Harold Allen Brown was born in 1946 to Dallas Brown and Ozell Walker Brown in Hamburg, Arkansas. Six months after his birth, his father died — leaving his mother Ozell to raise three children alone.

He grew up in a shotgun house in rural Arkansas, shaped by a mother of extraordinary courage who never threw out food, never complained, and never let her children see her broken.

Harold wrote his memoir during the final years of his life — a year-by-year account of growing up in Hamburg, full of humor, wisdom, and the small moments that make a life. He also wrote Every Coach’s Dream, a true story about coaching Dixie Youth baseball in Tennessee in the summer of 1987.

Both books were discovered on his iMac hard drive by his son Owen W. Brown, who shared them because, as he writes: “He wrote it to be found and shared. I have no doubt.”