Podcast
Elliott Brack Talks About Journalism, His Life and Gwinnett History [Podcast]
Exploring the Unexpected in Gwinnett County
Elliot Brack, a longtime journalist and resident of Gwinnett County, founded the Gwinnett Forum. The online forum has attracted a steady flow of content from various sources that Brack carefully moderates and publishes. This episode highlights the county’s transformation, local histories, and the importance of providing a platform for diverse public opinions and covering local news. Hosted by Rico Figliolini.
Resources:
The Gwinnett Forum: https://www.gwinnettforum.com/
366 Facts about Gwinnett County Book: https://www.gwinnettforum.com/2018/03/order-366-facts-about-gwinnett-county-ga/
“I started Gwinnett Forum not to make money, but to extend my life—and so far, it’s worked for 24 years. I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can.”
Elliott Brack
Timestamp:
00:00:00 – Elliot Brack’s Lifelong Journalism Journey
00:02:51 – Unexpected Opportunities and Challenges of Running an Online Forum
00:04:37 – Balancing Political Perspectives
00:06:38 – Gwinnett County’s Rapid Growth and Media Coverage Challenges
00:09:46 – Balancing Short and Long-Form Journalism
00:11:14 – Exploring the Unexpected in Gwinnett County
00:15:44 – A Newspaper Man’s History of Gwinnett County
00:17:39 – 366 Facts About Gwinnett County
00:24:14 – Diversity of Cuisine in Georgia
00:26:56 – Daughter’s Passing and Cherished Memories
00:30:16 – Voting Irregularities in Small-Town Elections
00:33:32 – Jury Duty and Politics
00:35:25 – Serving in the Army in Germany
00:39:44 – Closing Thoughts
Podcast Transcript
Rico Figliolini – 00:00:00
Hi, everyone. My name is Rico Figliolini. This podcast is Urban Ebb, and it discusses culture, politics, everything that you can think of about the urban environment and the suburbia that we live in. And my great guest today is Elliott Brack. Elliott, thanks for coming.
Elliott Brack – 00:00:18
Thank you. Appreciate being here.
Rico Figliolini – 00:00:20
Yeah, no, this is cool. Elliott’s been a longtime Gwinnetian.
Elliott Brack – 00:00:24
50 years now.
Rico Figliolini – 00:00:25
50 years, way longer than me, double the span that I’ve been here almost. And he publishes an online publication called Gwinnett Forum, which is a great informative piece. I learn something every week whenever I get the newsletter from you. Why don’t you tell me, let’s start off with a little bit about your background, you and your family.
Elliott Brack – 00:00:44
Good. I am born south of Macon in middle Georgia. Went to school, grew up in Macon, went to school there and at Mercer University. Then I went into the army, spent three and a half years in Germany defending your country. I’ll come back to that if you want to. Then to the University of Iowa for a master’s. Then to South Georgia and started publishing a weekly newspaper where I stayed 13 years. Then I came to Gwinnett in 1974 with the Gwinnett Daily News. Stayed with it until just before the New York Times bought it and ended up my newspaper career as the associate publisher of the Gwinnett Extra of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And then I had to retire because of age limits there. So I started Gwinnett Forum, an online moderated forum about activities in Gwinnett. I started it for one reason. Can you guess the reason?
Rico Figliolini – 00:01:44
Tell me.
Elliott Brack – 00:01:45
Well I had seen too many people retiring doing nothing dropping dead. So I didn’t want to do that. So I started the Gwinnett Forum. Not to make money and I’ve never made money on it, I’ve got a decent retirement but I did it to extend my life and so far it’s worked for 24 years and I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:07
Terrific. I feel the same way. I don’t think everyone asks me when I’m retiring and at that age where I could and I’m like, no, it doesn’t make sense for me to do that.
Elliott Brack – 00:02:16
Not if you’re having a good time.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:17
Yeah, you’ve got to enjoy life.
Elliott Brack – 00:02:19
And luckily I’ve had good health so you stay with those two and you’re all right.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:23
Yeah, especially through COVID and all that too.
Elliott Brack – 00:02:26
Yeah, we missed that one.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:28
Yeah, that’s cool. So, you know, let’s stick to, so your journalistic background runs deep and long.
Elliott Brack – 00:02:35
That’s all I’ve ever
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:37
Yeah. So is there a particular part of it that, is there a story from out of that that might have inspired you further to do something than you otherwise would have?
Elliott Brack – 00:02:48
I just fell into everything. I’m lucky.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:50
Okay. All right. It’s a good thing, I guess.
Elliott Brack – 00:02:52
I never saw the job come to me, and so I’m happy.
Rico Figliolini – 00:02:58
All right. Well, when you started Gwinnett Forum, though, I know you wanted to start it because it kept you busy.
Elliott Brack – 00:03:05
Yes.
Rico Figliolini – 00:03:06
But you’ve done a lot with that, I think, over the years.
Elliott Brack – 00:03:09
Well, I have been surprised from the very beginning when I didn’t know if I would get anything. I wouldn’t know anything to put in there. But from the very beginning, I started getting material from other sources, from public relations people, from city officials, from all kinds of places. And it just keeps coming. Even this morning, I didn’t know what I was going to use as my lead story. And then we found something happening, the widening of U.S. Highway 120 to four lanes. And all of a sudden, that’s the story you know and it just keeps coming in.
