The Dispatch reports:
Strickland said McGee Brown’s vivaciousness enhances his re-election chances. But he and others also know her as a smart and demanding public official, who gives no quarter to excuses and demands personal accountability.
“She’s fun, but she also has a serious side and most of that seriousness is based on her own experiences growing up on the East Side of Columbus,” Johnson said.
It was not an easy upbringing. She was born to an unwed teenage mother, her father long gone. If not for her grandmother Eunice Banks, who died at 79 in 1985, McGee Brown has no idea who she might have become. Maybe not a lawyer or a judge or a good mom and wife. Lieutenant governor probably wouldn’t be in the conversation.
“My grandmother is who I got a lot of my strength from,” McGee Brown said.
Born on a sharecroppers’ plantation in Macon, Ga., Banks married an alcoholic who wasn’t around much for their eight kids. When her daughter, Sylvia Kendrick, became pregnant at 18 with McGee Brown, Banks made sure Mom worked to support the new baby.
“Life didn’t give my grandmother a fair shake, but she would always say to me, ‘You go to school, baby, and you learn everything those people have to teach you because once they’ve taught it to you they can never take it back,’” McGee Brown said.
When a professor at Ohio University in Athens urged McGee Brown to go to law school – putting on hold her goal of becoming a congressional press secretary in Washington – she sought Grandma’s advice: “She looked at me and was quiet for a while, and then said, ‘Well, if you’re going to live to be 25 anyway, why not be 25 and be a lawyer?’ ”
Banks died on Christmas Day in 1985, a month after watching her granddaughter be sworn in as a lawyer. A year earlier, she had beamed as her own daughter, Sylvia, received her bachelor’s degree, a 10-year endeavor.
McGee Brown had steady boyfriends at Mifflin High School and OU but waited until age 32 to marry. She was a first-time judicial candidate in 1992 for Franklin County Common Pleas Court and had no time for dating. But she couldn’t resist the fawning attention of Tony Brown, a high-school teacher of learning-disabled students whom she met in church. His wife had died of cancer about a year earlier and he brought 14- and 6-year-old daughters to the marriage.
“He said, ‘I have these girls. I’m not a dater. I’m not going to have women in and out of my house. I have to live a moral life for them.’ And he said he knew I was the one,” McGee Brown said. She and Tony added a son to their family.
It was Tony who persuaded her to run, she said.
When Strickland came calling, McGee Brown was not looking to establish another milestone. She already was the first black woman elected to the Common Pleas Court and would be the third woman, and second African-American, to serve as lieutenant governor. In 2002, she became founding president of the Center for Child and Family Advocacy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and was committed to the mission of serving abused children. The $75,900 lieutenant governor’s salary would mean a $222,890 pay cut.
“I swear to God, I thought I was done with public service,” McGee Brown said. “The center was my baby.”
Even so, she was restless, telling her husband, “I’ve got one more big job in me.”
“Tony said, ‘You belong in public service. You’ve had your foray in the private sector. You’re good at this. You like being with people; you need to get back in.’ ”
Contemplating her husband’s advice, McGee Brown’s eyes were lost in another smile: “God really smiled on me with him.”