Bruce Bent's partner in launching the first money-market mutual fund has died. Henry B. R. Brown, 82, died at his home in Leesburg, Virginia on Monday. His obituary ran Friday in the New York Times. The cause was an abdominal aneurysm.

Brown's passing follows the deaths earlier this summer of a number of notable fund industry personalities, including Sir John Templeton (see The MFWire, July 8, 2008), Gerard Tsai (see The MFWire, July 11, 2008), Eugene Sit (see The MFWire, June 30, 2008) and Jack Nash (see The MFWire, August 1, 2008).

In 1969, Brown and Bent came up with the idea for the first money-market fund. Together they financed The Reserve Fund, which after being featured in the New York Times in January 1973, garnered $100 million in deposits by the end of that year. Currently, the fund boasts about $62 billion in AUM.

The Harvard-educated Brown worked for Chemical Bank in the early 1950s. He became manager of securities investments for the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association in 1963.

In 1968, Brown and Bent launched their own investment-banking firm, but interest rates had risen to 8 percent by 1969. In August of that year, the idea to come out with a mutual fund hit Bent.

"I was sitting at my desk in August 1969, and I looked up at Brown and said, 'Why not a mutual fund?'" Bent told Fortune in 1999. "He said he didn't know anything about mutual funds. I said, 'I don't know anything about mutual funds either, but I think it would work.'"

But their invention did not get off to a hot start. In the same Fortune article, Bent recounted how he and Brown were turned down by 144 financial institutions, fell $250,000 into debt and bonded with the hot dog vendor: "We developed an intimate relationship with the hot-dog man on the corner, because that's all we could live on. Hot dogs."

The turning point came in January 7, 1970, when The New York Times' Robert Hershey Jr. featured the fund in an article called "Overnight Mutual Funds for Surplus Assets."

Years later, Brown became a gentleman farmer, and according to the obituary, also took part in unusual activities such as participating annually in the Punkin Chunkin competition in Delaware.

Brown is survived by his wife Betsy, two brothers, a son, two daughters and 10 grandchildren. 

Edited by: Erin Kello


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