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George Brown's family and former Eugene City Council colleagues remembered Brown, who died last month, as a deeply analytical thinker who always did his homework and cared deeply about his community.
George Brown, the owner of Kiva Grocery and a former Eugene city councilor, died last month from a vascular condition. He was 79.
Brown gradually expanded his store from a bookstore in a downtown Eugene garage mall in 1970 to its current storefront on 11th Avenue and Olive Street, a beloved natural foods store and deli selling goods from more than 240 vendors in the Willamette Valley.
Family and former colleagues remember Brown, who represented Ward 1 on the Eugene City Council from 2009 to 2017, as a civic force — deeply curious, fiercely dedicated to his business and neighborhood, and never idle.
“His way of approaching the world was just this intense, insatiable curiosity,” said Melissa Brown, his wife of 26 years. “It just never stopped.”
George grew up in Wichita, Kansas. One of six children, his father began the state’s first NBC affiliate television station. His family emphasized civic engagement: “You see an invasive weed, you pick it,” Melissa said.
He was living in Washington before he moved to Eugene to open his bookstore in the downtown “hippie mall” known as Scarborough Fair.
Lazar Makyadath, the owner of Lazar’s Bazar downtown, set up shop in the same mall decades ago. When he first showed up to Scarborough Fair to rent a tiny retail space, shortly after immigrating to the United States, he was clad in a three-piece suit, surprising Brown.
“They were kind enough to understand that I will take the suit off,” said Makyadath, who remembers Brown as “just a busy bee, running around all over the place.”
George moved to Eugene during a time of rapid growth in the city, and the height of what he would describe as “destruction through urban renewal,” Melissa said. Seeing businesses that he considered gems torn down deeply impacted him, shaping his advocacy for development that is “reasonable in scale,” she said.
Melissa said she found a letter he had written to his brother in 1981 about an unsuccessful plan to join the Mill Race and the Amazon Canal to make a waterway system known as the Emerald Canal. Melissa said under the plans, the area they lived in would have been “wiped out.”
After learning of the plan, he took pictures of every single building that he thought would be knocked down, she said.
“He wanted people to be able to live in the neighborhood in and around downtown, and be able to have a garden, not have a six-story building totally block out the sun,” Melissa said.
By the 2000s, George married Melissa, whom he met when she was working for the store in the 1990s. She said he was a loving father to the son they had together, who is now 22.
By 2008, George set his sights on a run for Eugene City Council, skeptical about the use of urban renewal to attract big development and fighting to preserve Civic Stadium.
He was elected after setting a campaign goal of knocking on the door of every single household in Ward 1. He was “pretty darn close,” Melissa said. At the council table, George was laser-focused on the use of development subsidies, and quickly developed a reputation for being meticulous and well-prepared at meetings.
Though they didn’t share the same politics, George worked with Councilor Mike Clark, a more conservative voice on the council, to revise the city’s downtown Multi-Use Property Tax Exemption ordinance and add provisions requiring some workforce housing as part of the developments. Clark said he’s never had a colleague who did their homework as much as him.
“Whenever a difficult question came to council, George was almost never the first one to talk,” Clark said. “George was frequently the first one to ask really good questions. He wanted to think about it and mull stuff over.”
His last major (and unsuccessful) effort on the council was pushing for an independent city auditor. At that point, he was already losing his strength to his illness, Melissa said. When he decided to step down, he helped his mentor Emily Semple, who ended up succeeding him on the council.
She recalled facing some roadblocks about a month into her campaign — she hadn’t hired a campaign manager — and coming to George for help.
“We were walking down the street, and I was just like, ‘Oh, I can’t deal with this! This was a big mistake!’ and he said, ‘OK, Emily, let’s take some breaths. We’re doing fine. It’s only so much time. It’s going to work out,” she said.
She continued: “He just had this ability to hear you and react in a way that made you feel supported and able to deal with whatever it was.”
Clark said he couldn’t recall a single instance of George getting “riled up” during the eight years they served on the council together. But Melissa acknowledged he could get “kind of snotty” when other councilors didn’t come prepared to meetings: “He took that very seriously.”
George was a lifelong learner. Melissa, who called him a “human encyclopedia,” said he studied Prussian, Mandarin, Chinese and Italian at the University of Oregon in the 1980s in his downtime because he wanted to read books in the languages they were written in.
George would come to the Kiva every day, even sweeping up cigarette butts in the parking lot, but as his illness advanced, it became harder for him to make the trip.
Just before his passing, Melissa said his nephew carried him down the stairs of his house and into the car so he could go see the books in his store.
“He just wanted to go see his books,” she said. “We just wheeled him in, and he just sat there with the books until he was ready to come home.”