Rico Figliolini – 00:03:42
You know I feel the same way sometimes when we put out our magazines it’s like what are we going to put in the next issue and life happens right so it just keeps coming at you. Is there anything that you found along the way doing Gwinnett Forum that you know when people do online forums and stuff, you have to moderate, you have to do certain things.
Elliott Brack – 00:04:07
It is a moderated forum. It’s got to get past me to get in.
Rico Figliolini – 00:04:11
Okay. So have you found where, you know, things sometimes got a little hairy around certain things? What subjects? What topics?
Elliott Brack – 00:04:18
Well, mostly politics, of course, lately has been a lot about Mr. Trump in there. But we’ve always had politics in there. And I always endorse candidates ever since 2008 in all the elections.
Rico Figliolini – 00:04:29
Yeah, I’ve noticed that.
Elliott Brack – 00:04:32
So we’ve become political some. But some of the better stories are about individuals, when you go out and meet a person and write about them. And that’s fun.
Rico Figliolini – 00:04:43
So do you lean more moderate, Republican? How’s your politics?
Elliott Brack – 00:04:47
I try to stay in the middle. I want to hear from Republicans and Democrats and independents as far as that goes. I must admit I’m a liberal. I accept that. But still, I don’t want to shut anybody out who wants to say something. That’s why I try to make it a forum of public opinion from different sources.
Rico Figliolini – 00:05:09
Based on the moderation you’re doing, how are you seeing the politics right now?
Elliott Brack – 00:05:14
What do you mean by that?
Rico Figliolini – 00:05:16
Are you seeing within your forum, you know, and every forum is a little different, right? They attract certain types of people.
Elliott Brack – 00:05:22
Right.
Rico Figliolini – 00:05:22
Are you seeing more Trump?
Elliott Brack – 00:05:25
I get probably more reaction from Trump people, and I always try to print their reactions. I don’t want to just be known as a leftist or a rightist.
Rico Figliolini – 00:05:25
Right.
Elliott Brack – 00:05:36
We seldom don’t print a letter. We sometimes cut it shorter just for space. But we like to get to be able to show what people are thinking.
Rico Figliolini – 00:05:51
Okay. All right. Yeah, politics is tough, right? Because you have Trumpers, you have, I say Trumpers, sorry about that, MAGAs, and you have now, it used to be Biden, and now it’s Harris. RFK Jr. every once in a while pops up.
Elliott Brack – 00:06:07
We haven’t had much on the third-party candidates for some reason. People are not how we’re dealing. We’ll just talk about the two main parties.
Rico Figliolini – 00:06:16
Even before Harris came in?
Elliott Brack – 00:06:18
Yes.
Rico Figliolini – 00:06:19
Really? Okay. Interesting. Other parts of the country don’t.
Elliott Brack – 00:06:22
But that’s just with us in our little forum there.
Rico Figliolini – 00:06:25
Right, right, right. Are there particular issues that you’d like to cover in the forum?
Elliott Brack – 00:06:30
Well, we’ve always covered the growth in Gwinnett because it just continues every year. We sometimes, we get in more people in Gwinnett each year than larger than the 100 smallest counties in Georgia. You know, we continually get in about 10% to 15% every time you turn around, it looks like.
Rico Figliolini – 00:06:52
Are we still the largest populated or the second largest at this point?
Elliott Brack – 00:06:56
We’re second largest in the state, and it’ll be a long time passing Fulton because they had a lot of, Fulton consists, really, for you who weren’t born here, of three counties. Did you know that?
Rico Figliolini – 00:07:09
No, I did not.
Elliott Brack – 00:07:10
Well, two counties, Milton in the north and Campbell in the south, went broke during the Depression, and Fulton absorbed them. That’s why you can get on a bus, a barter bus in North Fulton and go all the way past the airport in Fulton County to South Fulton County in about a 50 or 60 mile ride for one fare.
Rico Figliolini – 00:07:33
Wow, okay. I never knew that. And I wondered why the county stretched as long as it did.
Elliott Brack – 00:07:37
It’s really three counties, you know. But now Fulton is running about 200,000 more than Gwinnett right now. And we may catch them someday, but with their bigger geographic area, we probably never will. But still, when I moved up here, there were 100,000 people, and now there’s a million.
Rico Figliolini – 00:07:57
So covering such a county, Gwinnett County, I mean, how do you do that?
Elliott Brack – 00:08:01
Well, nobody does it, especially the traditional media, the Atlanta newspapers and the Gwinnett Daily Post, Daily Post down to two days a week. The Atlanta papers no longer have any reporter covering Gwinnett. They’re only looking at the hole in the donut. They’re not looking at Cobb or Gwinnett or Fulton. And that’s sad. That’s bad for government and bad for democracy, too, I think.
Rico Figliolini – 00:08:28
Sure. So are you covering, I mean, it’s hard to be able to cover city councils.
Elliott Brack – 00:08:33
I don’t cover anything. People write me. I don’t have any staff. I don’t have any reporters or anything like that. It’s just me and editing what people send in to me. So that’s not much cover if you ask me.
