FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (September 22, 2022) – Years before Northern Arizona's football program moved inside, and decades before another receiver could replicate his numbers, Charlie Brown was setting records through the cold air of Flagstaff.
A native of Oakland, Calif. and a transfer into Northern Arizona University from Merritt College, just minutes away from his alma mater of Castlemont High School, Brown's transition into the elements as a junior in 1968 led to one of the program's greatest seasons ever for a receiver in 1969.
"He was competing for a starting spot and one of the issues he had was the snow," said Brown's son, Christen Brown as he recalled one of his father's stories. "He said, 'My hands were so cold that it would make it so hard for me to catch the ball'. Just the pain of having those frozen fingers with the ball hitting them off the spiral and getting hit with the laces, it was just tearing them up. And at that point, nobody was wearing gloves. You put some tape on your fingers, but you are still in the elements."
A starter in the final four games of his junior season, Brown finished with 17 receptions for 149 yards and one score as Northern Arizona finished 6-4 as an Independent in 1968. With first-year head coach John Symank, a former Green Bay Packer and University of Florida Hall of Famer, at the helm in 1969, Brown's career took a leap forward.
While the installation of an improved passing game by Symank and the passing ability of his quarterbacks surely aided in the improvement, Brown also prayed for some assistance as well.
"He told me his senior year, before the first game of the season, he said a prayer and asked for good weather for the '69 season," Christen Brown said. "He said he was able to play that whole season without any snowfall and at the end of his last game, after the game was over, there was a blizzard. But the weather held up for his entire senior season."
When the 1969 season concluded, Brown had rewritten the record book for receivers. With 63 receptions, 1,134 yards and 11 touchdowns, Brown owned the program's best mark in all three categories. In fact, he nearly doubled some of them.
Teammate Bob Grey caught a school record 38 passes in 1968, with the mark lasting less than a year thanks to Brown's 63 catches that stood until 1986. Besting Al Rex's 601 yards receiving from 1958, Brown's 1,134 yards held up until 2003 and even stood as the lone 1,000-yard season until 1982. Lastly, the first double-digit touchdown season in program history remained the record until 2003 as well.
Symank remarked during the season that, "Charlie's done an outstanding job. It's reflected in his stats. That's the story in a nutshell."
The NAIA All-American lined up on the strong side of the Lumberjacks' offense along with Northern Arizona's tight end, and went to work on what would eventually be rewarded with a place in the NAU Athletics Hall of Fame.
"Charlie helped put NAU on the map," former teammate Mark Lomas would later say. Lomas, a NAU Hall of Fame inductee himself in 1981 and a member of the New York Jets after being drafted in 1970, offered plenty of praise to a player who produced a record that stands to this day.
"Charlie was the best of the best and he was very disciplined. He would do what his assignment was, wouldn't deviate or change," Lomas said. "You could count on Charlie to do what he was supposed to do."
Finishing with 245 receiving yards against Whitworth in the seventh game of the season, Brown broke the previous single game record of 189 yards, one he himself set a few weeks prior against Montana State. Adding in 192 yards against Weber State a week after the record-setting game against Whitworth, Brown held the top three games in program history until 1977.
"There was no question Charlie was going places. There was no doubt he'd get to the next level after NAU. It was just a matter of where he would go. He was that good," Brown's teammate Steve Holmes would say years later.
Even with the school records at Northern Arizona, and the ensuing NFL career with the Detroit Lions, Brown's quiet humility carried on from his playing career to his parenthood.
"It wasn't anything he bragged about to us," Christen Brown said. "It was something that if you went through his scrapbook, you could look through it but it wasn't like 'Hey children, come sit down and look at what I did.' He wasn't that kind of dad."
Following the conclusion of his playing career, as well as a period of service in the military, Brown modeled and acted before earning a master's degree of education from Cal State East Bay while spending more than 30 years as an institutional officer working with juveniles at the Alameda Probation Department.
"He approached all his achievements with extreme humility," Christen Brown said. "It was something that he did and he was glad that he did it. We are all just extremely proud of all the things that our father was able to do knowing who our dad is to us. We weren't necessarily there to experience him being in the NFL or playing at NAU, but just to be able to look at who our dad was before we met him, it's just amazing."
