John A. Brown

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

John A. Brown Company, usually called Brown’s, became an Oklahoma City retail landmark in 1932, when John A. Brown bought out the Rorabaugh interest in the old Rorabaugh-Brown dry-goods business. Its downtown flagship grew across adjoining West Main Street storefronts and became the kind of sprawling store where shoppers could take lunch in the Colonial Lunch Room, pause at the soda fountain, and lose track of both time and their shopping list.

Brown died in 1940, and his widow, Della Dunkin Brown, led the company until her death in 1967. The store became a regional institution, adding locations in Norman and Oklahoma City’s suburbs, plus Tulsa. Downtown Brown’s was famed for elaborate animated Christmas-window displays—a yearly mechanical spectacle designed to separate families from their schedules and, ideally, their cash.

Dayton-Hudson acquired the company in 1971 but retained the John A. Brown name. As shopping shifted to malls, the original downtown and Capitol Hill stores closed in 1974; the hoped-for downtown Galleria replacement never materialized. In 1984, Dayton-Hudson sold six Brown’s stores to Dillard’s, ending the independent chain and ushering the familiar name off the sales floor.

Our John A. Brown collection celebrates Oklahoma City’s grand department-store ghost: a Main Street original of pneumatic tubes, lunch counters, holiday windows, and the glorious pre-digital art of making an afternoon out of buying a pair of gloves.