Rico Figliolini – 00:08:46
No, it’s not. Now, it’s a sad state of affairs. Let me tell you. And you’re right. I’ve noticed the Gwinnett Daily Post. I mean, if it bleeds, maybe it leads, but mainly high school sports.
Elliott Brack – 00:08:58
Yeah, high school sports, therefore, take it. But now that’s what bleeds where it leads. That is, chasing ambulances is what the television stations do. They think just because someone got evicted or a tree fell on a house, that’s news. They aren’t covering hard news or investigative reporting of statehouse or the prisons or something like that. You just don’t see that. Why? Because it costs money. Chasing ambulances is cheap.
Rico Figliolini – 00:09:24
Yes. No, I agree with you. And the journalism, like the Woodward Bernstein type journalism, never happened today.
Elliott Brack – 00:09:31
You’ve got to. It’s unusual. Now, sometimes the Atlanta papers, and I get concerned about, they will have a story and it’ll go on and on and on, maybe two or three pages. That’s one reporter covering that. It’s a waste of time. They ought to be out covering small stories, I think.
Rico Figliolini – 00:09:50
Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. You know, that’s long-form journalism, I guess. And it’s like extreme, I guess.
Elliott Brack – 00:09:55
Yeah.
Rico Figliolini – 00:09:57
You know, so publishing Peachtree Corners magazine and Southwest Gwinnett magazine, we also get people submitting articles sometimes. But I tend to want to, you know, like you edit your materials that come in. They don’t go straight in.
Elliott Brack – 00:10:10
No, never.
Rico Figliolini – 00:10:12
Okay. And we do the same.
Elliott Brack – 00:10:13
Because I’m responsible for everything that’s published. You write it, but I’m the one that’s legally responsible. That’s why I read everything.
Rico Figliolini – 00:10:21
True, true. So you don’t have any reporters, any freelancers?
Elliott Brack – 00:10:26
Never have.
Rico Figliolini – 00:10:26
Okay. But you do have a stable of volunteers.
Elliott Brack – 00:10:29
We have several people who write often, and we appreciate them. And then we have the various public relations people of the cities and counties, county and cities of Gwinnett, that send material. And then we have various people who head the nonprofits, and they have a staff, and they send us things. We get a fair amount of material, and I’d say we publish probably at least three-quarters of it.
Rico Figliolini – 00:10:57
Okay, that’s quite a bit. And I got to say, when I get your email, newsletter, every week, twice a week, then.
Elliott Brack – 00:11:02
Twice a week.
Rico Figliolini – 00:11:05
There’s stuff in there I don’t know. And it’s like, wow, okay, I didn’t know that one. And I could say that there’s probably a third of what you put in there that I’m not familiar with, but I’m learning from.
Elliott Brack – 00:11:14
I’m learning, too. I’m learning, too. You’re not by yourself.
Rico Figliolini – 00:11:18
Okay, good, I don’t feel so bad. There are what I like too, I think you have a feature that does, where is this picture? Find where this image is from.
Elliott Brack – 00:11:27
Oh, yes. We started the mystery picture about six years ago. five, And we have been amazed at two or three things. Gwinnett people travel and it’s hard to slip a picture past and nobody get it. Because somebody will have been that place before and they’ll respond. We have a cadre of four, five, six people who respond to every one of them. But this morning, the first answer I got that was the correct answer is from a guy I’d never heard of before. I mean, one of our readers who was there, you know.
Rico Figliolini – 00:12:01
Is there any of them that struck you that you remember?
Elliott Brack – 00:12:10
Well, I remember sitting in the plaza in Salamanca, Spain one day, and I thought, hey, this would make a good picture. And so I snapped the mystery photo for it. The next issue I put it in, four people got it, and two of them had been there the week before.
Rico Figliolini – 00:12:26
Oh, really? Serendipity. That’s good. Amazing. The world is not as large as we think, apparently.
Elliott Brack – 00:12:31
And the hardest pictures, though, usually if we snap a picture in Gwinnett that hasn’t been published anywhere before, that’s the hardest for our people to get. But we just don’t, I don’t see enough good pictures in Gwinnett to click.
Rico Figliolini – 00:12:48
I’ve seen some stuff through Georgia, though. Because Georgia has great, great landscapes, great places.
Elliott Brack – 00:12:54
We can’t publish any if it’s copyrighted, though. We have to, the pictures all come from readers that have been to these places.
Rico Figliolini – 00:13:00
Individuals, yeah. Do you feel that you want to do, you know, you know, Gwinnett Forum is the thing you do on a regular basis. Is there anything else you want to do? Like, would you have chosen to do something else besides Gwinnett Forum? Or is this?
Elliott Brack – 00:13:16
I just fell upon it. I don’t know if it’s an idea. When I started it, my son said it wouldn’t work. And my son is important because while I don’t have any staff, when I finish it in a Word document, a simple Word document, I send it to my son. He manipulates it and puts it out on the internet. I don’t know how to do that.
Rico Figliolini – 00:13:36
Oh, okay.
Elliott Brack – 00:13:36
He said, I don’t think this is going to work. A few years later, he had one like it.
Rico Figliolini – 00:13:43
I’m sure that the traffic you get to the website is pretty good.
Elliott Brack – 00:13:47
Well, we think so. We think we have about 10,000 readers, but in a county of a million people, that’s not very many.
