Henry Brown; Sire Of Money Market Fund Investment

Henry Brown launched pumpkins as well as a fund. His 2002 team: Peter Gustafson, left, Peter Jesenski, Peter Hart, Brown, Chris Gerow and Dave Bresnahan. (Courtesy Of Chris Gerow)

The enormous popularity of such funds began to drain money from banks and S&Ls, but Mr. Brown said he felt little guilt.

"The banks can't accuse us of stealing their money," he told Forbes magazine in 1985. We "just recirculated it in bigger bunches. They had tremendous margins to play with, they were getting money at 5 1/4 percent and they could lend it out at 10 percent or better.

"With the average banker," he added, "the doorknob would hit him in the tail at 3 p.m. and then the only place you could find him was the golf course."

Henry Bedinger Rust Brown was born Feb. 13, 1926, in Pittsburgh, where his father was chief financial officer of the Koppers building materials company. He was a 1947 graduate of Harvard University, where he drew cartoons for the satiric Harvard Lampoon magazine.

He held several interim jobs and enrolled in architecture school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but joked of quitting after a term "because I could not draw a picture of a house."

He entered investment banking in 1950 as a Chemical Bank trainee, then spent several years at Citibank before landing at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association in 1963 as manager of the pension fund's securities investments. In 1968, he left to form a consulting business with TIAA colleague Bent.

Mr. Brown had many hobbies. A self-described "dirt farmer," by the late 1980s he settled on 600 acres north of Leesburg, raising cattle and hogs and growing wheat, corn and hay.

He also helped design a medieval catapult, a trebuchet, for long-distance pumpkin launching.

With a group of neighbors and friends, he co-captained a team that won the Delaware-based Punkin Chunkin championships four times in recent years. Their trebuchet, King Arthur, powered by a 600-pound falling weight, propelled a pumpkin 1,150 feet in 2003. They beat the closest rival by 120 feet.

Survivors include his wife, Betsey Smith Brown of Leesburg; four children, Peter Brown of Washington, Alexander Brown of Boulder, Colo., Elizabeth Devlin of Tewksbury Township, N.J., and Harriet Dickerson of Waterford; two brothers, Stanley Brown of Bethesda and Fitzhugh Brown of Sewickley, Pa.; and 10 grandchildren.