John Wesley Brown
uncle
John Wesley Brown was my dad’s little brother. He died before we were born so we never met him and we always regretted that fact. Dad loved his brother and told us a number of stories about him. The first one was when my dad and his sisters decided to hang John. They had heard about the hanging of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and had decided to re-enact it on their front porch. They had the noose secured from the side of the porch roof and had John all set to push off with the noose around his neck when Grandpa Brown rounded the corner of the house just in time to stay the execution. 
Then there was the time that John and he were upstairs making a ruckus in bed. Grandpa kept yelling up at them to quiet down but they couldn’t seem to control themselves. The next thing they knew he was up the attic stairs and into their bedroom. He reached into their straw bed and pulled out John, gave him a whipping and threw him back in the bed. Meanwhile dad had crawled to the end of the bed and was lying there very still. So Grandpa Brown reached in a second time and pulled out John again. He whooped him a second time despite John’s protests, and threw him back into the bed again. Dad loved re-telling this story to us!
Later when they were teenagers, they took a break from their hay-baling duties and were sitting under a tree trying to out-do each other with shouting obscenities they had heard. After this had gone on for a while, they heard a loud voice behind them: “Boys, don’t you think it’s about time you got back to work?” Dad said that not only scared them to death; it was the end of their shouting obscenities days!
After the war John never returned home from the Philippines. Aunt Peggy told me that John had been crazy about a girl before the War and while he was gone, she married someone else. That’s the reason he didn’t come home; he was brokenhearted. He had found excellent work there as a driver. He would buy discarded military transport vehicles and use them as an island taxi service.
John died there after a few years from kidney failure. Now that we know about the genetic ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn’s Disease in the family, his death may be related to that.