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He is possibly the richest man in Horry County: endowed Clemson centers

He is possibly the richest man in Horry County, and an ordinary Sunday afternoon will find him taking a spin down S.C. 9 in his white Jeep Cherokee, heading home to visit his mother.

Multimillionaire businessman Robert H. Brooks is known by his middle name, Howell, to folks in the Sweet Home community where he was born and raised. Here, just outside the town of Loris and 10 miles shy of the N.C. state line, is the farm he calls "the home place."

When Brooks isn’t working, which is rare, he comes here to relax. While most people his age have kissed the daily grind goodbye, Brooks’ favorite thing to do is work. As he puts it, the fun is in chasing the fox, not catching it.

"Who coined retirement, anyway?" said the 66-year-old Brooks. "Who coined 40 hours? I’m just not a goof-off person. I like building things. Have a little fun. That’s what it’s all about."

BUSINESS BEGETS BUSINESS

Some of the things Brooks has had fun building over the years include his Atlanta-based food company, Naturally Fresh Foods Inc.; the Hooters restaurant chain; the Hooters ProCup series (his own auto racing circuit); and the National Golf Association Hooters Golf Tour.

Add to the mix what Brooks calls "a few other things": the WhiteWater Country Club in Fayette County, Ga.; the Super Sports Co., which makes merchandise sold in Hooters restaurants; and the World Business Center, a land development company in Atlanta. Brooks also is co-owner of a video production company, Hallbrook Productions, which produces commercials for his restaurants and other ventures. He also owns a hotel in Lakeland, Fla., and three motor speedways: the USA International Speedway in Lakeland; the Peach State Speedway in Jefferson, Ga.; and the Tri-County Speedway in Hudson, N.C.

By Brooks’ philosophy, business begets business. Naturally Fresh Foods owns its own trucking company, and the Hooters chain produces its own newsletter and magazine.

Reinvesting in business is a lesson Brooks learned in Sweet Home, when he was a boy in the Future Farmers of America. His teacher, John Rankin, was fond of saying, "You can feed a profit from a pig, but you can’t starve a profit from a pig."

Brooks said he isn’t sure how much money he has.

"If you can count it, you must not be worth too much," he said. Brooks’ latest accomplishment — his own airline — takes off on March 6, a charter jet operation designed to promote Hooters restaurants while bringing additional air service to Myrtle Beach.

"You live in a community, so don’t you want to see it grow?" Brooks said in his plain, soft-spoken manner. Hooters Air initially will fly between Myrtle Beach and Atlanta, adding routes to Newark, N.J., and other destinations in the future. Brooks said he knows what some people think of his plunge into the airline industry.

"Everybody thinks I’m a nut for doing it," Brooks said. "We might be barking up the wrong tree. But we’re going to try a few things. You never know until you try."

FASCINATION WITH AIRLINES

Brooks has been intrigued by the airlines ever since his food company began selling nondairy coffee creamer to Eastern Airlines in the 1960s. "I think the airlines are sort of romantic," Brooks said.

The relationship is hard to understand, given the fact that Brooks’ 26-year-old son Mark died in plane crash in 1993 while on a promotional tour for Hooters with NASCAR driver Alan Kulwicki and two other members of the Hooters racing team.

Brooks said the loss was without a doubt the hardest thing he has ever had to bear.

"Things happen in life and you have no control over them," Brooks said. "I guess one of the things I learned with my son’s tragedy is, you don’t know how much time you have here."

When questioned about his religious beliefs, Brooks said his faith is "pretty strong."

Although raised Methodist, he sometimes attends Trinity Episcopal Church with his wife and daughter, who are regulars in a weekly Bible study. "I don’t think the hereafter is anything we can conceive of," Brooks said. "I think we’re so inept at what we understand."

Brooks recently purchased about 40 acres around the Bellamy family cemetery, where his son, father and other relatives are buried. He plans to expand the cemetery and install perpetual care.

He also has given millions to Clemson University, including $2.5 million apiece for the Brooks Institute for Sports Science and the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts, which includes a 1,000-seat auditorium named for his son, Mark. He recently sent the school $1 million to establish a performing arts series in honor of his young daughter, Boni Belle.

