LEO BROWN/GREGG LEE: MEMORIES OF MY FRIEND

Heaven is now a neater, cleaner place since Leo Brown has been there tidying it up
.
And the angels have a much brighter, clearer sound system thanks to Leo repairing the subwoofer and ‘tweaking’ the high and mid range equalization. The angelic choirs have never sounded more beautiful.

That was Leo…always making things better wherever he was.

Leo Brown, as he was known to radio listeners in CJCB in Sydney, Nova Scotia and Gregg Lee at CJCH in Halifax, 1050 CHUM and CHUM FM in Toronto, passed away on Tuesday July 16th, just a few days after arriving in his native Nova Scotia on an annual summer vacation with his wife Kim Mayo.

To say Leo’s death was a major shock is an understatement. I’m still having difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that I’ll never see or speak with Leo again.

Leo was a close friend for nearly a quarter of a century. He’d usually call when he was sitting in his comfortable chair in the garage with the door wide open to the street, watching the world go by and having ‘a Coke and a smoke’ and we’d talk and talk, many, many times for hours about everything under the sun, the moon and the stars as well as the latest conspiracy theory (he talked, I listened).

After he left CHUM FM, or rather after CHUM FM left him, Leo did a few on-air gigs at Rock 95 in Barrie, near his and Kim’s home in Innisfil. Then for several years, he was a freelance commercial voice for Rogers Radio Toronto. A number of those commercials won awards. Most recently, Leo was a first-call voice-over talent for several agencies and production houses in Quebec.

I hired Leo often. First in 2001, as a commercial voice for CHUM Limited’s ill-fated sports network The Team. A few years later, Leo became my narrator for “Hi-Fi Salutes”, a two season series of interstitial television profiles on pioneering Canadian musicians, disc jockeys and record producers that aired on the Hi-Fi Channel.
Some of these episodes can still be seen on the Canadian Museum of Recorded Music and Culture – cmrmc.ca. Click on ‘Stories’ in the menu bar. 

Our final project together was a year long series of daily 2 minute “Entertainment Express” features for AMI (Accessible Media, Inc.)

Leo was a proud man.
He was proud of what he’d accomplished in life.
He was proud of the life he had with his beloved Kimmie.
He was a proud to be from Cape Breton. 
And I’m proud to have called him friend.
Leo Brown is at last…home!