Berkeley mourns Ben Brown, skilled cook and stand-up uncle who was ‘loud with positive energy’

Ben Brown, who delighted friends and family with his cooking, prepares a meal at home in Harper Crossing in 2018. Brown was fatally struck by a motorist Nov. 14, 2024. Credit: Kelly Sullivan

What do you do when you lose someone who looked out for everyone?

Friends and relatives of Benten “Ben” Brown, 78, who died last week after a motorist struck him while he was crossing the street in North Berkeley, are grappling with that very question.

Those who loved Brown remembered him as a savvy gourmand, a man generous with his time and attention, a devotee of music and art and tennis and, above all, someone who cared deeply about the world and the people in it.

Brown’s family and friends are hoping to organize a celebration of life in early 2025. In the meantime, Stephanie Mackley, a friend of Brown’s, has organized a GoFundMe on behalf of Brown’s family in Georgia to defray funeral expenses and help them travel to California.

Brown’s niece Angie Perkins said Brown was raised in Macon, Georgia, and spent the early years of his adulthood living in New York, where he met his partner, Alexander “Muli” Reich. Brown and Reich moved to the Bay Area around 1980, she said. They opened a bakery in Berkeley on Shattuck Avenue near Delaware Street, MuliBen, a portmanteau of their names. While Brown gave up the disco scene of 1970s New York, he brought his love of music and passion for movement west with him.

Even though he lived three time zones away, Perkins said, Brown made frequent trips back to visit family in Georgia, typically twice a year.

“He didn’t have children of his own but he always made an effort to be at every event, every milestone for his nieces and nephews, weddings, graduations,” Perkins said. “It sounds simple, but it’s not, because we just don’t have that sort of support from everyone.”

Ben Brown, at home in 2018, died after a motorist struck him in North Berkeley on Nov. 14, 2024. File photo: Kelly Sullivan

Nicole Kyner was a student at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s when she drove downtown to run an errand and happened to park outside MuliBen. “It literally smelled so wonderful that I just ran inside,” she said. “In very short order I was working there,” helping out at the register to help shoulder some of the couple’s burden of bakers’ hours.

The bakery was “this wonderful mashup of Israeli and Southern cooking,” Kyner said.

Faircloth, whose children knew Brown as “Uncle Ben,” has memories of visiting that bakery around age 9. “I just remember this tall figure,” he said. “It would’ve been Ben.”

“They would host a neighborhood, community Thanksgiving … we poured some pretty good wine, the best we could get our hands on, and we just had a blast,” Kyner said. “It was an extraordinary thing for me. I was a pretty young woman at the time and to see people who would have been alone otherwise … that was really an instructive lesson for me.”

A doting uncle and loyal friend

When Reich died in 1990, Brown left the bakery behind. After some time working at the Cheese Board, Brown went to work for Faircloth’s father, Ian, when the elder Faircloth opened the Red Cafe at University Avenue and Bonita Street.

A family friend “brought up Brown as someone he knew who had some culinary background and was a cook and was an interesting character,” Faircloth said. Even though Faircloth was just 17 or 18 at the time, “we became instant friends,” he said.

“I remember him telling me, ‘This kid loves hanging out with me, it’s crazy,’” Kyner recalled Brown saying, speaking of Faircloth.

Brown “was kind of an ageless guy,” moving seamlessly between older and younger groups of friends and acquaintances, Faircloth said. “He was there for me as a great friend, then when I became a father in 2010 he became Uncle Ben and kind of took over and was super supportive.”

The man who doted on his blood nieces and nephews — and later, grandnieces and grandnephews — showed the same devotion to his adopted ones. “With Matt and his children, he was always at their games,” Perkins said.

Matthew Faircloth, a friend of Ben Brown, who died last Thursday after being struck by a motorist, organized a memorial at the intersection of Josephine and Rose streets in North Berkeley. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/ CatchLight Local

“He came to everything, and he wasn’t going to get away with not getting a hug, doing something to make a real connection with him,” Faircloth said.

Faircloth would speak to Brown nearly every day, if not in person then by phone. Brown also began joining the Faircloths for Thanksgiving.

“You’ve got to save me, they’re doing a vegan Thanksgiving,” Brown, an omnivore, joked one year, as Kyner remembered.

“He had a passion for lamb, and he cooked a great lamb,” Perkins said of Brown. He had an alchemical flair for cooking, an ability to take whatever happened to be laying around and transform it into something delicious. “He didn’t like waste, so he would definitely play around with things and put things together,” Perkins said.

“I remember he made a gravy at Thanksgiving, I’m like, ‘I’ll never make gravy again,’” Kyner said. Salmon paired with roasted potatoes, hummus, homemade pickles, his own version of a secret sauce — whatever it was, Brown would nail it.

