A grieving widow helps Brown’s Orchards move forward in York County

Rain pelted the roof, and the wipers fanned back and forth as Mary Brown rushed to the hospital.

The highway was dark as she drove alone with a feeling of dread, the only light coming from the glow of the dashboard, a full moon and a phone that wouldn’t stop blinking.

A 10-minute ride to the emergency room seemed longer as she tried to stay calm, thinking her family already had its share of bad news. She lost her mother when she was 24. A brother-in-law 13 years ago. Her mother-in-law and father in January, and the family patriarch last summer.

But Mary had a feeling, from the nonstop phone calls and texts, she was about to receive the worst news of her life on that first day of March. She knew for sure when a doctor approached her with tears in his eyes.

Her husband, Dave Brown, couldn’t be saved. He died of cardiac arrest, just a few weeks shy of his 54th birthday.

“This can’t be real. We’ve already lost so much,” Mary said through tears.

Doctors, nurses and dads from her sons’ elementary school filled the small waiting area, surrounding her with support, but she felt alone.

“I have nobody,” she said, recalling her first thought in that moment.

Questions raced through her mind: How would she tell her young sons? What would happen to them without a father? Who was left?

She didn’t have time to answer those questions. In the same minute she became a widow, she became the president of an iconic fruit farm. And someone from human relations had just given Mary her first job – telling the 200 employees at Brown’s Orchards & Farm Market their boss had died.

Those employees had barely finished mourning the loss of Stan Brown, who had transformed his dad’s roadside farm stand in Loganville into the kind of place Wegman’s had sent its produce workers to learn the business.

And five months after Stan died, at the age of 84 on Aug. 12, the workers said goodbye to Nona Brown, Stan’s wife, who died in early January after complications following surgery. Mary’s dad died two days later.

Now, Brown’s had to move forward without Dave, who had led operations since 2012 and worked closely with his dad.

“What do we tell the employees?” the human relations director asked.

“Tell them everything is going to be OK,” Mary said. “It has to be.”

Just as the Brown family faced its hardest year, the 200-acre farm noted 2018 as its worst growing season in at least five decades.

The 70-year-old farm had survived other rough times – a late frost that ruined the apricots, a cold spring that delayed strawberries, a short apple crop.

“Onto the next one. Salvage what we can,” Stan had said anytime Brown’s faced a tough season.

He knew the farm couldn’t control the weather, and he hoped if it was a bad spring for strawberries, maybe it would be a good summer for peaches. It’s part of life when your business depends so much on the weather.

This year, it’s been too much rain.

And, for Mary, too much loss.

Yet, in keeping with Stan’s spirit, they already see hope and promise in the apple trees – both in the orchards that have flourished for a lifetime and the new saplings they just planted.

Will things improve in the fall, the season when families travel to Brown’s in carloads to pick apples and pumpkins, take photos and hayrides through the orchards, and buy slices of Dutch pride at the bakery?

“The apples look great,” the orchard manager, Ray Dietrich, said. “Fingers crossed. We’ll start picking in the next 10 days.”

Brown’s typically produces about 42,000 bushels a season. That’s millions of apples.

As the person in charge of raising, growing and bringing the produce to harvest, Ray is especially ready for the good news.

“This year’s been a struggle. The weather has been extreme one way or another,” Ray said recently, in the middle of what should’ve been a great peach season.

A 10-minute hailstorm in the spring ruined many of the peach buds and cherries, causing them to scar and grow abnormally.

In July, there was a week-long heat wave followed by nearly two weeks of downpours. The farm was hit with more than a foot of rain in the wettest July on record in central Pennsylvania, making it impossible for the pick-your-own peach orchards to be open for more than three days.

“We can’t put an umbrella over the farm,” Ray said.

The rough peach season followed a terrible strawberry season. Again, weather was to blame. Several days and nights of below-freezing temperatures caused ground damage in the berry plants, keeping them from forming correctly.

“There have been rough years that take a portion of the crop away, but not like this,” Ray said. “It’s just been a pattern of extremes this year.”

