The founder of a foundation that has provided scholarships to Andalusia High School students for the past 25 years was honored with a dinner at the Andalusia Country Club Friday night as he prepared to retire as chairman at the group’s annual meeting today.

Robert Brown – “Bob Brown” to friends, and still “Bobby Brown” to those with whom he grew up – spent his career as a Houston attorney. But in 1992, he and other members of the Class of 1948 founded the Class of ’48 Scholarship Foundation, now known as the Andalusia High School Scholarship Foundation.

The group has awarded a renewable scholarship to an AHS graduate each year, and in recent years, also has offered study abroad opportunities. To date, the scholarships have totalled $180,000, plus $130,000 in study-abroad scholarships.

Class of ’48 graduate and foundation board member Rudy Bray said if some of the class’s teachers could have been present last night, they would have been surprised.

“We had a tremendous chemistry teacher in James Arthur Wilson,” Bray said. “One day he was lecturing and everything was going along fine. He looked up and said, ‘Bobby Brown, you’ve got a good head, but you’re just lazy as … you’re just lazy.’

“I wish he was here, because evidently that talk inspired Bobby,” he said. “He would take the opportunity to apologize to Bob, and he would probably paddle me.”

Bray said Brown’s background as an ex-Marine likely served him well in leading the group of people who have served with the foundation.

Pete Donaldson presented Brown with a chair, etched with his name and the foundation’s.

“It is an appropriate gift as he is about to become chair emeritus,” Donaldson said. Mayor Earl Johnson presented Brown a proclamation, and Jim Krudop presented a proclamation from the Alabama House of Representatives.

“Someone once said, ‘You can’t go home again,’ ” Brown said in accepting the chair. “ That guy was not from Andalusia, Ala.

“It is always good to come back home, and have that hometown feeling again. What Class of ’48 has done shows that we all felt the that same way.”

Brown said the foundation was created as a way to say thank you to the Andalusia community, the City of Andalusia, the Andalusia schools and the teachers and administrators for the values imparted and the fine education provided.

“It was a great opportunity to be born and raised in Andalusia. You people don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “You can go home again. I am so delighted to be here, and I always am.”

Richard Anthony has agreed to chair the foundation going forward.

Anthony, a 1964 graduate of Andalusia High School, was the chairman and CEO of Synovus Financial Corp. at the time of his retirement. He currently resides in Birmingham.

The AHS Scholarship Foundation holds its annual meeting in April.