St. Louis ? When St. Louis coffee king Dana Brown died in 1994, the savvy businessman and globe-trotting outdoorsman left behind a fat trust fund that has pumped almost $40 million into local institutions, from St. Louis Children’s Hospital to Forest Park and the St. Louis Zoo.

Brown also left another, less well-known legacy – more than 400 film canisters documenting his travels to exotic locales in Asia and Africa from the early 1960s through much of the 1980s.

The silver-gray metal canisters and reels of 16 mm films inside have been carefully stacked on the shelves of a fourth-floor storage room in south St. Louis. If the film has not deteriorated – and a brief inspection recently indicated that it remained intact – it offers a potentially amazing look into the lives of the people and wildlife that inhabited some of the most remote corners of the world at that time. The film also provides a glimpse into the life of a local icon, whose Safari brand coffee commercials and documentaries entertained generations of St. Louisans.

Many of Brown’s documentaries began with “This is Safari Land, and I am Dana Brown.”

“I would think a lot of this would be very interesting to someone,” says Tony Shimkus, director of facilities at Concordia Publishing House, where the film canisters are housed.

They’re treasures, says Lela Rice, Brown’s longtime assistant, confidante and a trustee of his estate.

David Diener, a vice president with U.S. Bank charged with helping oversee the Dana Brown Charitable Trust, said trustees have wrestled with the question of what to do with the films almost since Brown’s death. Diener says the estate pays for storing and insuring the films. For insurance purposes, Diener said, the films’ value has been estimated at up to $3 million, but it is virtually impossible to determine a real value.