor season on March 15, jumping 14 ft in at Madison Square Garden for a new indoor world record. At the 1933 outdoor IC4A meet Brown pulled a tendonhigh jumping, but still shared first place with four others in the pole vault, including Olympic champion Bill Miller and outdoor world record holder Bill Graber. Brown won his first national outdoor title that summer, tying with Matt Gordy at 14 ft. He broke his own indoor world record on February 17, 1934, with a jump of 14 ft 4 in, again at Madison Square Garden. That summer he repeated as both IC4A champion and national outdoor champion. Brown became captain of the Yale track team in 1935, and won both the pole vault and the high jump at that winter's indoor IC4A meet. In his final collegiate competition on June 1, 1935, at the outdoor IC4A Championships – the same meet where his uncle had broken the world record exactly twenty-three years earlier – Brown cleared a bar set at 14 ft in, breaking Graber's world record of 14 ft in., but that jump was void for record purposes since the runway had been elevated by two inches Later that summer, Brown broke the British all-comers record on two occasions and won the AAA Championships. A panel of experts viewed him as likely to make the American team for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, but he retired from the sport without attempting to qualify.
In addition to his career as a cattle rancher, Brown was chairman of the board and the leading stockholder of American Atomics Corporation, a Tucson-based company that used radioactivetritium to make luminescent tubes for clocks, watches and signs. Although the company's then-CEO Peter J. Biehl stated in 1977 that the radioactivity presented no danger, American Atomics was controversially shut down in the summer of 1979 by GovernorBruce Babbitt after high levels of radioactive tritium were measured in Tucson near its factory. Critics also claimed the firm had been more concerned with profits than public safety. Brown also served as director of the Southern Arizona Bank and Trust Company.
Personal life
Brown married Katherine McLennan, daughter of Marsh & McLennan co-founder Donald R. McLennan, at Lake Forest, Illinois on July 3, 1937. The couple had two sons and two daughters, with the first three children born in Illinois and the youngest, Steve, after the family's relocation to Arizona. They lived on their Santa Rita Ranch until 1967, when they moved to Tucson; they bought another, smaller ranch there after selling the Santa Rita Ranch in 1971. After Katherine's death in 1982, Brown married Mary Lou Stevens. They moved to Del Mar, California, where he died of emphysema in July 1991.