On any given day, Brooks juggles his business dealings — cemetery, golf course, airline, restaurants — on his ever-present cell phone, often dropping into a neighborhood Hooters for a quick lunch. In between bites of a buffalo chicken sandwich, Brooks gives himself an insulin shot for the diabetes that has plagued him for nearly 30 years. He also has had a stroke, and spent months learning to hold a fork between his fingers, then guiding it to his mouth. Effects of the stroke, which affected the right side of his body 18 years ago, are barely noticeable today.

"When I get tired, I’ll limp," Brooks said.

Tired is hardly descriptive of the silver-haired entrepreneur.

Ask his 89-year-old mother, Mary Belle Bellamy Brooks, what she remembers about Bob Brooks the boy and she vividly recalls his vitality.

"He was energetic," she said. "If it’s something he enjoys doing, he’ll go at it and get it done."

Loris attorney Stacy Stanley, whose father went to Loris High School with Brooks, joked recently that it was Brooks, and not his own father, who was voted "best looking" in the school’s 1955 yearbook.

"He is an eternal optimist and he’ll figure out a way to do things," Stanley said. "He’s a very good example of someone who began with a humble background and has done very well for himself."

OF FARMING AND FORTUNES

Brooks was born Feb. 6, 1937, the second of six children who grew up on a 100-acre tobacco farm just outside Loris.

His father, Gerald Brooks, was known simply as "Brooks." In addition to farming, the elder Brooks sometimes worked at the shipyard in Wilmington, N.C., and also worked on dredges and helped dig the Intracoastal Waterway. Brooks’ mother still lives on the family land, in a simple, 50-year-old farmhouse that replaced an earlier house destroyed by fire. The home sits along a gravelly lane a few yards from the edge of Black Bear Golf Course. Inside, the walls are strewn with family photos spanning an entire century. A photo of a granddaughter’s pet rabbit is tacked on the refrigerator, and the head of a buck is mounted above the living room sofa.

Brooks recalls growing up on this land with no electricity and no running water. "We had an outhouse and a well," Brooks said. "I remember when there wasn’t any money, we’d go down to the local store and take eggs and trade them for other food."

Brooks’ first job was building fires in the stoves at Sweet Home Elementary School before the other children arrived. He was paid with a free lunch, and to the present day he dislikes getting up early.

"I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now," Brooks said. Brooks and his older brother, Gerald, worked on the farm after school, planting mostly tobacco. One day in 1954, Brooks told his mule, Red, to give up on the cornfield they were plowing.

"It was so dry that summer that the plow would not go in the ground," Brooks said. "After one row, me, myself, God and everybody knew that corn was not going to grow. I slid the plow back in the barn."

On an impulse one day, Brooks bought a one-way bus ticket to visit relatives in northeast Georgia.

It was his cousin, Minnie Sue Brooks, who suggested they pack a picnic lunch, drive to Clemson University and ask about getting money to go to school. Brooks found out about a loan scholarship, but still had to be accepted to the university. He had to take remedial courses and, once he was in college, changed his major five or six times, finally settling on dairy science. "I was not a good student in high school and I was not good in college, but I graduated," Brooks said.

Throughout college, Brooks bussed tables in the school cafeteria. The summer before graduation, he worked in a Gastonia dairy, learning to make ice cream and other dairy products.

"I guess that was one of the first internships, before internships were fashionable," Brooks said.

After college, Brooks worked in dairy sales for a Rock Hill company, then in 1961 joined an Iowa company as an Atlanta sales engineer.

Soon after, Brooks was drafted into the Army during the Berlin crisis. After a year of duty, he joined a Philadelphia food formula company, where he worked and managed to save $10,000 over five years. He used the money in 1967 to launch his own company, Eastern Foods, now known as Naturally Fresh Foods Inc. The company operated out of a 4,000-square-foot warehouse with a handful of employees, marketing nondairy coffee creamer primarily to airlines. Over time,the company added other food products, including a line of preservative-free salad dressings and dips.

