Shirley Berkowich Brown, who appeared on radio and television to tell children’s stories, died of cancer Dec. 16 at her home in Mount Washington. She was 97.
Born in Westminster and raised in Thurmont, she was the daughter of Louis Berkowich and his wife, Esther. Her parents owned a general store and liquors sales operation. She recalled childhood visits from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as they drove to the presidential weekend getaway, Shangri-La, later known as Camp David.
She met her husband, Herbert Brown, a Travellers Insurance agent and broker, at a dance at the old Greenspring Valley Inn. They married in 1949.
“Shirley was a thoughtful and deeply caring person, always reaching out to anyone who was ill or had a loss. She remembered people with cards and often sent flowers,” said her son, Bob Brown of Owings Mills.
After the death in 1950 of her sister, Betty Berkowich, of stomach cancer, she and her husband founded and operated the Betty Berkowich Cancer Fund for more than 20 years. They hosted fundraisers for more than a decade.
She started telling children’s stories as a young woman, known as Lady Mara or Princess Lady Mara. She joined radio station WCBM in 1948 and broadcast from its studio on the grounds near the old North Avenue Sears store.
She later transitioned to WJZ-TV with her own program, “Let’s Tell a Story,” which ran from 1958 to 1971.
The show proved so popular that whenever she recommended a book to her young listeners, there was an immediate run on it, area librarians reported.
“ABC had me come to New York to do a national storytelling show, but after a couple of days, I walked out and returned to Baltimore. I was so homesick,” she said in a 2008 Sun article.
“My mother believed in memorizing a story. She did not like pictures to be used or any mechanical devices,” said her son. “My brother and I would sit on the floor of the family home on Shelleydale Drive and listen. She was a master of different voices, switching with ease from one character to another.”
As a young woman she also ran the Shirley Brown School of Drama in downtown Baltimore and taught speech and diction at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
Her son said she would be stopped by people on the street asking if she was Shirley Brown the storyteller and then told how much she had meant to them.
She also made three storytelling records for McGraw-Hill educational publishers, including one called “Old and New Favorites,” which included the Rumpelstiltskin tale. She also wrote a children’s book, “Around the World Stories to Tell to Children.”
Family members said that while doing research for one of her newspaper stories, she met Otto Natzler, an Austrian-American ceramicist, Ms. Brown realized there was a lack of museums devoted to ceramics and worked with her sons and others to secure rent-free space at 250 W. Pratt St. and raised funds to outfit the National Museum of Ceramic Art.
“Once she had an idea in her head, she would not stop until she reached her goal,” said another son, Jerry Brown of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. “It was eye-opening for me to see all my mother accomplished.”
The museum remained open for five years. A 2002 Sun article described how she also ran a nonprofit Ceramic Art Middle School Education Program for schools in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.
Her students unveiled “Loving Baltimore,” a ceramic tile mural, at Harborplace. It featured fired, glazed and finished tiles made into a mural intended to give both public arts education and passersby a lift, Ms. Brown said in the article.
“Several of the young artists who crafted the mural’s 36 panels came to witness the whole artwork for the first time yesterday and could not contain a sense of awe,” said the 2002 article.
“She was deeply dedicated to the children,” said her son, Bob Brown. “She had incredible joy watching the children in this program prosper.”
“She never failed to offer welcomed advice,” he said. “She reminded those around her how much she loved them. She also liked to have a laugh together with her loved ones. She never complained.”
Post time: Mar-12-2021