Brooks Von Arx Sr., born in 1937, passed away Oct. 21, 2024.
The one challenge greater than buying a gift for someone who has it all is summarizing the life of someone who has done it all. When Brooks Von Arx Sr. passed away at the age of 86, he left only one thing unrealized – a dream to cross the Sahara Desert on a camel.
Brooks’ life was marked with good luck – serendipity, but mostly dogged hard work which resulted in degrees from Lafayette College and Yale Law School and an interim Fulbright Scholarship to France, which changed the course of his life. On a return trip home on the French Liner Ile de France (this was eons ago, before transatlantic jet travel became common), he met a cute 16-year-old, who, although fiercely guarded by her parents, became the first chapter in a 63-year marriage.
Hard work cemented his law practice into the foundation of his Fair Haven community, which he loved, always referring to the Two River area as the best-kept secret of the East Coast. Some of his fondest memories of life on Fair Haven Road included checking out, with his sons, Brooks and Eric, the beaching hoe crabs at the end of the dock, and sailing – after work, of course – his catboat up and down the Navesink River. This does not include, however, the memory of rescuing his mother-in-law who had fallen off the dock ladder into the river.
Serendipity also played a part in his happening upon a lonely house called Wit’s End on Block Island, Rhode Island, which, with a lot of hard work, became the treasured family retreat of Cat Rock Cottage. His persistence and luck were also manifested in his garden where bulbs burst into kaleidoscopic blooms each spring and where tomatoes, beans and peppers wound their stems upwards around carefully erected supports to staggering heights.
In the sea of modern homogeny, Brooks was always recognizable. Sometimes this was thanks simply to his sartorial choices of a button-down Oxford shirt, a colorful tie (always a tie) and a sweater wrapped protectively around his shoulders; or a Yale Law sweatshirt carbon dated to the founding of the institution and a pair of equally well-loved corduroys. Beyond his distinctive outfits, Brooks was distinguished by the old-school chivalry of a gentleman. The “nice guys” that millennial men promise to be in their online dating profiles are inevitably weak facsimiles of Brooks’ constant care, concern and kindness to both loved ones and strangers. Even when there was a small nuisance to attend to, i.e. when his dog was once again feasting out of the dishwasher or when his bright red Vespa refused to start, Brooks’ frustrations rarely manifested themselves beyond a single profanity (which was duly noted and regurgitated by his granddaughters in their tender youth).
If there was a foreign city you dreamed of traveling to, Brooks would recount a story of his adventures undertaken in another outrageously obscure corner of the world such as Afghanistan. He and Annie climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and walked the Annapurna circuit as well as the Cotswold Way and the Camino de Santiago. If there was a wine you had tasted once and were clumsily attempting to describe to him, he could reliably identify both the bouquet and vintage and offer a (gentle) correction of the meat you should pair it with. If there was a mediocre joke that you offered earnestly, he would always return a booming, if sympathetic, laugh. With every accomplishment earned by a loved one or friend, he would receive said accomplishment with a sense of pride so earnest, it would make you blush.
Brooks leaves a legacy of aspirations for his surviving family – for his wife Annie and his sons, Brooks Jr. and Eric – to not rush to judgment and to carefully consider both sides of a case (considerations not just reserved for lawyers); for his granddaughter Isabelle, to appreciate art in all its forms and to continually cultivate her personal taste; and for his granddaughter Alexandra, to carry forward the ambition to undertake adventures as big and bold as a journey across the Sahara.
Survivors include his wife, Annie-France Von Arx; sons, Brooks Von Arx Jr. and his wife Diane M. Von Arx, and Eric M. Von Arx and his wife Cynthia Riegel Von Arx; granddaughters, Alexandra M. Von Arx and Isabelle M. Von Arx; his brother, Emil Von Arx III and his wife Anna D. Von Arx; nephew Jared D. Von Arx and his husband Brad Windhauser; niece Rebecca Von Arx Tani and her husband John Tani Jr. and their sons, Eliott Tani, Von Logan Tani and Avery Brooks Tani; together with many friends across the country and in France, which he considered his second home.
There will be a celebration of life announced at a later date.
The article originally appeared in the November 7 – 13, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
