Kalispell business pioneer Jack Brown dies at 95

Jack Brown, one of the founding fathers of modern Kalispell, has died at the age of 95.

Brown opened the grocery store now known as Smith’s in 1950 with his brother-in-law Arnold Beck, giving the store its distinctive B&B name, which was retained for many years after Fred Meyer acquired ownership in the early 1960s.

The B&B was a central hub for Kalispell life for dozens of years, and included not just the grocery store, but a restaurant, beauty shop, barbershop, pharmacy, laundromat and variety store where you could find everything from hardware and furniture to videotapes, candy and clothing. It was a meeting place as well as a shopping center.

In a 1999 interview with Inter Lake reporter Jim Mann, Brown reflected on his 60 years in the grocery business.

“Certainly that was something that was always dear to my heart — the loyalty that there has been with the customers. There are families with parents who traded there, and now their kids are trading their as well.”

Beck split from the business after just three years, but another brother-in-law, Melvin Lane, became Brown’s partner in 1953.

Brown and Lane opened the Columbia Falls store in 1954, and later a third B&B store in Polson.

The Kalispell store originally occupied just a small lot on the corner of Third Avenue East and Idaho.

“It was only 4,000 square feet and it was just groceries. We added on several additions and ended up with what you see there now,” Brown said in 1999 when it was a sprawling shopping center. Smith’s later demolished the old building and replaced it with a large, modern grocery store.

Brown was born in Havre on June 18, 1922, and moved to the Flathead Valley with his family in 1936 and graduated from Flathead County High School. He married Cecille Sykes in 1939 and leased Sykes Grocery from his father-in-law in 1940 at the age of 18.

Brown’s early business career was recounted in an Inter Lake story celebrating the opening of the new expanded B&B shopping center in 1958.

“In 1942, he bought the store from Cecil Sykes, after finishing a one-year stint in the Air Force. For five years, Brown operated his store, enlarging and improving it, and then he sold it back to Sykes … while he looked around for a new opportunity in the grocery field.”

That came a few years later when he purchased a lot on Third Avenue and Idaho Street where Smith’s is now located. The original store was just 42-by-100 feet in size, but Brown aimed big.

“We want to make certain that the types of businesses we bring to Kalispell will serve the community, and be a credit to the Flathead,” Brown said in 1958.

Brown later said he rebuffed early buyout offers from Safeway and instead sold the business to a Spokane wholesaler, Roundup Grocery, in 1959. But he retained ownership of the properties.

“I was an independent and battling the chains and it went against the grain for me to sell out to my competition, Brown said in 1999.

The budding Fred Meyer chain acquired the stores from Roundup Grocery by 1964, and Brown became fast friends with Fred Meyer himself.

He sold the real estate to Meyer, who retained Brown as an advisory manager of the Kalispell store and Melvin Lane as manager of the Columbia Falls store.

Both men supervised operation of the local stores until their full-time retirement in the late 1980s, Brown said.

In addition to serving on the board of the Montana Food Distributors Association and other industry organizations, Brown was active in civic works throughout his business career, and was a member of several civic organizations including the Elks, American Legion, Eagles Lodge and Lions Club. He was a former director of the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce, and former president of the Kalispell Golf Association.

Brown died on Thursday at his home in Kalispell. Services will be at 11 a.m. Monday at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Kalispell. Burial will follow at Conrad Memorial Cemetery immediately following the services.

A full obituary appears in today’s paper.