Today, the business thrives in a 250,000-square-foot facility on Naturally Fresh Boulevard near Atlanta and does about $100 million in annual sales. Brooks and his family lived in Atlanta for a time in the 1960s, but he eventually set up his present routine of living in Myrtle Beach and commuting to Atlanta, a vagabond pace that seems to suit him. "I never was comfortable in Atlanta," Brooks said. "Atlanta is such a big town, and it’s cold. People are so transient."

TAKING OVER HOOTERS

While the food company built Brooks’ fortune, he is better known for the Hooters restaurant chain, a publicity-maker with a sexy-waitress theme that Brooks didn’t create.

The businessman wound up with Hooters after trying to help the restaurant’s original owner out of financial trouble. When Brooks’ $50,000 loan to the company could not be repaid, he received a partial interest in Hooters, eventually buying out the other partners.

The chain, which has more than 330 restaurants in 43 states and 10 countries, expects revenues of more than $750 million in 2003.

When he bought the chain, Brooks said he didn’t know that its name and owl-eyes logo were meant as a reference to a part of the female anatomy. Brooks cleaned up the chain’s image to an extent, changing it from a bar concept that sold a little food to a full-service restaurant and bar. He kept the chain’s most prominent trademark, its shapely serving girls dressed in snug, low-cut tee shirts and orange hot pants.

On a trip to the first Hooters in Myrtle Beach some 15 years ago, Brooks’ mother, a longtime member of Sweet Home Methodist Church, was amazed. When Brooks said, "Mama what do you think?" she replied, "Son, I didn’t think there was anything like this in this world."

Brooks’ wife, Tami, has her own opinions about Hooters.

She said she doesn’t mind the waitresses’ outfits, "as long as they fit," but she definitely is not happy with the girls’ sexy poses in the Hooters magazine; neither does she approve of the company’s annual bikini contest. "I want him to cut out those bikini contests," Tami said. "I’m just getting madder and madder."

Brooks defends the Hooters girls, and said he doesn’t see much difference between their contests and the Miss America contest.He set his own limits when he took over the chain, and made all the restaurants remove a Playboy photo of a former Hooters girl.

"I know he did that for me," Tami said.

ON THE PERSONAL SIDE

Brooks married Tami, his second wife, in 1998 at the Sweet Home Methodist Church.

His first marriage ended after 29 years, not long after his son’s death." Things change, people change," Brooks said.

Tami Brooks, who grew up in North Myrtle Beach and whose family owns Tony’s Italian Restaurant, was also previously married. The 44-year-old has two adult children from her first marriage, and gave birth to Brooks’ only daughter, Boni Belle, in 1999.

Bob and Tami Brooks live in a comparatively modest one-story brick home on the west side of North Ocean Boulevard, just outside The Dunes Club gates. Brooks also has a home in Atlanta, and keeps a beach house in North Myrtle Beach mainly for guests.

"I hate to say this, but I’ve always thought people who had more than one house were sort of nuts," Brooks said.

Brooks dresses casually, sans glitz except for a diamond wedding band on his left hand and a Clemson class ring on his right. He drinks iced tea from a Styrofoam cup and isn’t starstruck by the celebrities he has met — Cher, Elton John, Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond, to name a few. A contributor to the Republican party, Brooks also has met former presidents Reagan and Bush. The entrepreneur from Loris often has said he is happier in a Waffle House than in a four-star restaurant.

Brooks rarely gets up before 11 a.m. He routinely flies to Atlanta each Tuesday, returning every Thursday. When he’s home, he checks his fax machine in the kitchen pantry. In his spare time, he sometimes plays pool or Chinese checkers. He reads mostly business journals and loves to watch the news. In his own words, he has few hobbies or outside interests.

"I enjoy working," Brooks said. "I enjoy being at home playing with Boni or the grandkids, going out with my wife. I look at the small things as being the sweet things in life."

On a recent Tuesday morning, his three-year-old, Boni Belle, danced around him holding a plush stuffed kitten, a purple ribbon in her wispy blonde hair. Brooks gathered his jacket, a Styrofoam Hooters cup and a worn briefcase before heading to meetings in his Oak Street office, and later to Grand Strand Airport. "We’re going to put some happiness, some excitement back into flying," Brooks said, referring to his Hooters Air venture. Then he added a favorite saying of his father’s:

"Long as the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise."