HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Former WHTC news director Reed Brown, a 1971 Hope College graduate, has died in San Francisco, where he’d been retired for some time. He was 69, according to a note emailed to WHTC from his brother, Gary Brown.
In a 2011 note to Hope College’s alumni magazine, Reed Brown reported enjoying retirement and that he remained “deeply grateful to Hope College and all it meant in his life for all these years.
In his college note, he included the comment “May God bless all of us as we have been blessed.”
On his Facebook page, he reported undergoing chemo for an undisclosed illness last fall. At the top of his page, he quoted the late San Franciso journalist Herb Caen, saying “One day if I do go to heaven…I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”
He called Holland his hometown. In addition to graduating from Hope with a bachelor’s in English, in 1969 he earned an associates of arts from Southwestern Michigan College in Dowagiac, and a masters in organizational communication from Western Michigan University.
Gary Brown’s email indicated Reed Brown died on Feb. 27, 2019, “after a long illness.”
Mr. Brown is survived by him mother Dorothy Brown of Portage; a sister, Ruth Ann Brown-Jones of Los Angeles, and his brother, Gary Brown, of Portage. He is predeceased by his former wife, Marilyn, who died in 2011; she was a long-time librarian at Herrick District Library in Holland. They had no children.