Rico Figliolini – 00:13:54
No, that’s not actually. But you’re not on social media either.
Elliott Brack – 00:13:58
I don’t play with that stuff. I don’t understand it. I do the simple Gwinnett forum. That’s it.
Rico Figliolini – 00:14:05
So if no one subscribes to your newsletter, they really wouldn’t be able to get to you.
Elliott Brack – 00:14:10
get to you. Well, it’s on the web. If they wanted to go to GwinnettForum.com, they could read it. But we like to send it by email like you, to people. They’ve shown interest in it. Okay, here it is right in front of you every, twice a week.
Rico Figliolini – 00:14:28
Right, right. You decided, I mean, being here half a century, to put it that way, I guess, you decided to do Gwinnett history. That’s a big undertaking.
Elliott Brack – 00:14:39
Well, it was. Let me go back and explain some things. We used to do a tour of Gwinnett. I say we. I started out with Wayne Shackford in 1975. We did our first tour of Gwinnett. And over the years, we started doing them twice a year, fall and spring. And later on, when Mr. Shackford joined state government, we had other people help us narrate the tour. It was a six-hour bus ride around Gwinnett, and one person can’t do it. You need help just to relax your throat. Anyway, we’ve had Brooks Coleman. We’ve had Jim Steele. And in the last few years of the tour, we had Wayne Hill, the former chairman of the commission, who was no longer on the commission. And I learned a lot from those two people, well, Jim Steele and Wayne particularly. But as we would get off the bus each day, they’d say to me, you ought to do a history of Gwinnett. I said, look, I want to see it in print tomorrow. I don’t want to see it in print three or four years from now. I’m a newspaper man, you know. But finally, after I retired, I got to thinking that maybe I ought to do a short history of Gwinnett. I wanted to do a hundred page history of Gwinnett. So I sat down one Friday afternoon up on a porch in the mountains, and I wrote for most of the afternoon. And when I finished it, by the way, if I needed a date, I left it blank. I was just writing from memory. So anyway, I read through what I had written. I’d written 50 pages. And I remember shaking my head. I hadn’t touched the subject, I’d say. I had just skimmed over it, and I said, what am I getting into? So what I got into was three and a half years before we finished that book. And on two or three occasions I thought I had finished it. I forgot this. I had to go back and do that one. It ended up 850 pages. This covers basically from Gwinnett’s growth from 1950 to the present day, or 2008 when we finished it. Because we had two other histories up until that time. And I wanted to show the past. We cover some of the early history, but that’s just a skim and a bunch. But I’d known most of the people who I was writing about. They knew me, and I had some credibility, and they had some credibility. So I started writing, and it took forever. We published it in 2008. We republished it two more times, so we still have some copies left. And this is not inexpensive. We sell it for $75. If you want a history, I’m the only one that’s got one.
Rico Figliolini – 00:17:24
Sounds like you could be one of those college textbooks.
Elliott Brack – 00:17:30
Well, if you want the history of Gwinnett recently, it’s in there. By the way, we also published another book. This is 366 Facts About Gwinnett. This came about by the chairman of the county commission, Ms. Nash. Called me one day and says, can you come up with 366 facts about Gwinnett? And I said, why that number? She said, well, we want to publish one on the first day of the bicentennial and another one on the last day of the bicentennial. And I said, well, Charlotte, I don’t mind doing that, but how about let’s put it in book form so we at least keep those facts out there a little bit. So the first one we published was a red book. This one is a change in colors, but I republished it to blue. And the idea here is that this one is new and improved. It’s new because I had to go back and update the facts in there, how many students were in school and things like that. But it’s improved because my service station manager told me and said, you know, that red book is a pretty good book, but if I want to tell somebody about it, I have to go through the whole book to find that fact. Can’t you index it? So I indexed that one, making it improved, you see. Now, let me tell you the rest of the story. One of the first persons I handed it to went straight to the index and told me, I’m not in there.
Rico Figliolini – 00:18:52
A little egotistical. That’s funny. Can they find copies of this online?
Elliott Brack – 00:19:00
No, no, not online. We’ve sold a few. We’ve got a few left, but not many. We’re about out of that with the second printing.
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:08
When was the last printing of this stuff?
Elliott Brack – 00:19:10
Last year.
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:11
Last year. Yeah. All right, cool. And there’s no digital version online that they can, PDF of a sort that they can order digitally?
Elliott Brack – 00:19:16
What?
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:22
No PDF that people can order online?
Elliott Brack – 00:19:23
No, no. You can order the history book on PDF, but not this one.
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:29
Gotcha. Alright. Cool. Anyone that thinks they want a copy of this, which is great. I’m just thumbing through it. It’s interesting, some of the stuff that I’ve not.
Elliott Brack – 00:19:38
The fact I like, and I forgot the number, such a significant fact and an insignificant fact, really. How many baseballs the Gwinnett Stripers use in a year?
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:50
Well, that’s interesting. Now, that would be. How many?
Elliot Brack – 00:19:55
It’s in there.
Rico Figliolini – 00:19:56
I’m going to have to look through it. Here’s another interesting fact. The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, anyone that’s old enough to know that one, is actually home-based in Peachtree Corners.
