GAINESVILLE — Northeast Georgia History Center honored three Hall County men as "Local Legacies" at the 2015 Taste of History Luncheon on Thursday, August 27.
Jan Cooley, Milton Robson and Jack Frost each were honored at the Banquet Hall at First Baptist Church on Green Street.
The History Center listed biographies of each honoree on its website:
Jan Cooley- A native of Burlington, NC, Jan Cooley found value in good schools and a father who worked in the region’s preeminent industry, textiles, before his family moved to Gainesville, GA in the early 1950s. There, while in high school, living in a cotton mill village, he landed an after-school job in the Sunbelt’s newest and emerging industry, integrated poultry production. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Cooley worked in a variety of roles with closely-held, family-owned poultry enterprises. From 2002-2007 he managed commercial properties, including three poultry processing plants. He then assembled a talented and veteran staff to open Pro View Foods, which employed 750 with sales targeted to exceed $185 million in 2014. Pro View Foods was sold in November 2014 and Cooley purchased two spring water bottling plants in Blue Ridge, GA in January 2015 to begin his newest venture.
Jack Frost-Born in Sevier County, Tennessee, Jack Frost’s first job was in a flour mill in Pigeon Forge. Later entering the cemetery business “by mistake,” he went door to door selling cemetery lots. In 1961 he bought his first cemetery in College Park, Georgia. During the next 50 years he bought, developed, and sold more than 100 cemeteries and funeral homes from Billings, Montana to Charlotte, South Carolina, including Mount Olivet in Nashville, Tennessee, the largest and most historical cemetery in the state.
He purchased Memorial Park in October of 1988, and built a funeral home on the property two years later. Since then he has built Memorial Park South, Memorial Park North, and is currently developing Memorial Park East in Braselton. Together with his wife Janice, Jack has lived in and been a significant part of Gainesville for the past 12 years.
Milton Robson-Robson moved to Georgia when he was 9 years old, and in his teens, he started selling chicken products out of the back of his El Camino for gas money. He started purchasing unique cars at the age of 25 and made it a lifetime hobby, collecting hundreds of cars that eventually turned into a profitable business. Milton Robson began his corporate venture in the food service industry by starting a distribution company in 1962. He opened Milton’s Portioned Packed Meats in 1972, which changed to Prime Pak as its current designation in 1985. Once Milton established Prime Pak, he purchased breading machines and began producing chicken tenders. Over the years the business progressed, and Milton decided to pass the company on to his son, Todd, in 1994.
Robson is also known for founding Milton's Institutional Foods, now known as PFG-Milton's, which he sold in the 1990s to retire to "piddle with ranching, cars and real estate."
