Biography
Alan Elsas was born in Atlanta at the original Piedmont Hospital and grew up in Buckhead, first in Brookhaven on Brighton Road and later on West Paces Ferry Road near present-day Westminster. He attended Fritz Orr summer camp and Little Lovett on West Wesley Road, before the Buckhead private school moved to its current location. He is the great-grandson of Atlanta pioneer Jacob Elsas, a German-Jewish immigrant from Württemberg who founded the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mills, which became one of the city’s major industrial employers. Jacob Elsas provided housing and welfare services for his millworkers, employed both Black and White workers, and helped establish the Georgia Institute of Technology and Grady Hospital. Alan’s family legacy is deeply tied to Atlanta’s industrial and civic growth, and the mill operations ceased in 1981.
Synopsis:
In this interview with volunteer James Ottley, longtime Buckhead resident and Atlanta native Herbert Alan Elsas (b. 1940) recalls a childhood on a twenty-acre tract on Paces Ferry Road, then rural country of dirt roads, woods, a victory garden, and a backyard pond his father dammed after returning from World War II. He describes summers at Fritz Orr’s overnight boys’ camp, whose grounds became the Westminster campus, and his schooling at Little Lovett and at Westminster, which began in downtown temporary quarters and reached its new campus by way of a caravan across the I-75 construction site. Elsas traces his family’s history from great-grandfather Jacob Elsas, a German immigrant who founded the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill and helped fund what became Georgia Tech’s textile school, and he credits his brother Skip, a geneticist, with inspiring the Historic Oakland Foundation’s work to restore Oakland Cemetery. He also discusses his finance career at Goldman Sachs, Drexel Burnham, and Robinson Humphrey, the early days of the Atlanta Financial Center, and the founding of the Charlie Cup mixed-doubles tennis tournament at Bitsy Grant. His recollections of 1950s Buckhead include filling stations at the West Paces Ferry intersection, movie trips downtown by bus, stock car and dirt tracks, and the Vinings artificial ski slope. He closes with the story of meeting his wife, Catherine, and their early married life.
Video
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