Elliott Brack – 00:20:05
That’s right.
Rico Figliolini – 00:20:05
I didn’t know that until just like a few years ago. I was like, man. You know, and the same thing Peachtree Corners has, the company that owns the salvage right to the Titanic is actually based in Peachtree Corners as well. So a lot of interesting stuff in Gwinnett County.
Elliott Brack – 00:20:22
It gets more every day.
Rico Figliolini – 00:20:24
Yeah. It’s just, you know, when I first moved here in 95, and I moved here because the Olympics. I moved here because Gwinnett County.
Elliott Brack – 00:20:31
A lot of people moved here because of the Olympics.
Rico Figliolini – 00:20:32
Yeah, because the county was the fastest growing in the nation, according to Money Magazine. So we came down here, we looked around, we bought the first and only house that we have here in Gwinnett County, or Peachtree Corners. Because of the school system.
Elliott Brack – 00:20:46
Yeah, a lot of people do that because of the school system.
Rico Figliolini – 00:20:51
So it’s, I mean Gwinnett has a lot of history to it. And maybe not all of it. It’s funny how some people, the old timers that I speak to every once in a while, they’ll tell me like, oh yeah, I remember the day my parents used to tell me. They would live in, Fulton think, County or Milton maybe at the time. And they would if you’re going to the other side of Gwinnett don’t you dare go through Gwinnett County. You go right around the other side of that county.
Elliott Brack – 00:21:14
Well, let’s go back to Gwinnett used to be a lawless county. When I was coming up from South Georgia, I was told, said, boy, don’t go up there. They’ll shoot you up there. And there had been two major instances of lawlessness in that. One time the three deputy sheriffs were killed here in Gwinnett County with their own guns by people who were stripping automobiles of their parts, and the deputies ran up. Somehow the bad guys got their guns and killed them. That was 1964, a very bad story. And then in 1988, a lady who was a student at Emory was kidnapped and buried alive 83 hours underground in Berkeley Lake.
Rico Figliolini – 00:22:07
In Berkeley Lake?
Elliott Brack – 00:22:08
Yes. And they caught the guy, and he demanded a ransom. They ended up catching him, and they knew. He told them where he was buried, and they brought him up here, and they had to search Berkeley Lake. Now, this was before Berkeley Lake was built up at all, all those houses you see around the school there. It was a pine forest. And a guy who worked at Rock 10 plant right near there says at 10 o’clock in the morning, every policeman in the world seemed to show up over there, and they were combing the woods for Barbara Michael. They finally found a grave, and everything stopped. No one had brought a shovel. They had to go back into Norcross and Ivy Harbor and buy a shovel. In the meantime, the guys who were left there were digging with their hands to get her out.
Rico Figliolini – 00:22:50
Was she alive?
Elliott Brack – 00:22:59
She was alive. The guy who had, the guy and a lady who had abducted her had put drugs in the water. And so for some early time, she was not aware of what was happening. They’d also put a flashlight in with a battery, but eventually the battery went out. And she was an heiress from down in Florida. And she didn’t say anything to the press about it until finally, several years later, a reporter for the Miami Papers got her to tell her story. And that’s the name of the book is 83 Hours Til Dawn.
Rico Figliolini – 00:23:35
Gwinnett’s famous for really dastardly things.
Elliott Brack – 00:23:37
This was 64 and 68. I came up here in 74 and it was still by the way, the sheriff who went to prison did not go to prison for moonshining he went because he owned a thousand moonshine jugs.
Rico Figliolini – 00:23:53
You’re kidding, right?
Elliott Brack – 00:23:55
He went to prison.
Rico Figliolini – 00:23:57
It’s like someone going to prison for tax evasion, not for the crime they were evading.
Elliott Brack – 00:24:00
That’s right.
Rico Figliolini – 00:24:03
Okay. So that’s, you know, Gwinnett really, it’s interesting how it’s changed.
Elliott Brack – 00:24:10
It’s so diverse now. I remember when the first Chinese restaurant, we came from Lawrenceville, where I was living then, to Jimmy Carter Boulevard on the east side, where China One was a restaurant. That was our first China. And the first Mexican place was in Duluth called Acapulco.
Rico Figliolini – 00:24:31
Authentic Mexican? Authentic?
Elliott Brack – 00:24:33
Yeah, both were authentic. But of course, we’re just covered up with any kind of foods you want now. You could go down the street and get it.
Rico Figliolini – 00:24:39
Yeah, someone actually, someone that’s funny because someone else was complaining there’s another, there’s a sushi bar that will be opening in the Forum, in the Plaza, the new area that they just built. It’s a two-story deck thing. So they’ll be opening soon. And they’re a sushi bar place. And they were like, we have too many sushi places in this city. Which is kind of funny when you think about it. When I moved here in 95, coming from Brooklyn, the things that I didn’t, unless you really maybe went into certain parts of Atlanta, couldn’t find a really good bagel place, couldn’t find a good pizza place. And even the Chinese food was a different type of Chinese than up in New York, because there’s Szechuan and there was another one. And so it was funny. I mean, it took us a while before we really found good Italian food.
Elliott Brack – 00:25:29
Now you find it easily.
Rico Figliolini – 00:25:30
Everywhere. Yeah. I mean, it depends. A couple of restaurants out there say they’re Italian. I know my father-in-law loved the Olive Garden, and he was from Sicily.