Mary hasn’t taken any time off to grieve, but she cries when she needs to: In the car on a rainy day, when she leads storytime at the farm, when she sees Dave’s chair, when she wakes up and he’s not there to say “Good morning,” when a Facebook memory pops up, when the boys do something amazing or even not so amazing, whenever she sees that view from the farm store parking lot.

Dave was proud of that view, so proud it was the first place he took her after they met in Mary’s hometown of Chicago in 2002 and started dating.

“Look at that. Isn’t it gorgeous?” he said, looking out at the fruit orchards, rolling hills and midday sun.

Mary thought it was beautiful then and thinks it’s beautiful now, so beautiful she’s going to wake up and go to sleep with that view every day. She and her sons, who are 10 and 7 years old, are moving next year from their four-bedroom home in Springfield Township to a two-bedroom home they are renovating next to the Loganville farm.

But it’s not just any two-bedroom home. It’s the house where Stan grew up. His dad owned the house and started the Brown’s produce stand, which expanded under Stan and Dave’s leadership to include a big market, full bakery, the Brown Bean Cafe, online ordering, a gift store, greenhouse, wine shop and ice cream stand with a pavilion, where events are held.

“Stan dreamed big and built big,” Mary said.

The move will put Mary closer to those big dreams and a major part of her support system, her sister-in-law, Linda Krupa, who lives next door in the house where Stan and Nona lived. Mary and Linda will be able to walk through the yard to work. More importantly, Mary’s sons, Scott and Sean, will be able to walk to work someday.

Mary likes seeing Dave’s favorite view outside and his vision for the company inside, logged in a series of notes he wrote to himself.

“You see his writing, and it hits you all over again. How is this possible? He was just here,” Mary said. “But there’s something comforting about being where he sat.”

She’s following his plan to strengthen the good parts of Brown’s and also add more “agritainment” – the combination of agriculture and entertainment, such as the farm’s fall festival, or strawberries and superheroes event in the spring.

“I’ve gotta keep this place going long enough for our boys to take it,” Mary said. “I won’t fail them. I won’t fail him.”

There are many people Mary doesn’t want to let down: her husband, her sons, the employees, the customers, the Brown family and especially Stan, who workers still refer to as Mr. Brown.

Stan focused on customer service, greeting everyone who walked through the doors, but also found ways to make Brown’s an experience and destination.

“People don’t have to come here to shop. They want to come here to shop,” Stan always said, according to retail manager Joe Doll and other employees.

Joe is working for his third boss in the Brown family – first Stan, then Dave and now Mary.

As retail manager and a Brown’s employee for 22 years, Joe is the familiar face with reddish-brown hair who knows all the regular customers by name and introduces himself to people coming in for the first time. There are new customers every day, and on Aug. 12, 2017, they wanted to know why everyone was crying.

“Mr. Brown died,” Joe told them.

Of course Brown’s was open, Joe said. “I can hear Mr. Brown saying, ‘Don’t close because I died.’”

Joe is also the guy who reassured customers after Stan and Dave died that everything would continue. Customers feared Brown’s would close, and Mary hadn’t buried her husband before people were sending offer letters to buy the farm.

“Those went straight to the trash,” she said. “We are not selling. We are not closing. We are keeping this in the family and continuing their legacy.”

That legacy extends past Brown’s doors along the Susquehanna Trail. Stan went “above and beyond on community donations,” giving something every time someone asked, Joe said.

“If we have a little bit, we’ll give a little bit,” Stan always said, according to Joe.

Stan taught Joe the work ethic of giving 100 percent, seven days a week. He also cared about his people. That’s why, in Joe’s opinion, so many Brown’s customers have become employees.

And the reason Joe said he has stayed so long reflects another part of Stan’s dream for his business: “It feels like it’s your family whether you’re a part of the Brown family or not.”

When she talks about her father-in-law’s love for Brown’s, the tears come easily for Mary.

Even in the week he died, Stan visited the market twice, she recalled.

