W. Earl Brown has played many, many roles in his 40-plus years of theatre, television and cinema.
He’s Ewing Cook in Apple TV’s “Five Days at Memorial.” A Weequay bartender in Disney+’s “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett.” Dan Dority in HBO’s “Deadwood.” Hugo Root in “Preacher.” John Martorano in “Black Mass.” Teague Dixon in “True Detective.”
He’s Bill in 2013’s most-popular video game “The Last of Us” — now a hit show starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey on HBO. He played “Kenny” in 1996 cult classic “Scream,” and he’s Warren — the lovable mentally-challenged brother of Cameron Diaz — in “There’s Something About Mary.”
But before these opportunities — before his graduations from Second City and DePaul University and Murray State University and Calloway County High School — Brown was born in 1963 of a family deeply rooted in Trigg County’s romanticized Golden Pond.
And just like everyone else had to do in the 1960’s, the Browns twice moved away from the creation of Land Between the Lakes and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Having recently spoke as Murray State’s lecturer in the annual “Presidential Series,” Brown proudly labeled himself “of Golden Pond” — and later shared with the News Edge his fond memories of the quaint community up until the age of 4.
Edgar Brown, his grandfather, ran the pool hall in Golden Pond, and he was a grocer who later took his business to the Eggner Ferry Bridge and then into eastern Calloway County.
The story told to Brown, over the years, is that they were the first family in Golden Pond to own a television — something that brought his father, grandparents and great-grandmother much delight.
It also might’ve spurred his own interest in acting.
At the 1968 Calloway County Fair, not long after the family had relocated, Brown said television became reality in his young mind.
In living near the Eggner Ferry, Aurora and Faxon communities after leaving Golden Pond, Brown said it was just as common to take trips to Cadiz as it was to Murray. Perhaps even more common.
They lived directly between the two cities, and his childhood doctors — John and Elias Futrell — were in Trigg County.
Over the decades, Brown said the idea of Golden Pond never left the hearts and minds of his, and many other, families.
So ingrained and impassioned was the community, Brown’s father, Eddie, took over the grocery business and helped establish Little Golden Pond in 1989 — along US 94, 12 miles outside of Murray.
It was without the world-renown manufacturing of golden corn whiskey — said to have tickled the tongues of many, including the infamous gangster Al Capone, during Prohibition.
But it wasn’t without the memory of a land once and always loved.
Brown’s full MSU presentation:
Brown’s Q&A:
