Earl Neighbors’ living legacy
By: Bert Belanger//Guest Columnist//March 21, 2019
On Feb. 20, my friend Earl Neighbors turned 92 years young. About a week earlier, Earl’s family trust sold the last property that he owned in Automobile Alley.
Jeremy Foraker closed on his purchase of 2 NE Ninth St., which he undoubtedly will transform into a cool collection of office and retail. I had heard Earl was a little down, as he was always a reluctant seller, so his son Stanley, friend Eugene Lawson and I brought in a Friday afternoon lunch of Nashbird chicken and onion rings to Earl’s newly constructed house near NE 15th Street and N. Walnut Avenue.
Newbie observers may not know that Earl’s fingerprints are all over Auto Alley; after a stint serving his country in the Marines, Earl began his career in coffee, working his way up to general manager for Cain’s Coffee Co., whose ivory brick headquarters on NE 12th Street is now slated for a massive retrofit. Earl’s oldest sons Steve and Fred were buying coffee from Cain’s until they decided to roast their own, and soon after his retirement from Cain’s, Earl was knee-deep in working with these two sons at Neighbors’ Brothers Coffee. A few years later, Earl helped son David start a totally separate business based in Tulsa around his own brand of the brew – Java Dave’s.
While I had met Earl during his Cain’s tenure in the ‘70s (my dad bought his product for our family’s restaurants in Weatherford), it was around 2004 that Earl and I became well-acquainted. I felt privileged to observe as Earl worked tirelessly to squeeze income from his collection of buildings that he and his sons had cobbled together when no one else wanted them. Starting at NE 12th Street and working south, the Neighbors clan amassed well over 300,000 square feet, spanning both sides of 10th and Ninth streets and most of the north side of Eighth Street. Being from the waste-not, want-not WW II generation, Earl showed amazing creativity in carving up these buildings into his ever-moving Java Dave’s shop, small offices and hundreds of climate-controlled storage lockers.
Following a 2011 sale of five buildings to his tenant Randy Kamp, Earl finally sold his last properties, to developer Brandon Lodge last year, and now to Foraker. While he deserves to rest, I know Earl would still be out creating if his legs would let him.
Bert Belanger is a broker with Adept Commercial Real Estate and a real estate attorney with Riggs Abney (bbelanger@riggsabney.com).