But the most gripping memory for Mary and Linda, Stan and Nona’s daughter, is remembering how he wanted to spend his final time there.

“He had Ray take him out for one more ride through the orchards before he died,” Mary said through tears.

“Just to make sure everything was OK,” Linda said.

Linda and her husband, Nick Krupa, moved to York County the same weekend his dad died. Another heartbreaking phone call, another painful loss, but also a new beginning.

Linda gave up her life in Huntingdon County to move to her parents’ ranch house next to the farm after they died. Nick is still commuting to his job at Raystown Lake, where he is operations manager with the Army Corp of Engineers. He is also a retired Army colonel, who served two tours in Afghanistan. But one of his favorite titles is “uncle.”

“Auntie Linda and Uncle Nick,” as Scott and Sean call them, will soon greet the boys when they get off the school bus and make family dinners together with Mary.

“When we lost mom, we knew we didn’t want to be anywhere but there,” Linda said.

She and Dave, her younger brother by two years, set the plan in motion: Once she moved, Linda, a dietician, would add some healthy options to the lineup of prepared foods at Brown’s.

“We were really excited to work together. I was going to start working with him in April,” Linda said.

But then she lost him too, so soon after her parents and about 13 years after her older brother, Scott, died of cancer.

Her eyes welled with tears recently as she mentally counted how many in her family are gone.

“I can’t think about being the last one left,” Linda said.

Being at Brown’s helps, she said. So do sunny days.

“I can’t imagine being anywhere else. I feel really really blessed to follow in their footsteps,” Linda said. “With dad it’s really humbling to feel the awe of everything he’s done. We all feel them here, feel their presence. I’m living in the house where I grew up, which was always home. In one sense, it’s like I never left. In another, it makes me sad I missed so much.”

That’s coming from a daughter who called and visited a lot. But after losing parents so dear, she longs for more time. She misses the people who can answer the questions nobody else can: Where did this piece of furniture come from? Who is that old man in the black and white photo?

“Dave had those answers. He had a great memory, a vivid memory,” Linda said. “There are so many things I don’t have anyone to ask anymore.”

She feels closer to those answers on her family’s land. Just as she’s happy to be home, she’s happy with her role at the farm as a food and nutrition consultant. Like both of her parents, she believes food is love. Like her dad, she loves to walk the orchards. Like her mom, she likes being behind the scenes. She’s happy to support Mary.

“She’s doing remarkably well,” Linda said of her sister-in-law. “They’d all be so proud. Dave would be amazed.”

People who don’t know the Brown’s business well think Mary went from leading Thursday morning storytime to the front office.

The truth is, she always knew the business in and out. She’s a lawyer with an accounting degree who served as company vice president when Dave became president in 2012.

She worked from home as a senior claims adjuster for Hanover Insurance, a full-time job she gave up in May during the difficult strawberry season at Brown’s. It was clear the farm needed her more.

And she needed the farm.

“I wanted to support them, but I feel like they’re supporting me. If I need a hug, I know where to find a hug,” Mary said.

She also finds comfort in continuing Thursday morning storytime in the café at Brown’s, missing only one week – right after Dave died.

Recently, though, a story about a peach and toad made her pause.

Her audience of babies, toddlers and preschoolers was forgiving, eating their breakfast and playing with toys until Mary found her words again.

In the story, Blue, the toad, tells Peach he’d like her to stay forever. She tells him she doesn’t think she’ll last forever.

“But until then,” Blue said, “you have me, and I have you.”

It reminded Mary of one of the last conversations she and Dave shared.

They were on a date night about two weeks before he died, and she was missing her father. Dave wanted to talk about her 50th birthday that was coming up in July, but she said it didn’t feel right to celebrate this year.

“It can’t get any worse,” he told her, Mary recalled. “You have me. I have you.”

Mary, feeling like there wasn’t anyone left after both their parents died, started to worry about losing Dave too.

“What if something happens to you too? How would I run the farm?” she said.

“Nothing is going to happen to me, but if it does, everything will be OK,” he said. To answer her question about the farm, he said, “It will run itself.”

