Obituary of Ray B. Browne

Mr. Ray B Browne, age 87, of Bowling Green, Ohio, passed away Thursday October 22, 2009, in Bowling Green, Ohio. Funeral services will be graveside at 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 28, 2009, in Woodlawn Memory Gardens. Interment will follow with Holman Funeral Home of Ozark directing. The family will receive friends at the funeral home from 6:00 P. M. until 8:00 P. M. Tuesday evening, October 27, 2009. Ray was always one to question convention and authority. As a former professor of English and Literature, he broke academic conventions in the 1960's and 1970's to pioneer the study of popular culture, the study of everyday cultural life. In the process, he helped revolutionize the subject matter that scholars in English, American Studies, Sociology, Radio/Television/Film, and other disciplines view as acceptable and helped drive the academic study of what most people spend most of their free time pursuing. Born on January 15, 1922 in Millport, Alabama to Garfield and Annie (Trull) Browne. He married Alice "Pat" (Matthews) on August 25, 1965 and she survives of Bowling Green. Also surviving are sons, Glenn & Kevin Browne, daughter, Alicia Browne and three grandchildren. He fought in World War II in an artillery unit in the European Theater, and the studied in England at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham for a year after the war ended. From there, he returned to the U.S. and earned a masters degree in Victorian Literature from Columbia University. He spent two years teaching at the University of Nebraska in the late 1940's before attending the University of California at Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in English and Folklore in 1956. Mr. Browne taught at the University of Maryland from 1956-1960, and at Purdue University from 1960-1967. A prodigious scholar, he published dozens of articles and numerous books in his early career. In 1967, Ray moved to Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio with the express purpose of starting the academic study of popular culture. He was fortunate to have the support of both the dean of his college and the University President at the time. At that point, Mr. Browne's career and the popular culture movement took off. He founded the Journal of Popular Culture in 1967 and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1968. These were the first entities of their kind to focus on the study of everyday culture. From the beginning, Mr. Browne cast his net widely. A perusal of a recent program from the Popular Culture association annual conference includes such subjects as comic books, fashion studies, Stephen King, mystery and detective fiction, children's literature, westerns, rock music, internet culture, sports culture, vampires, world fairs and expositions, food and popular culture, the Civil War, digital culture, Arthurian legends, travel culture, slapstick comedy, romance fiction, motorcycle culture, medical humanities, popular architecture and design, and hundreds of other subjects covering aspects of everyday life. Quite simply, Mr. Browne viewed popular culture as what most people spend most of their life doing. He founded the Popular Culture Library at BGSU in 1970. The Library now holds 190,000 books and hundreds of thousands of other materials related to the study of popular culture. The repository is perhaps the leading source for popular culture artifacts in the nation. In 1970 he founded the Popular Culture Association (PCA) to organize and promote the study of popular culture both in the U.S. and internationally. The annual national convention, held since 1971, regularly draws more than 2000 participants. Browne later founded a sister organization to the PCA, the American Culture Association, to focus solely on American popular culture. His focus on everyday culture earned him many honors and high visibility in the media. He appeared several times on the CBS Evening News, as well as on the Phil Donahue show, BBC N Service Information