BIG enough

With humor and persistence, Mark Brown has seen his life change and his future expand

Stories By Katya Cengel | Photos by Bill luster | The Courier-journal
kcengel@courier-journal.comThe Courier-Journal

"Caddyshack" is playing on the television.

It's a favorite of Mark Brown's.

So are Westerns.

His home in Southern Indiana is filled with cowboy and horse figurines. His back porch has more of a NASCAR theme with the whiz of traffic from a nearby state road, a sunken hot tub and a "Dale Jr. Blvd." mock street sign.

It's the perfect home for a 47-year-old single man. And a far cry from the one he grew up in.

He has nine siblings, eight still living.

"They're all average," he says.

Quickly correcting himself, he adds, "size, size." His siblings are all average size.

Brown is 4 feet 2 inches, about the height of a second-grader.

He is an achondroplastic dwarf, the most common kind, accounting for about 70 percent of all cases of dwarfism. A spontaneous genetic mutation at conception occurring in one per 26,000 to 40,000 births, achondroplasia is characterized by disproportionately short arms and legs.

Or, in Brown's words: "short limbs, big head, big butt." At least that's how one little person would describe it to another at a Little People of America conference, he says.

He attended his first LPA conference in the mid-1990s. In a photo taken during that trip, he is in the front row, kneeling.

"That was the first time someone asked me to go down in front," he says.

He started a Kentucky chapter of the support organization for people of short stature the following year. He has photos of that as well, from the chapter's annual pool party. Pointing to a picture of the pool, he jokes: "It's crowded down there in the three-foot end."

His siblings have their own stories involving Mark's sense of humor.

Andrea Bellis, an older sister, likes to tell about the time she was walking with him and a group of kids started shouting, "Hey midget!" and other unpleasant things. Mark, she says, "just looked at me and said, 'Looks like I've got a fan club.' "

Older brother Steve Brown tells how Mark got a free hat. Mark asked a woman selling hats with logos at a local business: "Why do you want to charge me? Everybody looks at me. I can give you more advertising wearing your hat."

But it isn't all a joke.

About the same time Mark joined LPA, he learned to drive a car. He was 36 years old. He moved out of his mother's home when he was 42.

Being on his own is the best thing that ever happened to Mark, says Steve. But it was slow in coming and is still new enough to seem tenuous.

"He worries more about losing his house and losing his independence than anything else," Steve says.

'A great kid'

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Brown family gathers at Churchill Downs for gambling and gorging. They have been coming here for more than 20 years and occupy quite a few tables. When asked how many grandchildren she has, Mark's mother, Doris Brown, uses her fingers.

"Oh Lordy, let me count," she says.

There are 16, and seven great-grandkids, and one great-great-grandchild.

Doris was 22 when she left England to join the American soldier she married near the end of World War II. It was 23 years before she went back to visit. "When you've got nine children to raise, you can't walk off and leave them," she says.

There were 10, but a daughter died in infancy. Mark was the third to last child. When he was born, the doctor asked Doris if she'd noticed her baby's legs. She replied: "He looks pretty good to me."

But when she looked closer, she noticed her little boy had short arms and legs. It didn't change the way she raised him.

"Mom never treated him like a different child," Steve Brown says.

The only difference, says eldest daughter Beverly Vincent, was that Mark could do "crazy tricks" for her friends, like going from sitting down with his legs straight in front of him to standing without bending his knees.

"He was a great kid. Everyone loved him. Everybody knew him," Bellis says. "I mean, even the garbage men would drive down the street and holler at Mark."

In their South End neighborhood and the tightly knit Catholic community they belonged to, Mark was both treated like everyone else and also protected, she says. He played football and baseball with the neighborhood kids and even played on his Catholic grade school's basketball team until eighth grade. That's when he says a priest told him, "We don't need no mascots this year."

As he grew older and saw his six older siblings move away from home, comments like the priest's became more common. Discovering he was "not normal," after always having been treated as "normal," was a difficult adjustment for Mark, says Steve. It also was an adjustment for the siblings. When people started to laugh and stare at Mark at a Pizza Hut, Vincent says, she wanted to stop them. But Mark wouldn't let her.

"He said, 'Don't. I go through this all the time.' "

Bellis says she and several other siblings had a similar experience during a celebration on the river one year. People were calling Mark a midget and pointing at him.

"It just killed us," she says. "I mean, as protectors we just never thought that people would do that, I guess. But he had been experiencing that all along when we weren't around, and we didn't realize it."

A step behind

Mark learned a long time ago not to try to keep up with friends when walking.

And for a long time, he stayed behind in other ways as well. After high school, he had "big dreams" of a steady job and a house. Instead, he continued living at home with his mother and went from job to job, working as a bartender for a while and most recently in quality control at PSC Office Products.

His supervisor, Bernie Stillman, describes him as a good employee who listens well, is attentive and gets along with most people. But, she says, she has been tempted to do things for him she knows he can do himself.

"It's just that you think of him as a child, you know," she explains.

Bellis knows. While the family never treated the adult Mark like a child, she says, there were certain things they figured he would never be able to do. Driving was one of them.

"We just always thought his life was limited -- in our minds," she says.

But as Bellis got older, she began to see things differently. She grew closer to Mark, and when she found an article on Little People of America, she decided to tell her brother about it. Mark eventually founded the Kentucky chapter and for a while was its president.

"It changed his life …," says Bellis. "It gave him a vision to see where he could be in the future because he saw other people able to accomplish so much more."

He learned that there were pedal extensions that would make it possible for him to drive. Bellis' husband, Bill, bought him his first set and taught him to drive. It was something, she says, Mark had never thought he would be able to do. And it made it possible for him to find his own place.

And through LPA, says Bellis, he also discovered that women were interested in him.

"I guess it gave him more of a future outlook on his life," she says. "He wasn't so limited, in a box -- probably that we all had put him in -- but LPA took him out of the box."

It didn't, however, change the fact that he is a little person with a body that is far from perfect. In 1985, Mark underwent back surgery. He went under the knife again after a car accident in 1996. Problems with his back have left the top of his arms and his lower left leg numb. He can walk, but worries that in the future he may have to use a wheelchair.

Despite that, the strong desire to be taller, which he had when he was younger, has cooled.

"I'd have to go to Wal-Mart and buy a whole new wardrobe if I did get taller," he says, ever the comedian.

Reporter Katya Cengel can be reached at (502) 582-4224.

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