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"I Was Miserable." Edmund Gerald Brown was born April 21, 1905 in San Francisco's "Western Addition," then a middle-class section of narrow homes with stained-glass windows and Victorian gingerbread, now part of the city's expanding Negro community. Pat's father, Edmund Joseph Brown, was a trim, likable man, given to fancy gold watch chains, aromatic cigars and second-best poker hands.
He prospered briefly with a Fillmore Street nickelodeon, ran shooting galleries, arcades, three-for-a-quarter photo shops. Finally, he bought an interest in a Tenderloin district poker club, bucked his own game and ended on his uppers.
Young Edmund, eldest of four children, picked up pocket money carrying the San Francisco Call and Chronicle, was a better-than-average student, starred in extracurricular activities. "I have always wanted to be a leader," he recalls. He won first prize in a grade school oratorical contest, ended his speech with the deathless words: "Give me liberty or give me death!" That promptly got him dubbed Patrick Henry Brown—and he has been Pat Brown ever since. But leadership had its problems for cautious Pat Brown. He was easily the best-liked kid at San Francisco's Lowell High School, served as cheerleader and wanted desperately to be elected president of the student body. "But the captain of the football team was running," says Brown, "and I was afraid he would beat me." Pat ran for secretary instead—and won, while the football captain was beaten for president by someone else. "As secretary," says Brown, "I was miserable. I felt left out of things."
"Why I Left." After high school he worked at odd jobs, tended the cigar counter in his father's poker club, went to night classes at San Francisco Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1927. But his real interest, then and now, was in being liked, in being a leader—and a political career was inevitable. He ran as a Republican for assemblyman in 1928, but the G.O.P. competition was stiff in San Francisco, and Pat lost in the party primary. When he next ran for public office—in New Deal 1939—he was a Democrat. "I've never regretted the change," he tells his friends. "I'm not entirely satisfied with everything, but I have considerable more intellectual solace as a Democrat than I had as a Republican."
Democrat Brown became a popular luncheon speaker on the subject. "Why I Left the Republican Party," made hundreds of new friends, joined every organization he could find (including the National Lawyers Guild, which he joined and quit in the 1930s, rejoined and quit again in the 1940s, when he finally discovered that it toed the Communist line. He ran for San Francisco County district attorney in 1939, lost, went out and made more friends, joined more clubs, ran again in 1943—and was elected.
At the time he took office, Pat Brown had never tried a criminal case. But he surrounded himself with promising young trial lawyers, moved hard against gambling and vice interests, wrote a good record.