Robert Delford Brown was born in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains during the Great Depression in Portland, Colorado. “It was very rural,” he said in a series of interviews he did with his biographer, the artist and writer Mark Bloch. His father was employed testing cement as a chemical technician. "I was born in Central Colorado in 1930. No one is more American than I am,” he told Bloch in 2006. Both sides of his family had been in the USA since Revolutionary times. His father, whose name was also Robert Delford Brown, was of Irish, German, and Dutch stock, originally hailing from a farm in Illinois. His mother's family were farmers from Kansas. He said that he once told his mother, “If you join the Daughters of the American Revolution, you've lost a son.” Brown was born a Junior but, like the DAR pedigree, dropped it, “I don’t need it.” The family moved to Long Beach when he was 12. “For my benefit,” he added.