Elliott Brack – 00:25:44
I can’t stand it.
Rico Figliolini – 00:25:45
He was from Sicily, and that was his favorite place to go to. And it was like, you don’t want to go to Maggiano’s? He’s like, I like the Olive Garden. I like the bread.
Elliott Brack – 00:25:54
My daughter was a waitress at the Olive Garden, and I didn’t like the taste of their food.
Rico Figliolini – 00:26:01
Yeah, I mean, there’s other Italian restaurants that aren’t legitimately Italian, but they smother their food in sauces and stuff. And you don’t see that in Italy, really.
Elliott Brack – 00:26:12
I remember when we were in, we spent a month on a vacation in Florence, Italy. I mean, that food there is so delicious, it’s pitiful. I mean.
Rico Figliolini – 00:26:19
Can’t find the same stuff here.
Elliott Brack – 00:26:21
No, it’s not like it is here.
Rico Figliolini – 00:26:22
No. Yeah. They ban stuff in Europe that they feed us here. It’s not the same world. So you’ve written a couple of books. You’ve done the Gwinnett Forum. Do you see yourself wanting to do anything else?
Elliott Brack – 00:26:30
No, I’m getting old. I don’t want to do much more.
Rico Figliolini – 00:26:35
You could do more. Are you kidding? The whole idea of doing stuff is to stay alive, right?
Elliot Brack – 00:26:42
The Forum keeps me busy and keeps me busy enough, you might say.
Rico Figliolini – 00:26:46
All right, well, that’s good. Anything you want to say that we haven’t really touched upon?
Elliot Brack – 00:26:53
Well, I will say this, and I don’t mean to be maudlin, but we lost our youngest daughter two weeks ago. She battled cancer for six years, and yet she was leading 20 students in Greece for four weeks before she died.
Rico Figliolini – 00:27:07
Before she died, really?
Elliott Brack – 00:27:08
She just kept going. She was always positive about this. She thought she was going to beat it, but of course it takes everybody. It looks like it’s in its way. But that’s been tough. We’ve got two other children, but watching her go down was the hardest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Rico Figliolini – 00:27:35
I think for a parent, to see their child go first is not something a parent wants to see.
Elliott Brack – 00:27:42
No, it just stays with us all the time. We’ve had a great outpouring of comment and thought and cards and food. People have just been wonderful, but it hurts.
Rico Figliolini – 00:27:57
I would imagine. When did you lose your parents?
Elliott Brack – 00:28:03
Well, they’ve been gone quite a while, both my father and mother, maybe 30 years, 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
Rico Figliolini – 00:28:12
Are you an only child?
Elliott Brack – 00:28:14
Yes, I am. I had a brother who was born and died three months later, and I remember my father taking that small casket and walking out our door and us going to the church. I mean, I was about four years old at the time, and I remember that. By the way, when was the first time you voted? What age were you?
Rico Figliolini – 00:28:38
I think I was in my early 20s. I was 20, 21, something like that?
Elliott Brack – 00:28:44
I actually voted when I was four years old.
Rico Figliolini – 00:28:47
No, you didn’t.
Elliott Brack – 00:28:49
I was down in, staying in South Georgia, middle Georgia with my grandmother and her son. And it was voting day. So we went to the Turkey Creek voting precinct in Wilkeson County. And my grandmother stayed in the car, and I walked with my uncle toward this one-room courthouse, as they call it. And by the way, I remember as we were walking up there, there were tubs of soft drinks all over the place and ice. And I remember one of the first things I remember was a man said to me, son, do you want a drink? And I said to him, sir, I don’t have a nickel. And he says, boy, today you don’t need it. He handed me an orange knee high thing. Anyway, my uncle went in and got his ballot and got one for his mother. And this is violating law, but took it out to her car. And she looked at the ballot for a while and said, hmm, here, boy, you vote. So on the hood of that car, I marked that. Now, I don’t know who I voted for, but I suspect I voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And I suspect I voted for Eugene Talbot.
Rico Figliolini – 00:30:00
Okay. You know, it’s like stories like that. I can imagine other counties then that is like going back. That’s amazing.
Elliott Brack – 00:30:11
And nobody said anything.
Rico Figliolini – 00:30:12
No, hey, you know.
Elliott Brack – 00:30:17
Everybody knew each other.
Rico Figliolini – 00:30:18
Yeah, well that’s the problem.
Elliott Brack – 00:30:20
Probably 200 people in the whole precinct, you know?
Rico Figliolini – 00:30:22
And how many people in that county?
Elliott Brack – 00:30:25
Probably less than 5,000, 10,000 or something like that.
Rico Figliolini – 00:30:36
You know, that’s funny because it’s just like you think about that. And I think about like Brooklyn and voting over there and people you know today would say, oh you know people they shouldn’t be voting. A four-year-old voted like a long time ago. But you find things like that all over the place right? Missing ballot boxes.
Elliott Brack – 00:30:49
Oh, I remember when I was in South Georgia, it was a real controversial election. And this guy’s, this candidate’s father, after the vote counting was over, the courthouse was locked down. This is a county of about 20,000. Courthouse was locked down. But the father stayed outside in his pickup with a shotgun all night in case anybody tried to sneak in the courthouse and do something.
