Warren Brown

Who was Warren Brown?

Warren Brown was an American sportswriter who spent the major portion of his career in Chicago, Illinois. Brown was born in Somersville, California, a mining town near San Francisco. His father Patrick was the local saloon keeper. When the Somersville mines flooded the family moved to San Francisco, where Brown was a firsthand witness to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Brown attended St. Ignatius College for his prep school as well as university years. During his college years Brown played baseball for the Sacramento minor league team in the summers.

After getting his undergraduate degree he began his sportswriting career with the San Francisco Bulletin. After serving in U.S. Army intelligence stateside during World War I, Brown returned to the Bulletin, but soon moved to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Call & Post. Brown was one of the first sportswriters to hail a local boxer named Jack Dempsey. He also doubled as the paper's drama critic, specializing in vaudeville and musical comedy. In the early 1920s Brown was transferred to the Hearst paper in New York for a year. That is where he hired a young sportswriter named Ed Sullivan, who went on to be a society columnist and then a mid-century American icon with his TV variety show. Starting in 1920, Brown saw every World Series for fifty years. Brown's final move was to Chicago to be the sports editor of Hearsts Chicago Herald-Examiner. He was a sports editor, columnist and baseball beat writer for several Chicago papers over the next 40 years.