Obituary
Freda Dorothy Brown, beloved wife, mother, aunt, cousin, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend, passed away on Sunday, April 14, 2024. She died peacefully at 87 years old in Venice, Florida, surrounded by her family after a long struggle with dementia. In our sorrow we take solace in all the years she lived a full, active and vibrant life, with her kindness, generosity, humor and sense of fun bringing joy to so many.
Freda was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on November 7, 1936, the only daughter of Marion and Leonard Goldman. As a girl, she loved attending summer camp and to ride horses, especially her favorite, King. While she did not have siblings, she was the adored “big sister”/older cousin to Elinor Lipman and Deborah Slobodnik, and regaled them with stories of her nights in Manhattan with cousin Larry. She attended Lowell High School and gained her associate’s degree in early childhood education, dedicated to the care of children and young people with learning and physical disabilities. In 1959, she met her husband, the late Norman Brown, in Manhattan at a bar in Greenwich Village, and, as family lore has it, he invited her to listen to Nina Simone sing at nearby bar and proposed marriage that very night.
Norman and Freda raised their three children, Amy, Burt and Toby, on Long Island in New York, in Hauppauge and then Westbury. She and Norman shared a love of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and other singers of the 1960s and attending musical theatre performances. In 1980 Freda and Norman moved to Providence Rhode Island with Toby who was still in high school. For many years Freda was employed by The Rhode Island Blood Center as a recruiter, or, as she liked to say to friends and acquaintances who came up in her dialing system, “It’s Freda, your friendly vampire.”
A few years after becoming widowed in 2011, Freda retired from the blood center and had more freedom to travel. While she and Norman had made frequent trips to Sweden to see her daughter Amy and her family as well as to London, in her 70s she made especially memorable trips to the island of Malta to visit Amy and family and also to Paris with Amy and her oldest granddaughter Marielle. Her greatest joy was spending time with her family especially her five grandchildren and her great-grandson. She was a lifelong cat lover, and mourned the loss of her final feline companion, Pablo Picasso Brown, in 2020, named after her favorite artist.
Freda was an avid reader whose happy place was her local library and she also loved art and touring art museums. She also took up her late husband’s penchant for doing crossword puzzles. Among her favorite activities was engaging in marches and protests for causes she believed in, like peace, gun control and abortion rights, and doing political work on behalf of the Democratic party and candidates she supported. And in her later years in Florida she spent many happy days as a volunteer docent at her favorite local museum, The Marietta Museum of Art & Whimsy.
Freda is survived by her late husband Norman, her children Amy Brown, Burt Brown and Toby Robinson, her granddaughters Marielle, Sara, Cheyenne and Sierra, her grandson Brad, her great-grandson Conan, daughter-in-law Diane Brown, sons-in-law Bjorn Velander and Michael Robinson, and sister-in-law Lillian Waters.
A celebration of life service for family and friends will be held in Venice, Florida on Sunday, May 26 with details to follow. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the following charities in her memory:
Mercy Corps
Planned Parenthood
Everytown For Gun Safety
The Cat Depot, Sarasota
Florida Marietta Museum of Art and Whimsy, Sarasota, Florida
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