BROWN, ROBERT S.

It was not too easy for the workers at the Army’s First Fighter Command headquarters to say “Good morning,” when Mrs. Brown reported for duty yesterday. They had heard the news, too.

She shrugged the feeling away for a while as if it could be disposed of that way, but presently the people working with her ventured by—one at a time—and said they were sorry, and all the clumsy and well-meant things that people say on occasions when there are no words quite adequate.

Mrs. Brown had received a telegram from the Navy Department that said her husband, Major Robert S. Brown, was killed in action [September 14, 1942] in the Solomon Islands.

He was an officer of the U.S. Marines, and she took the word that he had died in action as she had taken the transfers to China and Guam and back to the United States since his graduation from Annapolis in 1931. She kept her chin up and went back to the job of spotting airplanes that she assumed last April.

Major Brown and his wife, the former Betty Johnson, of 205 Stoneway La., Merion, returned to the United States three years ago after his tour of duty in the Far East.

Until April, he was second in command at the Quantico, Va., Marine base, and then he was ordered to the West Coast, and subsequently to service in the fighting area.

He was a native of Arkansas. He and Mrs. Brown, daughter of an attorney here, have a son, Robert, 10. Mrs. Brown and the youngster are living with her parents in Merion.