Master storyteller, author, historian

John Brewer Jr. lived and breathed stories, both in the telling and the listening. He could keep a class of college students riveted with nothing but his voice, said colleagues, or draw from people memories they had never shared with anyone. And he lived stories, too, including being the son of the first African-American school principal in the state and befriending many of the major figures in Pittsburgh’s AfricanAmerican history.

“He cared about his community, he cared about helping people, and he cared about Homewood,” said Ralph Proctor, a professor in the department of ethnic and diversity studies at the Community College of Allegheny County.

Mr. Brewer died Feb. 13 at the age of 73.

Mr. Proctor had known Mr. Brewer since childhood, when Mr. Brewer’s father, John Brewer Sr., was his mentor.

John Brewer Sr. was the first African-American principal in Pennsylvania, serving at the Hill District’s Miller Elementary School, and John Brewer Jr. got to know notable Pittsburghers when he was young.

The younger Mr. Brewer attended Westinghouse High School, which friends said he remained proud of all his life — going on to write a book, “The Room,” about his time as a Westinghouse athlete.

After high school, he studied history at North Carolina Central University. Mr. Proctor recalled Mr. Brewer’s telling him about how he rushed back to Pittsburgh to be with his family after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Due to the rioting here, he was unable to find a taxi to take him from the bus station to his home in Homewood.

After college, Mr. Brewer joined the Army. He was stationed in Europe, allowing him to travel and broaden his worldview.

For 28 years, he worked for Equitable Gas. In that role, according to Laurence Glasco, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, he crisscrossed the Hill District and “got to meet and talk with lots of people, and get a sense for the community.”

It was in the late 1980s, colleagues said, that Mr. Brewer came into his own as a prominent member of Pittsburgh’s AfricanAmerican community. In 1989, he and his wife purchased a former trolley barn in Homewood and turned it into an event space called the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum.

“I thought it was fantastic that at last black folks in the city had a top-grade place to go to and hold large conventions,” Mr. Proctor said. “And he had a nightclub there, too. We no longer had to either hold events in churches or ask white folks to let us hold events in their spaces, which there is a long history of them saying no to.”

The coliseum now is home to the Trolley Station Oral History Center, which Mr. Proctor hoped would become an “archive for oral history in the Pittsburgh arena.”

While running the coliseum, Mr. Brewer went on to become an oral historian and writer, publishing several books about the African-American history of Pittsburgh in addition to the book about Westinghouse High.

“He had this nose for oral history,” said Mr. Proctor, who also specializes in the technique. “People would talk to him about things they would probably talk to nobody else about. He was forever coming in with new stories, and he would call me all excited about some new information he had, from some 100-year-old man or woman.”

“You know he discovered a huge collection of photographs were missing that people from the thought Courier?” Mr. Glasco said. “Hundreds of thousands of images, no one knew they were there. He happened to stumble on them in some filing cabinets in a backroom of the Courier.

“That was a big contribution that John made that will last forever.”

Additionally, Mr. Brewer consulted with the Carnegie Museum of Art in recent years to help identify the thousands of negatives from the collection of the Pittsburgh Courier’s legendary photographer, Charles “Teenie” Harris. Through his own memory and by conducting over 100 interviews, he identified many of the people photographed in the collection, according to the Pittsburgh Black Media Foundation.

Mr. Brewer’s last book, “Kingpins of Pittsburgh,” told the stories of prominent figures of the African American community, especially the “numbers men” of the Hill District’s underground lottery.

Mr. Glasco used that book in a class last semester and had Mr. Brewer come in to speak. “The students loved it, he was so good at bringing stories to life,” Mr. Glasco said. “He knew a lot of it personally, or learned it from his father.” Mr. Proctor underscored that Mr. Brewer was able to hold people’s attention not just through his knowledge of a subject but his skill at talking about it. “He was gregarious, always gesticulating and talking. He had this ability to put together multiple trains of thought coming from all kinds of directions.” According to Mr. Proctor, that skill also was displayed in Mr. Brewer’s writing. They were working together on a book on the early history of black gangs in Pittsburgh, and Mr. Brewer stunned him. “John was writing in the vein of August Wilson, creating story lines out of what people told him. I always told him he had to be careful because his characters were so clear that he might as well have put names on them.” Mr. Brewer is survived by his wife, artist Tina Williams Brewer; a son, John Emery Brewer; daughters, Kristine Jordan Brewer and Demeca Glenn (Curtis); and brothers, Norman and Mark Brewer. The Spriggs-Watson Funeral Home will schedule a memorial service at a later date.