Carolyn Bryant Brown

Carolyn was born on September 25, 1937, in Monroe County, Kentucky, to James Floyd Walden, a teacher and Southern Baptist minister, and Maude Bryant Walden, a homemaker. She was reared with her siblings in the communities of Fountain Run and Tompkinsville.

In 1958, at the age of 20, Carolyn lost her 48-year-old father to heart disease, which had a profound impact on her life. Floyd Walden was her guiding light and her greatest role model and inspiration. He also instilled in her an unwavering, lifelong faith in God. His death left an enormous void.

She was taken in by her older sister and brother-in-law, Betty Jean and Burnis England, who loaned her the money to finish college so she could fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher like her beloved father. Knowing she needed transportation, Burnis came home one day with a new car and offered it to Carolyn on the condition that she pay him back when she could. She accepted the car, and whenever she’d come home from college, Burnis would say, “Now I feel like all my kids are home.” In him, Carolyn gained a both a second father and a second brother. These loving gestures changed the course of Carolyn’s life, resulting in her long, fulfilling career in education and a family of her own. Her gratitude for these kindnesses — or any, for that matter — had no bounds. She never forgot, even after dementia clouded her mind. She spoke about them into her final days.

Upon graduating from Campbellsville College in 1962, she landed a job teaching sixth grade at Howevalley Elementary School in Hardin County through the most magical of coincidences. While being interviewed by the superintendent of Hardin County Schools, a complete stranger to her, he asked whether she was related to his friend and classmate at Western Kentucky State College (now Western Kentucky University), Floyd Walden. When she responded in the affirmative, Carolyn was hired on the spot based solely on her father’s fine reputation.

While teaching at Howevalley, Carolyn (Carol, as she became known in Hardin County), rented a room in nearby Cecilia, where she met an attractive, blue-eyed and seemingly stuck up young hometown man named Jim Brown, who taught English and religion classes at his alma mater, Elizabethtown Catholic High School. It turns out, Jim wasn’t stuck up at all. He was merely shy. The two fell in love and married at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Cecilia on November 19, 1966, and Carol became Jim’s forever “Hossfly.” They welcomed their only child, James Joseph (Joey) Brown, who was named after both of his grandfathers and Jim, 13 months later. But they almost lost Joey to Bob and Cathy Brown (no relation) of Brown Funeral Home, whose son Mike is two days older, when a Hardin Memorial Hospital nurse mixed up the babies and tried to send Joey home with Cathy. Fortunately, Cathy noticed “her baby” had grown larger and balder since the last time she’d seen him, and a potential and unwarranted scandal was averted since Joey grew up to look remarkably similar to Jim Brown rather than Bob Brown.

By this time, Jim had become principal of E’town Catholic, and upon its closure in 1969, the young family moved to Meade County, Kentucky, where Jim became principal of Ekron Elementary and Carol taught at James R. Allen Elementary. The move lasted only one school year. Jim “didn’t like” Meade County (in truth, he was homesick for his Momma), but Carol fell in love with it because it reminded her of home.

When Jim was named principal of St. James School in Elizabethtown in 1970, Carol reluctantly returned to her teaching job at Howevalley, but she was determined to make her way back to Meade County. In 1971, Jim helped build the family’s new home on Hutcherson Lane, just outside Elizabethtown, which was “on the way” to Meade County, and Carol accepted a position as sixth grade teacher (and later sixth, seventh and eighth grade math teacher) at Flaherty Elementary School, where she taught until her first retirement 22 years later. Her former principal, Nelson Kelley, once said she was the most skilled teacher he had ever observed in the classroom.

Carol loved everything about the Flaherty community, especially its people, and its people loved her. When a former sixth grade student lost a limb to a drunk driver during his senior year, his parents asked him on the night of the crash whether there was anyone besides family he wanted to see. He told them, “Mrs. Brown.” Jim canceled a school board meeting that night to drive Carol to the hospital in Louisville. That student continued to communicate with Carol through her final years, which absolutely thrilled her.

She would be treated like a rock star by her former students and their parents when her son would take her to back to Flaherty in recent years for St. Martin of Tours parish picnics and fish fries. And throughout his life, whenever her son has met random people from Flaherty, the first thing they say is some variation of, “Are you THE Joey Brown? Your mom was my favorite teacher. She talked about you constantly. You could tell she adored you.” She was known to hold up long lines at the Sam’s Club gas pumps whenever a former student would recognize her sitting in the car and come over to talk to her — and she loved to talk.

Following her retirement from Meade County Schools in 1993, Carol embarked on a second career as the GED examiner for a seven-county region of central Kentucky, based at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College (ECTC). Her favorite part of the job was testing the inmates at the Hardin County Jail, which she felt provided them with a second chance. She was lauded by her supervisors in Frankfort as the model GED examiner who outshone her peers throughout the state. She worked alongside her husband, who retired from ECTC in 2002 as a student affairs officer and director of the Regional Assessment Center. Carol’s second retirement came in 2008. Both Carol and Jim served 15 years at ECTC.

During their retirement, they acquired new legions of fans and became “Facebook famous” because Joey began secretly posting their everyday banter for all his Facebook friends to read. What follows are two of their greatest hits from November 2012.

“Mom: ‘I hope the doctor tells me I'm doing okay when I go back.’ Dad: ‘Hell, I don't know why he wouldn't. You've demanded to be treated like the Queen of England since you broke your ankle.’”

