By Bob Ray Sanders
bobray@star-telegram.com
When I first wrote about Emiel "Amos" Brown in 1999, I called him "lucky."
Four years later in this space I referred to him as "blessed."
In recent years, while recounting his remarkable story to others, I've simply said he is "a living testimony."
Affectionately known as "the popcorn man" at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth, where he volunteered for years, Brown's initial encounter with me was an amicable, but adversarial one.
He had called to voice his displeasure with a column about the lottery in which I noted several instances of people who spent too much of their income each week chasing pipe dreams. They had become obsessed, I said, with this state-sanctioned gambling scheme that most would never win.
Brown invited me to his house to prove that not all lottery players were foolish enough to overspend on tickets and that some indeed did win. He said he usually bought $5 worth of quick-pick Cash 5 tickets three times a week, and in that past year he had won two jackpots worth a total of almost $100,000.
Except for the amount used for taxes and church tithes, he had put the money in savings rather than spend it.
Of course, I checked his story out and, sure enough, the Texas Lottery Commission confirmed his winnings.
As I got to know him better, I began to learn about a man whose smiling face and calm demeanor disguised a lot of pain he had endured in life, including an unbelievable number of medical problems that led to multiple surgeries.
He had been declared dead or dying on more than one occasion.
In 1961, when he lived in El Paso, Brown's parents were called and told their 23-year-old son was not expected to live after having been beaten by an unknown attacker.
The following year he was involved in a bad automobile accident, and the local paper the next day printed that he was "dead on arrival" at the hospital.
His first heart surgery came in 1969 after he was stabbed in the chest.
After that he had two shoulder surgeries, five back surgeries (after falling through a roof at work), a triple bypass and several other health issues that sent him to the hospital.
His wife, Delois, died of cancer in 1997.
His most enjoyable times at the hospital were when he was selling popcorn, where several years he had record sales.
When I got a call from him last year, he wanted me to come by for the latest news. He was smiling when he told me his right leg had been amputated below the knee and he had a new prosthetic he wanted to demonstrate. He also had made an appointment with the hospital to see when he could start selling popcorn again.
But a series of other issues, including kidney failure, kept him from his favorite volunteer job.
He was placed on dialysis three times a week, and in the fall of 2010 a doctor told him he would not leave the hospital alive.
He told me at the time, "Doctors know a lot of things, but they don't know when you're going to die."
Brown, of course, proved the doctors wrong again. He did leave the hospital, got a newer model prosthetic limb, fulfilled his wish of walking into church without the use of a walker and, in September, got remarried to longtime friend Glenda Walker.
He passed out numerous copies of his "testimony," recounting his hardships and heartaches, while giving the glory to God for his blessings.
On Dec. 17, while a patient at the hospital that recorded him as its first African-American volunteer, 73-year-old Amos Brown took his last breath.
He would want his family, friends and the world to know what he had written in his printed testimony:
"I am a living witness. I
know there is a God."
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.817-390-7775
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