Rico Figliolini – 00:31:14
Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. There are people that do that today sometimes. They’ll sit outside voting areas in right to carry states.
Elliott Brack – 00:31:26
I got introduced to politics when I was in South Georgia within the first six months when my partner’s father-in-law ran for sheriff because the crooked sheriff had gotten killed. And all of a sudden, I’m in on the inside, drafting the strategy. And all that stuff. I didn’t mean to do that.
Rico Figliolini – 00:31:37
How old were you?
Elliott Brack – 00:31:38
Oh, I was 26, 27 years old then. And I planned to be an objective newspaper man. But then all of a sudden, I couldn’t be called objective because I was helping him get elected.
Rico Figliolini – 00:32:00
I wonder how much different that. When I grew up, politics was the late 70s, early 80s for me, really. Democratic machine, Brooklyn County. I worked for, the county was broken down into sections, right? Districts, if you will. So I worked for the district leader in that area, and his name was Tony Genovese.
Elliott Brack – 00:32:23
I remember that name.
Rico Figliolini – 00:32:24
No relation to the…
Elliott Brack – 00:32:25
But still, Genovese. I remember that name.
Rico Figliolini – 00:32:28
Yeah, yeah. But even that family has no relation from what I understood anyway. But the politics of doing stuff, suppressing votes, putting out flyers that were essentially not meant to stop people from voting. Well, it was meant to stop people from voting for a candidate. So suppressing the vote, if you will, is what they called it.
Elliott Brack – 00:32:49
We call that just politics.
Rico Figliolini – 00:32:52
Yeah, different words, different places. Everyone was doing their thing. But I did learn quite a few over there. And I even tried to, I was called to a jury duty. I was like 20-something. And I really didn’t want to go. I had work. And if I didn’t work, it’s an hourly job. So I went to my district leader and he said to me, he said, what do you, what do you need? I said, I have this thing. I don’t want to go to jury duty. Can you take care of him? He crumples it up, throws it in the waste basket and says, it’s done. And I looked at him like, no, no, seriously. And he’s like, do you think anyone is going to come out and say you didn’t go to jury? There’s millions of people there. They don’t do that stuff. And I was like, okay, well, this is the way it goes. Politics is…
Elliott Brack – 00:33:36
Have you ever been on a jury?
Rico Figliolini – 00:33:38
Yes, I’ve been on a jury, although not in the South. When I was called to jury duty in Gwinnett County, they asked me, where are you from? I said, I’m from Brooklyn. They said, why’d you move here? I said, well, to get away from the crime. I was not picked on the jury duty, and I was never since actually called back.
Elliott Brack – 00:33:57
I’ve been on a jury one time, a murder trial.
Rico Figliolini – 00:33:59
Were you called and actually sat on the jury?
Elliott Brack – 00:34:01
I was on the jury, yeah. We were sequestered, too, for four days.
Rico Figliolini – 00:34:05
Wow. How’d that go?
Elliott Brack – 00:34:07
Well, the district attorney at that time did a bad job. We kept waiting for him to ask one more question, and it would have slammed the guy. He never asked it. So it was a hung jury. Later, they tried him again, and he was convicted.
Rico Figliolini – 00:34:24
Okay. Well, again, good experience. Let me ask you also about you mentioned you were in the armed forces. Can we touch on that a little bit? How old were you? Were you legitimately the right age?
Elliott Brack – 00:34:39
Yes, yes. When I was coming along you had the draft. And so while I was in college, I joined the National Guard.
Rico Figliolini – 00:34:45
Okay. How old were you?
Elliott Brack – 00:34:46
Oh, 17, 18. Went to camp at Fort McLean, Alabama for two years. Then this is when I was in college. And when I got in the third year of ROTC, you could no longer be in the Guard. You had to transfer to the Reserves. And I stood two more years there while I was in college. Then I was commissioned a first lieutenant. And I was sent overseas to Germany. They said, sign here and your wife can go with you.
Rico Figliolini – 00:35:10
What year was that?
Elliott Brack – 00:35:13
That was 58 we left.
Rico Figliolini – 00:35:14
Okay, okay, 58.
Elliott Brack – 00:35:15
No wars going on there.
Rico Figliolini – 00:35:17
And your wife was able to come with you?
Elliott Brack – 00:35:19
My wife went with me. We sailed on a ship and landed in Bremerhaven. The day we landed in Bremerhaven, we didn’t know it, but my wife’s father was killed in a tractor accident. A tractor ran over him when he was trying to open a gate. Anyway, she had to fly back immediately and all that stuff. Anyway, my job, I had a great job. While I was a part of the post operation, we ran the post, the military policemen, the doctors, the post office, the PX, the commissary. I was the commissary officer. I ran a supermarket for the post office. And I also ran a class six store. What is that?
Rico Figliolini – 00:36:05
I have no idea.
Elliott Brack – 00:36:07
Liquor. I was a liquor and commissary officer.
Rico Figliolini – 00:36:10
And you were how old?
