Rowland Brown

Rowland Brown (November 6, 1900 – May 6, 1963), born Chauncey Rowland Brown in Canton, Ohio, was an American screenwriter and film director, whose career as a director ended in the early 1930s after he started many more films than he finished. He walked out of State's Attorney (1932), starring John Barrymore. He was abruptly replaced as director of The Scarlet Pimpernel. As a writer, he was credited with twenty or so films including two Academy Award nominations, one in the 11th Academy Awards for Best Original Story Angels with Dirty Faces and another in the 4th Academy Awards for Doorway to Hell.

Chauncey Rowland Brown was the first child of Hannah and Samuel Gilson Brown, native Ohioans. In 1900, the year Rowland was born, his father was a thirty-year-old electrician in Canton, Ohio. Twelve and a half years later he had become a successful realtor in the same town. Then, on April 4, 1913, the family was packed and ready to leave for Panama, when Samuel Gilson Brown had a massive heart attack. He was rushed to and Akron hospital, where he died.. Samuel Brown's unexpected death left his widow, Hannah Rowland Brown, to raise their four children, Chauncey, Samuel Gilson, Marguerite, and Jean) alone. By default, twelve-year-old Chaunce had become the "man of the family." In 1915, Hannah married Walter J. Maytham, a successful engineer, who brought along his own five children. Two years later, on April 6, 1917 when the U.S. declared war on Germany, forty-year-old Walter Maytham and sixteen-year-old Rowland Brown rushed to enlist. Both were turned down, Maytham because of a "deformed toe" and Brown because he was too young. November 9, 1917, three days after Chaunce turned sixteen, Hannah gave birth to her third son, John Rowland Maytham.

Because of his earlier rejection by the United States Navy, on his second try Rowland Brown lied about his age. (The fictitious year of birth, 1897, appears on his subsequent registration in the Navy Auxiliary Reserve and is widely given in both books and web sources.) For all of his desire to participate in the war, The Official Roster of Ohio Soldiers in World War I, p240, shows that Brown wasn't called to active duty until Nov 4/18 to Nov 11/18. He had just one week of active duty, which he served at Great Lakes Naval Training Station on the shore of Lake Michigan — just in time to hear the guns of the The War to End all Wars" fall silent. The Roster also shows that he served as a seaman second class for an additional 135 days before being released on April 27, 1919, and received an Honorable Discharge September 30, 1921, the cause being a "Lack of funds."

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