This morning finds me a little hollow-eyed, after sitting up all night composing this obit to Roy Brandenburg, a great local hero and writer.
Yesterday evening, I got a call from Teddy Kalmar, informing me of Roy’s passing. He suggested I crank something out for the local country club’s on-line newsletter “HowGreenMyMoney.com”
“I don’t know any other writers,” declared Teddy forthrightly. How could I say no to an entreaty like that???
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Roy Brandenburg was born in 1920 in Cecil County, Maryland where he spent his early years working on his father’s chicken farm. A precocious child, his first experience in publishing consisted of writing earnest homilies to Christian virtue, which the local pastor saw fit to post on the church bulletin board. The town of Eastfield had only a one-room schoolhouse, but young Roy made ample use of that one room.
At the age of 14, after confirmation, his parents sent him to Baltimore County to live with his Uncle Cyrus, where he attended Livingston Parochial School for Boys. Excelling in the three R’s— readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmatic— he became Editor of the school newspaper. Unfortunately, a combination of prankishness, blatant interest in the female anatomy and an all-consuming thirst for comic books got him expelled in 1937.
Becoming a copyboy at the Eastern Shore Clarion newspaper, he honed his writing skills and began churning out a series of short stories and novels that would continue until the present day. Refusing to be cowed, Roy rebuffed the epithet “unpublished author,” preferring to see himself as a “self-published author.” Driving his young wife Betty batty, as soon as Roy was able to scrape some moolah together on his day job, he would publish another novel through the so-called “vanity press.”
A true visionary, Roy prophesied many of the innovations that grace our present day: Roy predicted the universality of indoor plumbing, which was not a given in the 1930’s. He envisioned the national system of highways. In his short story “Venusian Vulva,” he foresaw the rise of the porno industry. Our national fixation on hamburgers, coffee, cupcakes and automobiles all figure prominently in Roy Brandenburg’s oeuvre. “Never Enough Soap”— written in 1943 at the height of war-time rationing— portrayed modern man’s preoccupation with personal hygiene. Roy predicted the demise of pay toilets!
The loss of the pointer finger on his right hand in a farm accident as a child kept Roy from serving in World War Two. Patriotic, he worked instead at OPA, the Office of Price Administration. His coworkers included a young Richard M. Nixon, who would later become 37th president of the United States as well as a homeowner in San Clemente, California. Although not a surfer, Nixon enjoyed the ocean breezes.
After the war, Roy continued in government service, working at GSA, General Services Administration, as a purchasing officer. The sheer volume of ballpoint pens (a relatively new invention), staplers, cellophane tape, typewriter ribbon, White-Out (also new) and other office supplies employed by the U.S. Government led Roy in 1953 to pen his seminal novel, “Beyond the Office In the Sky.”
Affectionately referred to simply as “Office” by Roy’s readers, friends and coworkers, the cost of self-publishing this book so infuriated Roy’s wife Betty, she filed for divorce. “If a man cannot write well enough to interest the general publishing industry,” Betty declared in her deposition, “nor the magazines, newspapers, radio, television or film, I do not think it too much to ask that he stop squandering our life savings, time and again, on high-flying fantasies of writing the Great American Novel.”
Within two years, Roy remarried, this time to Mavis Pearson, something of a sex siren in the town of Oxburg, Maryland. Naturally, this gave Roy much to write about during the remainder of the chaste 1950’s.
Estranged from his first wife and their two children, Roy— accompanied by Mavis— joined the hippies in the 1960’s, living in New Mexico, Colorado and California. Finally tiring of communal life and sex orgies, the two of them returned to Oxburg in 1971, using Roy’s inheritance to purchase a cottage on North 1st Street, which everyone knows, rests on the “wrong side” of The 1812 Hwy.
Undaunted, Roy churned out another 14 works of sci-fi flavored fiction— and innumerable short stories— in the intervening years. The Xerox machine was Roy Brandenburg’s indispensable collaborator. Among Roy’s futuristic predictions was the commercialization of Grape Nut Flakes as a breakfast cereal, the popularization of lobster, facial tissues as a mass consumer product, and newspapers delivered to home subscribers sheathed in cylindrical plastic bags. Roy presciently foresaw the spread of weed-killer, mountain bikes and slurpees as artifacts of pop culture. The eventual decline and fall of suburbia itself has become a recurring theme in Roy’s most recent writing.
Cause of death is not known at this time.
Roy Brandenburg is survived by his first wife, Betty Brandenburg Hutchins of Waldorf, Maryland, and two children from his first marriage, Paul Brandenburg of Buckeystown, Maryland (Brenda) and Susan Brandenburg Miller (Roger) of Washington, D.C., as well as five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
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Now it turns out that Ted Kalmar intended for me to write an obit about the well-known sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. I don’t want to say that my nose is out of joint, but, really, I expected to include this piece on my résumé!
What’s worse, I double-checked ten minutes ago and found that— while creaking at the joints—my neighbor Roy is still alive!
Please view the information I have imparted as material for future reference.
– Kevin
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