Getting into Real Estate and Dad's Death

Tom: Well, I went back to the real estate office. And I was supposed to go back to my law practice, so I went to DeKalb County, and told them I would take anything they would give me for free, to kind of get back into the practice, so they gave me a fellow that was in prison, charged with something. So I went in to defend him without realizing, after all those years, I’d forgotten about 90% of courtroom practice. So I got in there and everything I said, the opposition they opposed it, and I didn’t have grounds for what I was saying, and I found out I either had to go back to law school or give up the practice. So I just made a miserable job out of that. And I could run titles, and such as that, but so far as courtroom practice, I just didn’t remember all the rules. So that was the one and only time I went back to court. So then I went back to the real estate office, and then started concentrating on that.

There were three boys that went back. And he made a rule, or said “I’ll give you 100% of your commission in the first 12 months, first year. So anything you earn you get it all, and I’ll stand the office expense.” Well, to this day I kind of regret the fact that I accepted that order, because I realized how much the office was costing him. But anyway, shortly after that he had a heart attack and died.

He was in the office, and about 10 o’clock in the morning, he was kind of red-faced, but he was just white as a sheet. I said “something’s wrong with you.” He said “I feel like the devil.” I said “we’re going to take you home.” So I took him home, and my mother called the doctor, and the doctor sent him to Emory hospital, and he died that night. He had a massive heart attack.

And he was a diabetic, but he never knew, and the doctor he had told him to lay off sugar and he didn’t. He’d put two spoonfuls of sugar in every cup of coffee. And, back then, he always had something to eat and he’d have a dessert. If he couldn’t see sugar on top of the dessert he’d put some on it. But he had the heart attack, and died overnight.

So from one day to the next, I had a real estate office and my two brothers went in there with me, and one of them just made the comment “well, you’re the oldest of the three of us so you be the president.” So that’s how I became president of Ben S. Forkner Realty Company.

Scared me to death. Because all of a sudden, I’d been listening and all of a sudden I had to be doing. And it probably turned out, as unfortunate as it was, the timing might have been good, because it really put me in high gear. And I felt like I had to open the office, and I closed the office.

It went on that way for several years, and then I got a connection with a banker, and then another connection downtown — W. O. Doval, Atlanta Federal — and I started developing houses. And I developed a subdivision, and it’s still down there. A good location, and what they’d do, they would lease me the ground, and I had a builder to do the building for half interest, and I borrowed 100% of the money, so I would end up with a building with nothing in it. And Paul Shoeder, who was my partner, he’d get in a tight during the year and come want to sell out to me for about 25 cents on the dollar, so I’d buy him out, and within about five or six years I had about six buildings and I owned them 100%.

So then the GI bill came through and people were buying buildings where they give these fellows 100% loan on a house, and then some of them would get in a tight, and I’d buy any house that I could buy for $500 and subject to the loan. And I would rent the house, and sooner or later someone would come along and offer me a pretty good price for it, so I got a bunch of houses under that condition.