Dave had so much confidence in the employees and customers, and business his family built, that he was sure it would carry on successfully, Mary said.

Once he was gone, she realized how much support she had – Linda, the extended Brown’s family, her five siblings, the Dallastown community of classmates and teammates, the employees and customers. Stan, Nona and Dave touched many lives, and all those people were there to respond in kind.

But there’s something forever missing in a life without her husband.

“I’m already better for knowing him, but there will always be that ache. I miss him every single day. I’ll never find another Dave Brown,” Mary said.

And she doesn’t want to.

“I want to keep him with me,” she said, looking down at the engagement and wedding rings she still wears, clutching a silver heart necklace from him that hangs from her neck.  “I’m not looking to replace Dave, but I am looking to be the best mom I could be.”

It’s another rainy morning in early August, and the Brown boys are playing with the family’s 3-year-old Goldendoodle, Ginger, in the living room.

In a few minutes, Mary will drive Scott to basketball camp, and Neila Santana, the family helper, will take Sean to soccer camp.

“Are you ever bored?” Mary asked her 7-year-old son, Sean.

“No!” he said through laughs, as Ginger jumped on his lap.

“That’s a win,” Mary said. “There’s a trumpet in the corner waiting for someone to take it on.”

“Mom, I don’t think we have time for three instruments,” her 10-year-old son, Scott, said with a smile.

Neila laughs, knowing how busy they are with sports and music lessons.

One of the songs Scott is learning on the piano is “The Happy Farmer.” He’s not playing it because he’s a Brown. It’s a coincidence and just where he is in the lesson book.

But, someday, Scott does hope to major in agriculture and business, and run the family farm. Once they move, he’ll make the short walk from the house to the market to help, just like Dave used to.

That will take some time. Scott is headed to 5th grade later this month. Sean will go to 2nd grade.

Mary is doing her best to keep life normal for them, even as she tries to figure that out herself.

“Dave adored those boys more than life,” she said.

She’s working to make sure they never forget that, still referring to him in the present tense.

After a good day at soccer recently, when Sean was beaming after being picked for a team, Mary said, “Your daddy is so proud of you.”

And after seeing him give a limp handshake in church, she said, “Remember who your daddy is.”

Dave always had a firm handshake, she said.

Mary is also honest with them. Sometimes, they see her cry. She lets them know it’s OK to cry.

Recently, the spate of rainy days had her down. She used to love rainy days. They made her think of her mom growing up in Ireland and the stories she heard about rainy days there. Now, they often make her sad.

“Mom, are you crying?” Sean asked from the backseat.

“I was. I was just feeling a little sad,” Mary said. “What do you do when you’re sad?”

“I think of heaven, Mommy,” Sean said.

Five months after Dave died, she is still taking it one day at a time.

Mary, a devoted Catholic who teaches religion classes at church, credits her faith in God with giving her strength after so much loss.

Advice from her late father, Joseph Babbo, helps too. “He always said, ‘Babbos bounce back.’” And Mary is both a Babbo and a Brown.

She also still feels Dave’s love, silently giving her strength and cheering her on.

“There’s no other explanation for my ability to put one foot in front of the other, but for him being right there,” Mary said.

She’s still in love with him. It’s a love that isn’t destroyed by distance or death.That love reminds her he wouldn’t want her to dwell in pain.

“Dave made me a better person. I wish everyone that kind of love. If I knew I’d only have him til he was 53, my only regret is I didn’t meet him sooner,” Mary said.

On a recent weekday, as the peach season was winding down and apple season was days away, Mary stood in the Brown’s parking lot and looked at that gorgeous view, which included new apple trees for clients like Wyndridge Farm and some in Washington, D.C., that use Brown’s produce for cider.

She thought of Stan saying, “There’s no magic, just lots of love around.”

She thought of Dave as she looked at the rolling hills he loved so much. Mary believed her husband and knew, from season to season, sunrise to sunset, everything would be OK.

Onto the next one.