Elliott Brack – 00:36:13
22 years old. And the Army gives you a job. If you don’t do it, that’s all right with them. They can get rid of you and put somebody else in there. But I was three and a half years in Germany. We supported the 3rd Army Division. These are the guys who, in the little towns around us, were barracked there. They would go out in the field and get muddy and cold and all that stuff. I didn’t have to get muddy and cold. I had a great job. It was sort of like a training for a master’s degree or something like that. But it was management, really, because I was managing about 60 German people, and I had a sergeant and a PFC and me, and all the rest were German.
Rico Figliolini – 00:36:55
Did you speak German?
Elliott Brack – 00:36:57
I took German in college from a professor who mumbled. Mumbling German, we didn’t learn a thing, I don’t think. But when I got over there since I was working with all these people, I got a pretty good accent in German. I could speak it a little bit. Now, that’s only half of it. You’ve got to hear it. I couldn’t hear it. But my wife could hear it better than I could. She never even took German.
Rico Figliolini – 00:37:22
Oh, that’s funny. German is very guttural.
Elliott Brack – 00:37:24
By the way, I had one famous customer while I was over there that we fed Elvis Presley.
Rico Figliolini – 00:37:28
Was he in the armed forces?
Elliott Brack – 00:37:29
He was drafted like everybody, and he went in as a PFC.
Rico Figliolini – 00:37:31
So you got to see him?
Elliott Brack – 00:37:32
He was a good soldier in those times. He wasn’t into his problems, you might say. His mother just died, so he brought with him overseas his father. He paid for his father to come over. So his father was his official dependent. Elvis came in the commissary two or three times, but girls would mob him, and it made him crazy. But Mr. Presley, we got to know pretty good. He was a good old gentleman.
Rico Figliolini – 00:38:00
All these little things that go on in life. I’m surprised, actually, when you came back, you didn’t work for Ingles or become higher up in those.
Elliott Brack – 00:38:10
I had no idea I wanted to go be a supermarket manager. I came back with this distinct idea directly to go to college for a master’s. I went to the University of Iowa to get out of the South. I’d been in Germany three and a half years, but I always knew I was coming back home. I had no idea about staying away.
Rico Figliolini – 00:38:34
You know, this has been a great conversation. Great to hear about Gwinnett County. Great to hear about your background. Sorry about your daughter.
Elliott Brack – 00:38:49
Thank you.
Rico Figliolini – 00:38:51
You know, we should do this again, I think. Maybe even pick a topic or a time that we can…
Elliott Brack – 00:38:52
We’d probably talk about the same thing.
Rico Figliolini – 00:38:53
You know, I mean, there’s more about Gwinnett than… You know, most people don’t even know this. You know, when I came here in 95, I mean, there were a lot of farmers that owned 100, 200, 300 acres that became millionaires because of development.
Elliott Brack – 00:39:02
Oh, yeah. They just held on to the last bang all of a sudden.
Rico Figliolini – 00:39:08
And these farmers were making maybe household income $50,000 at the time.
Elliott Brack – 00:39:13
Oh, I doubt that. $45,000 probably.
Rico Figliolini – 00:39:15
I bet. And they would get these developers coming up to them saying, if you give us these 100 acres for an option and we get it developed, you know, rezoned is what it was, right? You could be a millionaire and we could have, you know, 300 houses on these 100 acres or something.
Elliott Brack – 00:39:32
Many people retired on that, yeah.
Rico Figliolini – 00:39:34
Yeah, quite a few people, actually. In fact, you know, going back through history, there’s been county commissioners or one in particular that had some issues also, I guess. But there may be other, you know, corruption and stuff.
Elliott Brack – 00:39:51
But generally speaking, since I’ve been up here, we’ve had commissioners and developers. Two developers were big when I was first up here. But we’ve had these people who were native, for the most part. They wanted to make a buck. They did. Many of them got pretty wealthy. But they also wanted to sell you another plot of land so they couldn’t clip you too much the first time or you wouldn’t come back. And so we’ve had pretty good commissioners up here. I’ve been real pleased.
Rico Figliolini – 00:40:27
Yeah, there have been really good commissioners. I agree with you.
Elliott Brack – 00:40:29
One or two bad ones.
Rico Figliolini – 00:40:30
Yes, the bad ones took a little while to find sometimes. When you’re sitting…
Elliott Brack – 00:40:35
Yeah, we got rid of them one way or the other.
Rico Figliolini – 00:40:37
Yeah, but I remember one where he was literally sitting, if anyone connected the dots, they would have seen it two years before, but they didn’t. But, yes, county commissioners have been great. The Parks Department, unbelievable. I mean, the Gwinnett County Parks.
Elliott Brack – 00:40:53
And our water department is unbelievable, too.
Rico Figliolini – 00:40:55
That, too, yes. So we’ve had really good quality, national award-winning quality work here in Gwinnett County.
Elliott Brack – 00:41:02
And our leaders have been national leaders too, in the cities, in the county commission. It’s amazing. We’ve had some good people up here.
Rico Figliolini – 00:41:14
We even have a good governor now. Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t matter. I mean, Kemp has been a decent governor as well, it seems.
Elliott Brack – 00:41:21
Better than ever.
Rico Figliolini – 00:41:21
Yes, I would say. So we’ve been talking to Elliott Brack, Gwinnett Forum. Appreciate you joining me and we’ll probably have you back again. But thank you everyone for listening and thank you Elliott.