By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
DEC. 12, 2023 | The first business partner I had died at age 96 last week. How lucky I was to have been associated with him all these years!
I didn’t know him until he was already my partner. And we maintained our association, becoming close friends for over 60 years, me checking in with him often, and he occasionally calling me. Most every time we went to the coast, we tried to go by for a visit.
It happened this way. Just out of graduate school at Iowa, I got my first job in Jesup, Ga., going to an 18 month old start-up weekly newspaper in a town where there was already another weekly. After working there for six months, one of the two guys who started the newspaper, an insurance agency owner, asked me to stop by his office after work. He and I did not hit it off very well, and I thought perhaps I was going to get canned.
Instead, he said he wanted out, and offered to sell me his half of the newspaper. Having no savings, I couldn’t see how I could buy, but somehow, with a loan from my mother-in-law, we bought a half-interest in the paper. That’s how I inherited Dr. Lanier Harrell as a business partner, whom I didn’t know at all. But of course, he had also just met me, a guy with little experience in newspapering or management. Boy, did he take a risk on his investment!
Harrell
The partnership was pleasant from the beginning, and set me on my newspaper career. But it was very much a one-sided partnership in this way. Rather shortly, I realized that we were in danger of not meeting payroll, and I told my new partner. “I’ll come by and we’ll go to the bank tomorrow,” he said, the beginning of my understanding of how vital local banks are. There we arranged the first of what was many loans, all because his signatory was good, and while mine was also on the bank note, but wasn’t worth much. Luckily, we did well, paid back many loans, and grew the business, and eventually took on a third partner. Later on, Lanier and I would sell our interest in the paper to our younger partner.
Lanier Harrell was born on a farm in Jeff Davis County, graduated from Waycross High, and went to Clemson to play for Frank Howard. He joined the Navy six months before the end of World War II, and later graduated from the University of Georgia. After getting married to the Wayne County sheriff’s daughter, he taught in Jesup and coached football before taking his family to Augusta to medical school. He returned to Jesup as a family doctor for 10 years (who made house calls) before becoming a radiologist for 20 years. He was most active and highly respected in many ways in the community.
He and his wife, Evelyn Warren, had one girl and two boys. His daughter Charlotte, worked with me at the newspaper one summer. She was killed instantly when a log truck hit her car when she was returning from school one afternoon. She was only 16. It devastated their family, though Lanier kept on as the radiologist at the local hospital before his retirement to his home overlooking the Altamaha River.
The community celebrated his life last Wednesday at the First United Methodist Church in Jesup, where Charlotte and Evelyn also had their funerals. His family gave the lectern in the sanctuary in memory of their daughter, Charlotte.
Edsel Lanier Harrell, 1927-2023: Thank you for your friendship. May you rest in peace.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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