Mickey Garber leads a visitor on a brief tour of 50 acres of what was once farmland through ankle-high grass towards a large hole in the ground where his brother Jerry is pulling a plastic bag out with his walking stick.
“Our parents used to make us pick up trash in front of our place,” said Mickey. “We’d say ‘but, daddy, we didn’t put it there.’ He would say go pick up that trash because nobody’s going to call us trashy. It’s your responsibility to keep this place clean.
“In order to represent what the people of Clayton County are, it is everybody’s responsibility.”
This sense of responsibility thrust Mickey into expanding his trash cleanup efforts to the surrounding subdivisions and businesses in his Rex community. Now, he spends two days or more every few weeks picking up litter with or without others. He was asked to join a nearby Neighborhood Watch Group even though he does not live in that neighborhood. His ongoing efforts have caused his neighbors to dub him the “Mayor” of Rex.
The Georgia House of Representatives recently honored Mickey with a resolution (H.R. 1426) for “his unwavering service, community devotion, and the quiet strength of a man deeply rooted in the place he calls home.”
Told months later of the honor, Mickey said he had not heard of it. “We don’t have email. All we have is a flip phone,” he said, showing off his vintage 1990s era flip phone.
Mickey got involved in politics 10 years ago when the Clayton County Commission decided to ban burning in unincorporated areas of Clayton County, which includes the Garber farmland. He and his Jerry were incensed because the only option to keep their place clean of falling branches and limbs was to pay to have it hauled away.
“That burn ban lit a fire under me,” said Mickey. “I told them life on the farm revolves around burning trash,” On the walking tour Jerry pointed out at least four black spots where they do burning.
On the day he spoke to the commission, Mickey was the only one to speak against the burn ban. There were four others who were there with written statements. When the commissioners asked for any more comments, Mickey, almost without thinking, jumped to his feet to defend burning. From that day forward, Mickey has missed, by his account, only six commission meetings. He attends every zoning commission meetings because, he says, they are putting new residential subdivisions right next to industrial and commercial zones.
“The way they zone things is willy-nilly,” he claims.
He was one of the voices that made the commission move the public comments section from the end of the meetings to the start of the proceedings and to extend the time allotted to each individual from two minutes to three.
“”That has just drawn me into the political thing,” said Mickey.
The Garber brothers are second generation immigrants whose grandparents fled from Eastern Europe, probably Poland, in the early 20th Century. “They never spoke much English,” Jerry membered. “Heck, they didn’t even know what boat they came in on. I don’t think my mother’s side of the family were ever even citizens.”
The Garber grandparents opened a small grocery store on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta that did moderately well. It enabled the family to send Mickey and Jerry’s father, David, to a small school in Pennsylvania called the Delaware Valley College of Agriculture, where he unintentionally prepared for the future by majoring in poultry farming and minoring in floral cultivation, two skills he would later put to use.
But David Garber came home to find his parents wanted him to get into the grocery business, even though he expressed a desire to be a chicken farmer. The grocery store David opened on Pryor Street was never a success. But he did go looking for land to start his chicken business, finally buying around 50 acres of land situated in between dairy farms in eastern Clayton County, in the unincorporated area known as Rex.
Mickey remembers living in a shack on the farm for many, many years before his father built a nice ranch-style home. At first, the Garbers raised broiler chickens, then switched to egg production. Mickey and Jerry were the farm laborers.
“Daddy would wake us up at 4:30 every morning. We would clean out these 150-foot long troughs right before school, so we would get a lot of chicken (poop) on our shoes. It wouldn’t dry on our boots until third period,” said Mickey.
The brothers entered the Army about six months apart, and for the duration of their service were constantly following each other from camp to camp and assignment to assignment, never at the same time. When their enlistments were over, the brothers decided to take a road trip to visit their Army buddies, driving up into the Midwest and then onto the West where they stopped in Las Vegas. For the next few years, the brothers worked as pool attendants at the Circus-Circus casino. Mickey eventually got hired as a craps dealer but Jerry got bored and moved back home.
The Garber Farm was about to undergo another transformation. Their mother, Helen Garber, was the brains of the outfit. With egg prices fluctuating so much the market was volatile. She convinced her husband and son to sell the egg business and open a nursery. The idea came from a local gas station that had been selling hanging baskets. David Garber noticed that the baskets were selling quickly.
“We didn’t know an Azalea from a Holly,” Jerry said. “But we ordered a couple of tractor trailers full of plants and my Dad hired the guy from the gas station as a consultant. We had the county Extension Agent come out and a plant pathologist tell us what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong.”
David Garber had to take a job as a driver to make ends meet. In three years the Garbers had made the nursery business profitable. Mickey, meanwhile, was contemplating a change in his life as well. He considered going to school to be a deep sea diver or he was going to move to Australia.
“We had to beg him to come home. We had too much business,” said Jerry.
The nursery would be their lives for the next three decades, working seven days a week. The nursery business included a retail store at the front of their property where seed and chemicals were sold. It was so busy, said Jerry, that at times there were three cash register machines being worked simultaneously.
The nursery, closed in 2006, is no more, yet dozens of trees remain: Japanese Maple trees and Crape Myrtles still stand. The hole where Jerry fished the plastic bag out of is where a tall Crape Myrtle once stood. It was sold just recently.
The brothers are retired now after many years of work, except they don’t believe they were working.
“The saying is that if you have a job you love, you never work a day in your life,” said Jerry.
“Even though we worked seven days a week for years, Jerry and I really enjoyed every minute. You can’t do it for 30 years unless you love it.”
Neither of the brothers have married or really wanted to. They are very happily married to the land.
“My brother is like American Express,” Mickey said. “I won’t leave home without him.”