“Mom to Dad: ‘You don't do anything I tell you to do. If I told you to blow your nose, you'd probably fart!’”

When one of Joey’s coworkers (Hi, Barb!) inadvertently spilled the beans to them about his posts, Jim relished in knowing that people were finally realizing how funny they were when they shed their buttoned-up teacher personas. Hossfly, on the other hand, was not amused. Without having read a word of what was written, she claimed all of it was made up. (None of it was made up.)

When she wasn’t being (often unintentionally) funny, Carol was a skilled country cook, using many of the vegetables she and Jim grew in their immaculate, half-acre, backyard garden on Hutcherson Lane, which for several years they shared with their close friend, Dr. Mike Greenwell. Carol loved to share her garden’s bounty, her cooking and her baking with family, friends and neighbors.

She spent thousands of hours crocheting beautiful baby blankets over the years, an art her father taught her. She was even known to crank out a few blankets in record time when some of the babies came as a last-minute surprise to their grandparents.

When one friend balked after Carol “went overboard” by giving the woman’s teenage daughter a wedding gift, a baby gift and a high school graduation gift at the same time because all three events occurred almost simultaneously, Carol responded with her typical, kind-hearted logic. “If she’d done things the traditional way,” Carol said, “I would have given her all three gifts because all three events are things to be celebrated. Why should this be any different just because she went a little out of order and all at once?”

Carol lent a kind, understanding ear and provided gentle guidance, counsel and reassurance to countless friends, family members, students and acquaintances throughout her life, including a friend’s college-age daughter who was on the verge of suicide; a son who was frightened of telling his parents he was gay; a niece whose premature infant was not expected to live (but ultimately did); a neighbor who was terrified to leave her abusive husband; and a transgender high school classmate in 1950s Monroe County, who helped form Carol’s lifelong philosophy of education, understanding, compassion, acceptance, inclusion, and equality for all.

Carol would often tell her family, “If I were forced to make a choice between a white student and a Black student whose grades and conduct were identical, I would choose the Black student because Black people in this country haven’t had the same opportunities white people have.”

These are all examples of why friends have said in the days since Carol’s death, “No one has ever validated me as much as her.” “She was a living angel.” “Her soul [is] golden.”

Carol was a remarkably patient, loving, nurturing and supportive mother, a Herculean feat, considering her own mother didn’t mother her. Yet somehow she escaped her traumatic childhood relatively unscathed and lived her entire life with virtually unparalleled grace, strength, empathy and humility, traits we all deserve to bear witness to in trying times like these.

Besides her parents, Carol was preceded in death by her husband of 55 years, James H. Brown; her sister and brother-in-law, Betty Jean and Burnis England of Tompkinsville; her brother, James Taylor “Jim T.” Walden of Edmonton, Kentucky; her mother-in-law and father-in-law, Jessie Evelyn and Joseph Harl Brown of Cecilia; and her sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Barbara Brown Castle and Andy Castle of Tuttle, Oklahoma.

Survivors include her son, Joey Brown of Elizabethtown; two nieces, Cheri England Cropper (Clark Cropper) of Cookeville, Tennessee, who was like the daughter she never had, and Tammy Walden of Tompkinsville; two nephews, Larry England of Tompkinsville, and Brian Castle (Brandy Castle) of Olathe, Kansas; two great-nieces, Grace Cropper of Memphis, Tennessee and Sabrina Castle (Jamie Hamm) of Overland Park, Kansas; three great-nephews, Mason Cropper of Gallatin, Tennessee, Nicholas Castle of Baltimore, Maryland, and Garrett Castle of Olathe, Kansas; and friends who are like family, including Celia Thomas and family; Regina and Margaret Lancaster; Greg and Patti Stith and family; Martina Spalding and Melissa Gaddie and family; “the Longendyck girls,” Judy Lambert and family; Jim and Carol’s “Black daughter” Pam Harper, Jennifer Douglas, and many others who are too numerous to list.

Joey would like to extend a special thanks to friends and family who have provided a great deal of love and support during these last several difficult months, particularly Anne Hill Armstrong, Kathy Bloyd, the Bob Brown family, Brenda and Jim Bush, Wendy Simpson Campbell, Karen Brassine Dohoney, Dr. Chris Godfrey, Kathy Boling Ledford, Russell and Bridget McKinley, Lari Ann Sharp Pickerell, Belinda and Greg Stark and family, Kent and Connie Leonard Taylor and Emerson, Karen McMahan Willmoth, Cathy Wilson and Brad Wilcox and family, the Catholic communities of St. James, St. Ambrose and St. William (Louisville) where Carol and Joey are members, and Joey’s work family at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) national headquarters in Louisville, with apologies to anyone who has been inadvertently omitted.

Visitation will be held at Brown Funeral Home in Elizabethtown on Thursday, January 22, 2026 from 4 to 8 p.m. and continues Friday from 9 to 10:30 a.m. at the funeral home.

The funeral Mass will be celebrated on Friday, January 23 at 11 a.m. at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Cecilia with Fr. Ben Brown presiding.

Burial will follow at St. James Cemetery.

Attendees are welcome to a meal immediately following the burial at Batcheldor Hall on the St. James Church Campus on West Dixie Avenue in Elizabethtown.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in Carol’s name to the Alzheimer’s Association or the St. Ambrose Catholic Church Capital Campaign.