Bobby Brown spent most of Wednesday in Alabama burying his brother-in-law. That’s where he was when he learned his old friend, teammate and one-time roommate Yogi Berra had died.

They had been friends since the spring of 1946 when, both fresh out of the military, they were teammates and roommates with the Yankees’ top farm team in Newark. The two also made their major league debuts on Sept. 22 that season, each picking up his first big league hit in the second game of a doubleheader.

On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. When his playing career ended, Brown become a successful cardiologist and, later, the president of the American League. Berra, a baseball lifer, left school in the eighth grade.

But there was a genuine affection between the two, a feeling that continued long after their playing careers ended.

“I think the most important thing to remember is the fact he was the same person at 90 as he was when he was 21,” the 90-year-old Brown said Wednesday night by phone from his home in Fort Worth, Texas.

“He was a terrific guy. He had terrific ability and he was totally unaware that he became essentially an icon for the nation. He just had great talent on the baseball field and was really a decent person.”

Brown, a third baseman who played for the Yankees for parts of eight seasons and was a contributor to four world championship teams, was enrolled in medical school at Tulane when he roomed with Berra. He said he remembered having his head in a textbook that entire summer with exams awaiting him when he returned to school in the fall.

“Yogi would read Superman comics,” Brown said. “I think they were a dime and I think he’d buy a dozen at a time and read them. I had some exams coming up when the season was over.

“I was really studying hard for a Pathology exam and I couldn’t drag the microscope on the road so I just had the textbook. I was in that textbook that whole summer. Yogi would read and I would read and he asked me one time, ‘How did yours come out?’ ’’

Brown, who said he hadn’t seen Berra since Old-Timers’ Day 2014, said those who laughed at Yogi’ s fractured syntax without digesting his message missed out on his friend’s wisdom.

“If you analyzed what he said, he said things that were pretty profound,” said Brown. “The words got a little bit mixed up because of his lack of a formal education. But, as far as the thought processes, he was right on the button with almost all of them.”