And “he was the best dancer I’ve ever seen,” Kyner said.

Loud in a good way — at sports games and on human rights

Brown eventually went to work for the Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, spending the last 14 years of his career there before retiring.

The few times Brown would be out of touch for a few days, Faircloth knew he would be watching tennis. Brown was an avid player as a younger man and remained an eager fan later in life.

“Ben was loud — loud in a good way, loud with positive energy,” Faircloth said. “Some people are too intimidated to make noise … You’d hear Ben before you’d see him, even at a soccer match, he’s 20 feet away and he’s starting to announce his presence.”

Brown “would acknowledge every person in his space,” greeting anyone he happened to pass in the street, Faircloth said. “That takes a lot of emotional maturity to do that.”

Tall and rangy, standing 6 feet, 3 inches and with what Kyner described as a “beautiful, deep James Earl Jones voice,” Brown built networks wherever he went. “God forbid you go to a farmers market (with Brown),” she said. “It was like this barter system that I was not tapped into personally but benefitted from, because we’d leave with beautiful loaves of bread and fish … I don’t remember any transactions.”

And Brown used that voice.

“Wherever there was injustice, Ben was ready to march, to speak on it, to voice his concerns. He was very much a man of the people,” Kyner said.

“He was very big on human rights, and just always concerned with the state of the country and who we were putting in office,” Perkins said. “He was probably more concerned than anyone else that we knew, and when I say that, I mean he felt it at a very deep level.”

“It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing to have a heart like that, but I was always concerned; I just wished that he could let it go so he could enjoy himself, enjoy life for a minute,” Perkins said. “He was a happy person, but at the same time, I think he had some sadness about the state of the world.”

“I think he was just against the mistreatment of humans,” Faircloth said, “an activist in supporting people in need.”

A shocking death

His last night alive, Brown had gone to watch Faircloth’s son’s soccer game at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.

After the game, Brown hugged Faircloth’s kids, and reminded Faircloth to be sure to send him a schedule of soccer games.

Faircloth rode his bike home while the kids got a ride with their mother, and then he went to meet his father for around an hour, and happened to leave his phone at home.

“When I came back, it was all these missed calls from Georgia and all these other numbers,” Faircloth said. “This is doctor so-and-so, I’m calling about your friend.”

Perkins got a similar call while at work, but later in the evening for her, as she was on Eastern time. Doctors told her at first that Brown was in very bad shape, already braindead. A few hours later another call brought the final news.

“You can never be prepared,” Perkins said. “This being so sudden, he wasn’t sick or anything like that, was a very big shock … we’re still in that phase where it doesn’t necessarily seem real.”

Kyner and Mackley found out from Faircloth.

Kyner was watching a movie with her her husband when Faircloth called. He “was in a panic and he told me, and then I started screaming,” Kyner said. “I handed the phone to my husband and then I ran upstairs to go drive, and then he came upstairs and told me not to.”

Mackley was on campus at UC Berkeley, where she works, and had had her phone off. When she turned it on later that evening, Faircloth had texted her that Brown had been struck by a car and killed. “I just texted him back the word ‘no,’ and then I called him. … He told me what happened and, for me, it was horrifying to think of Ben being killed in this way, and equally horrifying to know Matthew had lost Ben.”

Brown was just starting to walk back to his most recent home, at Harper Crossing in South Berkeley, about two miles away, to start cooking the evening’s meal. Years before, Brown had lived in an apartment inside a house just off the intersection where he was hit.

Brown preferred walking for his errands rather than to have anything delivered.

“He walked everywhere, he didn’t drive,” Kyner said. “I saw him once in the ’80s behind the wheel of a car, and I was shocked.”

“I’ve been trying to talk him into moving to Georgia for quite some time,” Perkins said. “He would always say, ‘There’s no convenience, I won’t be able to just walk down the street and grab my coffee.’”

A memorial at Josephine and Rose streets

Brown’s Berkeley circle has built a memorial for him at Josephine and Rose streets, full of pictures, flowers and handwritten letters.

“Thank you for everything you have done and we will always keep you alive wherever and whatever we do,” Faircloth’s daughter Ella wrote to Brown, in a letter commemorating years of family trips and passed-down recipes and inside jokes. “Thank you for your love, support and happiness. Thank you for your shining smile.”

“He knew who he was and he was comfortable with who he was, and he was curious about everybody and he really honored the deep humanity of every human that he encountered,” Mackley said. “And that’s so important for all of us to learn.”

“He was just absolutely present in a way that I find very instructive,” Kyner said. “Not everybody gets that lesson.”

Perkins had a childhood dream of becoming a writer before getting “sidetracked with life,” she said. Brown would rib her: “When are you going to write my book? Somebody’s got to write my story,” she said. “He wanted that left behind.”