Milton Brown, 90, longtime Harvard business professor

His teaching career began abruptly when McNair, who had organized the graduate school's first marketing and retailing courses, "just walked into my Morgan Hall office at around 11 o'clock one morning and said, 'Why don't you teach my class at 2?' I was paralyzed with fear, but I did it," he told an interviewer for a school publication in 1988.

Never moving "more than 6 inches from the notes I had laid out all over the desk at the front of the room," he made it through that first class and went on to become one of the school's most respected professors, teaching future business leaders for the next 45 years.

Professor Brown, who also formerly served as chairman and chief executive officer of the Harvard Coop, died April 25 of complications of pneumonia, at the Ridge at RiverWoods retirement community in Exeter, N.H. He was 90 and for many years had divided his time between Weston and a summer house he had designed with his wife in North Lovell, Maine.

Semester after semester, Professor Brown taught in Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program, introducing generations of general managers to the nuances of marketing. He also conducted research that shed light on retailing, a field that grew and changed rapidly during the early decades of the baby boom. The statistics were summarized in 50- to 60-page booklets, known as "Harvard Reports," which were published until 1963.

"I didn't expect the AMP [Advanced Management Program] participants I taught to do the marketing for their companies," he said in the interview for the business school publication. "I wanted them to learn the basic principles and know what was going on in the field, so that they could understand what the marketers in their firms were working on and what their problems were."

Rather than lecturing, Professor Brown taught by the case study method, in which teachers facilitate discussions based on real life situations. McNair, his mentor, had helped pioneer the case study style of teaching.

"I've always felt that when it comes to business, theory is relatively shallow," Professor Brown said in the 1988 interview. "By analyzing hundreds of cases at HBS, our students participate in a wide array of business experiences and decisions."

Stephen A. Greyser, the Richard P. Chapman professor of marketing at the school, arrived in 1956 for his first class at Harvard Business School and found Professor Brown at the front of the room.

Professor Brown "focused students' attention on the consumer in terms of the buying process and its implications for selling and marketing programs," Greyser said. "He had an instinctive capability to push people to try to understand how customers thought."

Greyser added that Professor Brown "was a great case [study] method teacher, and of course a major figure in retailing."

"In my judgment, he did not act in a classroom as if he was trying to be a star," Greyser said. "He was interested in advancing the ball, advancing the insights."

Walter J. Salmon, the Stanley Roth, Sr. professor emeritus of retailing at Harvard Business School, said in a statement that Professor Brown "had an almost magical ability to engage students and get them involved in meaningful discussions about important issues in a case study."

Born in Yonkers, N.Y., Milton Peers Brown II grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where he played flute and piccolo in school bands and orchestras. He graduated from high school and went to Harvard in 1936, returning home the following summer to work as a clerk in a department store.

"That was the beginning of my interest in retailing," he told the business school interviewer.

Professor Brown put that slender experience and his years of voluminous research and teaching to good use while overseeing the Harvard Coop, which added branches and tripled its sales during his tenure of more than two decades.

He also served as a director for several stores and corporations, beginning with Gilchrist's in Boston and Gladding's in Providence, and he later was on the board of Canton-based Dunkin' Donuts.

For many years, Professor Brown served on the advisory committee of the Navy Resale and Services Support Office, advising top managers of Navy commissaries and exchanges worldwide. In 1991, the Navy presented him with its distinguished public service award for his work.

In 1945, he married Joan Hawley, and the two designed and built "our dream house in Maine in 1957 and spend as much time there as the work schedule permits," he wrote in the 20th anniversary report of his Harvard class.

"Our plans are on a piece of old brown paper that I still have up there," she said yesterday.

Professor Brown wrote in one class report that he "never really left Harvard." He graduated from the college in 1940, from the business school in 1942, and spent 45 years teaching, progressing from his early years as a research assistant and instructor to succeeding his mentor, McNair, as the Lincoln Filene professor of retailing.

"I think I am a candidate for the 'most years at Harvard' award," he wrote in his 50th class report.

He left the campus for work and pleasure, though, teaching in locales as distant as Switzerland and India, where he helped set up a management institute.

"I think we counted up at one point that we've been in 55 countries," his wife said.

While they enjoyed their world travels, Professor Brown, his wife, and their daughters often preferred the quiet times at their retreat in Maine, "away from the telephone and somewhat hectic pace we accept as normal for these times," he wrote in 1965.

"There we swim, water ski, sail, climb mountains, read a bit, and play an occasional game of bridge. It is the frosting on the cake for all of us, something to remember with satisfaction, something to look forward to with pleasure."

In addition to his wife, Professor Brown leaves two daughters, Janet Slayton and Pamela Nahass, both of Millis; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned at 2 p.m. on July 25 in Lovell United Church of Christ in Center Lovell, Maine.