Brian Wall has lived in Jones County for 21 years, but few people locally know Brian Wall. Rather, they know BeeWall.
Wall, 54, grew up in Baldwin County and played high school football at Georgia Military College prep school (GMC). He picked up his name there.
“It’s literally my first initial and my last name, which was the way that all of our football lockers were laid out,” Wall explained last week. “You had literally sports tape on your lockers, and it was your first initial, last name and your number. And everybody just — you know — instead of me being Brian, I picked up this new identity of B-Wall. And then over time, the spelling got elongated to BeeWall.”
Wall is married to the former Amie Lane, sister of Brian Lane, and the common names shared by family members is also interesting.
“It’s kind of comical on my wife’s side of the family,” Wall chuckled. “We have three Brians, and we have two Amies. You have BeeWall, you have B-Lane, and then you have BB, and BB is married to a woman named Amie, so it’s comical how all the Brian and Amie scenarios play out at family reunions.”
BeeWall and Amie have been married for 24 years, and they have a son, Cauy, who is 23 and a millwright.
Wall graduated from GMC in 1989 and planned to attend college.
“I attempted to go to school, ironically, through GMC Junior College, though I lived in St. Mary’s, Georgia,” he said. “Not long after high school, I started at GMC JUCO through the Kings Bay off-campus program that they had there in St. Mary’s. I was just too far removed from the discipline of being in the classroom on a regular basis to where we were just throwing money at what we thought was going to solve a problem.”
Wall didn’t immediately leave the area after dropping out of school, however. He started a landscaping and lawn maintenance company that proved successful, and he relocated to Milledgeville, where he partnered with Eric Williamson, “who would become like an older brother to me.”
The business flourished until Williamson was killed in a snowmobile accident in early 1996. Wall was emotionally devastated by his friend’s sudden death.
“I became a recluse for about four months,” he recalled. “Didn’t leave the house, didn’t leave the yard. And tried to figure out how we were gonna pick up the pieces of the broken puzzle and put this together and move forward.”
That didn’t happen, and the business was eventually liquidated. Once his connection with the company was terminated, Wall returned to a trade he had worked in before going to St. Mary’s.
“I went into the bar management business. I was a bartender and bar manager in several college clubs in Milledgeville and worked a lot of different nightclubs in different places and got a good reputation for being able to make money in that industry.”
Wall did that for more than 10 years altogether but eventually decided he wanted a change of pace and joined a friend in the printing business. He was working with Studio Designs Printing in Milledgeville when he heard a radio ad in which the station was looking for a sports director.
“And because, I mean, I’ve never met a stranger, never met anybody that I couldn’t have a conversation with. And I figured, what the heck? I walked in unannounced one day in a work T-shirt and a pair of cut-off blue jean shorts and a baseball cap and said, ‘Is this where I need to talk to somebody about applying for a sport director’s job? ” His ability “to gift a gab,” as he termed it, got him the job that day.
The new radio personality did a sports show three times a day and seasonal stuff, generally August to December, “covering any kind of football, high school, junior college, college, wherever they needed me to go.”
Wall did that for several years before moving into the television market, both in sales and ad production.
“Well, the good and bad of that was you had to sell to be able to get to do the fun stuff,” he commented.
Wall did voice-overs for ad insertions on shows for coaches such as Mark Richt and Bert Williams as well as providing taglines for the shows.
“I got to hang out with some of the top talent in their craft, whether it be football, baseball, basketball, NASCAR, or whatever it was,” he recalled.
As did the bartending and club gigs, however, the media experience got stale.
“It was real fun, but we didn’t make a lot of money in those days,” Wall pointed out. “It was a single man’s game, and there aren’t but so many free draft beers and free meals that you can eat just to say that you went and hung out with Bobby Bowden for an evening or his brother or his son. One day you wake up and you realize, ‘Oh, hey, this is fun, but I got to start making money.’” Wall left television in 2004 and joined a new ready-mix concrete business.
“They gave me a clipboard, a laptop computer and a pickup truck and said, ‘Go out and work on the 11th commandment, go ye forth and sell.’” He did that successfully until the building crash of 2008.
“We hung in there probably until about 2010 and then realized that it wasn’t going to bounce back very soon, and when you’re working off of commission, 20 percent of nothing is nothing.”
Once he decided to leave that firm, a longtime friend with whom Wall had worked in television — Jim Fain — convinced him to obtain his independent insurance license and join Fain and his wife, Tina, in Milledgeville. He did just that, and the two men soon realized they “were fishing in the same pond.
“So,” Wall stated, “he took a chance and bought out a local insurance agency here in Gray, Holloway Insurance, in 2012. We retired Ms. Sharon in 2012, and he literally picked my flower pot up and put me in an office over here in Gray.”
That move proved profitable as well, and eventually Fain decided he wanted to devote 100 percent of his time to the real estate business.
“In return for years of loyal service and friendship,” Wall said, “I was able to purchase the book of business and run it as my own since 2017, and after our buy-sell agreement was completed, we renamed what was Beckham and Fain to Piedmont Insurance. So, here we are today, eight years later.”
‘Here’ is Dr. H.B. Jones’ office of decades ago on Clinton Street. Wall was relaxed when he talked about his journey from the bars to his successful insurance business. He also acknowledged he is a busy man off the job.
“I have a lot of irons and a lot of fires,” he began. “I’ve been told that I have a servant’s heart, and that I volunteer for things at a fault. I’ve also been told that I have a disease that carries no name. And the symptoms of that disease do not allow me to put the letters N and O together in a sentence. When somebody asks you a question, I go, no, yes, I’ll help you.”
The avid hunter is a 35-year committee member of the National Wild Turkey Federation.
“We concentrate on efforts on conservation of the land and the different species of the wild turkey,” Wall stated. “We believe in our Second Amendment rights. We believe in passing down our hunting heritage from our grandparents to our parents through to our children and our grandchildren.”
Locally, Wall, who was previously active for many years in scouting, has been involved off and on for the past 12 years with the Jones County football program.
“I am a past and current president of the Jones County Touchdown Club. And we have been able to rally the troops and bring all of the different teams of football in Jones County together, literally, under one umbrella.
“When you have a varsity program, those athletes have to come from somewhere,” Wall declared. “We have gone back to our roots and something that we have done in the past, we have re-partnered with the Jones County Parks and Recreation Department to promote football at the elementary level.” That feeds directly into the two middle school programs, as well as the ninth grade and junior varsity teams, he added.
The business owner also participates in fraternal organizations.
“I am the sitting chaplain for Sincerity Lodge #430, the Masonic Lodge in Gray, a member of Benevolent Lodge #3 in Milledgeville, and a 25-year member of Freemasonry in the state of Georgia,” he shared, explaining he is not an ordained minister or pastor. He responds to serious issues of members and their families.
“When they have sickness, death, and distress in their families, they contact us, and we just whisper words of counsel and comfort in their ear and help them become better men and be able to stay grounded and continue to service their families and their community.”
Wall emphasized that he was not patting himself on the back for anything he’s done. He simply tries to assist when he can.
“I truly believe that, if we’re not helping people, then we need to be sending them to someone that can help them. And that’s just from the heart. I mean, for all the work that we do for other people, it’s not a handout. It’s a hand up. And we’ve been doing it too long to change.”
