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Garthe Brown, who died in 2010, was one of the state's most acclaimed and industrious tax attorneys, eventually bequeathing $43.1 million to the Oregon Community Foundation.

(Courtesy Caroline Stutevoss)

If you've never heard of

, you never needed his help with your taxes or your inheritance.

He was a genius on tax law and estate planning -- deciphering the tax code, maximizing your return -- and utterly addicted to his work. "He really couldn't stop," says Lyle Lien, a CPA who partnered with Brown for 40 years. "He used to boast he had 80 billable hours every week. I don't think it was an idle boast."

He was brilliant and meticulous, disciplined and cautious. On the one week each year he took a stab at vacation, Brown invariably steered his family toward a client whose portfolio he could massage while his children hit the beach.

"There were clients who didn't even know he was married," says Caroline Stutevoss, his daughter, and one of two children who never would have guessed he was rich. When Brown added Caroline to his auto-insurance policy, he insisted she pay the difference in premiums. When she turned 16, he insisted she go to work, as a waitress at Dan and Louis' Oyster Bar, whereupon, Stutevoss says, "I was responsible for all my clothes."

Three years after Brown's death at 95, witnesses to his work ethic still marvel over it. "I don't know that anyone could accumulate $50 million on an hourly fee," says Rich Canaday, an attorney at Miller Nash. "There aren't enough hours in the day."

That's what bothered Garthe Brown. That's why he worked 12 hours a day, only slightly less on weekends. And when he died in March 2010 -- "The only day he didn't check the stock market," Stutevoss says -- that's why he was survived by an estate of $58 million, more than $43 million of which he entrusted to the

.

He was a workaholic, everyone concedes. He remains intriguing testimony on time, money and the return on those investments.

*****



On

list of the most generous donors in 2012, the first three Oregonians -- the late

, Brown's long-time friend, and

-- rank seventh and 12th. When you slide the cursor over their black-and-white photographs on the philanthropy.com website, their cheeks magically flush with color.

Not Garthe and Grace Brown. Their $43.1 million gift to the OCF ranks them No. 32, but their citation is attached to a faceless gray silhouette, an awfully drab sendoff for a guy who was so fond of Hawaiian shirts that Stutevoss placed one in his casket.

Born in 1914, Brown grew up on a Troutdale farm. By the time he turned 16, he'd seen his father lose his shirt on an Idaho gold mine and watched his father die.

He bulled through the Depression working with the

s, then enlisted at the Northwest School of Law. When he graduated in 1941, he was totally immersed in the tax code and wanted to share everything he knew.

"There was no gray in his vocabulary," Stutevoss says. "That's why he was a financial person, not a trial attorney. In accounting, there isn't any gray. Either it balances or it doesn't."

Garthe and Grace married in 1944; they adopted two children, Stuart and Caroline, in the mid-to-late '50s. Working in a law office with Bob Jacob and Randall Jones, Brown was soon pulling in clients like Fields, who would eventually become CEO of Coe Manufacturing; Lena Pierce; the Schnitzer family; and a diverse collection of eastern Oregon ranchers.

Once he snared those clients, Brown rarely, if ever, lost them. "His clients were incredibly loyal to him," Lien says. "They wouldn't make a move without running it by Garthe."

They could never find the equal to his diligence and attention to detail. Canaday still remembers Brown appearing at depositions in his 80s: "He'd come in with that walker with the tennis balls, wearing a pinstripe suit, a Hawaiian shirt and Birkenstocks, with most of his face shaved.

"Then he'd stun everyone with his knowledge of the tax code."

He used that knowledge through the years to lessen the sting of the estate tax, which packed a top rate of at least 55 percent until 2001.

How much disdain did he feel for that tax? "Those of us who knew Garthe," says Jeffrey Thede, the Portland attorney who drafted Brown's own estate plan, "were not at all surprised he decided to pass away in a year where there was no estate tax."

Brown was also "one of the few attorneys who advocated for charitable giving in your estate," adds

, the president of the Oregon Community Foundation from 1987 until 2011. The government was hard pressed to tax your charitable gifts, Brown reminded his clients, and you could alter the course of your community by nourishing its nonprofits.

He practiced what he preached. "He lived his life not to accumulate wealth for himself, but to bequeath it," Chaillé says. He didn't need a lavish home in Dunthorpe or an extensive wardrobe. "Two pairs of shoes," Stutevoss says, "and three suits: the one he wore, the one at the cleaner, the one in the closet."

He was also frugal, for many years, with his time and emotions.

"My dad wasn't very demonstrative," Stutevoss says. "There wasn't a lot of hugging and kissing in his family. He never told any of us that he loved us."

Never? "That was just him. He and my mom held hands until the day she passed, but he just didn't say the three words. We'd say, 'Love you, dad,' and he'd go, 'Uh huh.'"

Then he'd go back to work, arriving at the office at 8:15 a.m., often staying until 9 p.m., putting in the hours so that his family would never want for anything. Except, of course, precious moments with him.

*****



We've all known those guys. Maybe they were bruised by the Depression. Maybe they still bear the tread marks from one of those days when the market tanked.

Or maybe they're simply convinced they are most needed, and most valuable to everyone they love, when they are making money, not vacation plans.

"I know a lot of people like that," Canaday says. "There are often casualties. Divorces. Children who don't talk to you."

The Browns were luckier than that. Garthe's precision with numbers was such that he waited until a minute after midnight on Feb. 13 to propose to Grace, so that they would always celebrate their anniversary on Valentine's Day.

Grace and the children simply had to live with the fact that Brown was so devoted to his vocation that he'd get up early on New Year's morning to do his taxes.

"I've never met anyone like him," Lien says. "While I have a lot of admiration for him, I can see where the family felt short-changed. He worked practically every day of the year. It was kind of an obsession he couldn't do anything about. He wanted to work as hard as he could, and save as much money as he could."

Lien pauses. He is 80 and he sounds wistful: "I have to say: Garthe didn't take a nickel of it with him."

No. He didn't. But he left $43.1 million in the hands of the Oregon Community Foundation, creating an endowment for 10 of his favorite organizations. Twenty-five percent of the annual return on that money will go in perpetuity to the OHSU Foundation for heart surgery or treatment; Brown was always grateful for the care OHSU provided his son, Stuart, before he died of a heart ailment in 2003.

The other beneficiaries of that designated fund include Volunteers of America, the American Red Cross and the Louis Schnitzer Scholarship Fund at Lewis & Clark College.

Brown was also instrumental in connecting Fields with OCF. When the final tallying of Fields' gift -- for "education and the arts in Oregon" -- is complete, Max Williams, the foundation president said, it will total $166 million.

Those are powerful numbers on the black-and-white ledger of what a man leaves behind.

Either it balances or it doesn't.

In her father's later years, Stutevoss is convinced, he realized something had spun out of balance. Once Caroline had children, there were more trips, more vacations. "He was so afraid he would die before the kids got old enough to remember him," she says. "By the time my kids were in sixth grade, they'd been to Australia three times."

He bought a house at the beach. He took two weeks off. "We went to Hawaii a lot. That was his favorite place. And he loved Disneyland and Disney World," Stutevoss says. "He loved experiencing them through the eyes of our children because he never really got to be a kid."

She misses her father. She long has. She always will. Her devotion to him has never flagged. "Every decision I make about money? I always say, 'What would Grace and Garthe do in the same situation?"

And every decision about time?

Well, yes, her father provided lessons about that, too.

-- Steve Duin