Brown wrote the book to share his adventures with his daughters and promote a positive image of Black fathers.
Morris Brown grew up in Chicago and used to take family vacations to California and they eventually moved to the state.
He had a scholarship to play football in the Midwest but dropped it to attend Santa Monica college and received another scholarship to play football in Fresno State.
“I was going to go to the NFL, but I actually turned down the NFL because my major was film/television at school,” said Brown. “I wanted to be this Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood-director-kind-of-guy.”
Brown got to Hollywood and worked in television for over 10 years as an editor and director. He worked at Fox Sports, CNN, NBC and eventually got his own production company that produced music videos. He eventually went on to start teaching video production and video editing over at UCLA.
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“I taught at UCLA for seven years and I’ve been ranked one of their top 10 instructors and it was great,” said Brown. “They had a little write up in Harper’s Bazaar magazine about one of my classes and corporate America saw the article in Harper’s Bazaar and they started calling me.”
He continued, “So that’s what I’ve done for almost 20 years now. I made that transition from higher academia and at the college level to corporate and have been there for many years now as proprietary software trainer and instructional design, where I teach people specialty software and develop curriculum and classes and so forth.”
On top of all of this, Brown also has a love for music. He shared that after he finished Fresno State, he got a local job as an apprentice recording engineer.
“I play guitar, bass and piano and so that was just a beautiful job because I record music all day for various artists and then I record my own music for free, so it was like wonderful,” said Brown.
His next adventure would be in writing, and he wrote a book with a baby on the way. This was no ordinary book though; this book was written with a specific purpose in mind.
“I said how can I make my baby the smartest baby in the world,” said Brown. “So, I did all this research on how to make your baby smart and people in China, who were doing these different things, and their kids were doing trigonometry.
“I picked up all these different strategies and techniques that I’ve developed my own hypothesis that I could train the sperm and the egg even before sexual relations.
“So, basically you do a sonic training where you stimulate the sperm, the testes with the sonic stimulation say like a song from Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.”
The book was entitled “Smart Fetus—The Fetal Training Program” and according to Brown, he received feedback in time from others that the method worked, they apparently had smarter and brighter children. It was his next idea for a book that would bring the most reward.
“When my kids were still little, we went to the park a lot, we went to like 30 different parks all over Southern California,” said Brown.
He came up with the idea of a book based on visiting these parks with his daughters. He started the book, but life happened, and the book sat for 15 years. The COVID pandemic in 2020 offered the opportunity for Brown to finish his book.
“We’re stuck in the house, you can’t even go out, you got to stay in the house,” said Brown. “I’m like, maybe I can just pull this whole idea about my kids, hanging with their girls and just start writing this thing.
“So, I wrote it, it turned out to be the 800-page kids’ book.”
All those parks they visited added up to 800 pages, but Brown parred the book down, cut it in half and released 400 pages. As big as the book was, it did well, but Brown cut the book down again.
“Now it’s a little smaller far as the size, they’re like 50 pages per book so, I have 11 books out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart and other places and people love it,” said Brown.
“Hang’n with the Girls” is a book that combines real photos from Brown’s visits with cartoon images. Each book features a different park with different adventures that Brown and his daughters experience. Brown shared that his booked served two purposes.
“It was a gift to my kids, that was the first thing, I just wanted to give my kids a gift,” said Brown.
He continued, “There’s a lot of stereotypic stuff in society about Black dads and not taking care of their family or kids and the Black mom is the one that raises the kids around the world.
“I wanted to put out something that was positive that showed that Black dads are doing well and me being a college professor, working in television, teaching at the university level, my kids saw me as kind of a different dad than what they had learned from the other kids at school.”
Brown wanted to share the most important aspect of his books is something all families should make time for.
“I look back on all the pictures, all the different scenarios, all these different parks and what it boils down to is quality time,” said Brown.
“They’re only little from zero to about 12 or 13 and then they want to be independent and don’t want you around them.
“The main moral to the story is you don’t get a second chance at childhood, when your kids are little, love them, hug them, kiss them and give them quality time because that’s it.”
For more information, visit ihangwiththegirls.com.
