Milford S Brown

Milford “Skip” Slagen Brown, 93, was born July 2, 1932, in Cambridge, Maryland, and passed away on February 12, 2026, in Richmond, California. He will be cremated and inurned at Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose, California. He is survived by his wife and his only son. Services are not planned.

On the evening before his passing, he, and his wife were watching Winter Olympic Ice Skating. The next morning, a hospital workup revealed he had suffered a heart attack — one he survived. Throughout the following day, his breathing became more difficult, though he remained in good spirits, smiling at the medical staff tending to him. In the early evening, he drifted toward sleep, and within an hour, his journey was complete.

Born during the Great Depression, my grandmother often said that neither she nor my grandfather had “two nickels to rub together.” Even so, a healthy baby boy arrived on July 2, 1932. He soon earned the nickname “Skip.” As a child, he was anything but typical for the time — salvaging parts from discarded radios at the local radio repair shop, performing chemistry experiments, and building model airplanes.

Academics came easily to him. He attended Aberdeen High School before transferring to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute his senior year. He went on to the University of Delaware to study physics. When the department disbanded, he switched to chemistry, eventually earning his PhD in biochemistry from Penn State University. A postdoctoral position at the University of California, Davis brought him west, and he later moved to the Bay Area to work at the USDA Western Regional Research Center. The answer to his largest research project — developing self‑fertilizing crops — has not been revealed to researchers to this day.

After he moved to the Bay Area, he met his soon to be wife and the two became loving parents of a son. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the family was involved in countless hobbies and projects. Beyond being a capable bicyclist, auto mechanic, Japanese woodworker, and bonsai horticulturalist, house renovation was the largest of them over the years.

Perhaps to a fault, dad was easygoing and level‑headed. In a time before the internet, when information was harder to find, he shared countless hours of knowledge — building something electronic, assembling a bicycle from spare parts, and later helping his son craft full‑sized furniture in the basement workshop.

During the COVID pandemic, one of his doctors jokingly told him he had “won the race” after he recovered from the virus with little more than the symptoms of a common cold. My mother and I survive him, grateful for his long life, his quiet steadiness, and the many gifts he passed on.