Reluctant Office-Seeker Bosses County From ‘The Shrine’ : Georgia Candidate’s Headquarters Is a Tavern

Manuel Maloof runs his campaign not from some sterile TV studio but from a smoky old tavern that two generations of Dixie politicians have come to refer to reverently as “The Shrine.”

Maloof is chief executive officer of booming DeKalb County, population 534,000 and growing, up for reelection to a second term.

He is as unlikely a candidate as you could find running a major urban government--rumpled, gruff, outspoken, emotional, the proud antithesis of the blow-dried politician of the ‘80s.

Such is his popularity that ordinarily this might not be such a tough race for him, but this year his health could become an issue. It has not been the easiest of years for Manuel J. Maloof.

First, he went into the hospital for a bad foot, and wound up receiving Last Rites--twice--because he nearly died from pneumonia. Then he had some trouble breathing, and wound up with quadruple-bypass heart surgery.

But fighting the odds is nothing new to Maloof, son of a Lebanese immigrant and perhaps Atlanta’s most famous tavern owner.

Traditional Tavern

Manuel’s Tavern, on the now-hip fringe where Atlanta’s commercial east side gives way to DeKalb County and the dignified Druid Hills neighborhood, is a quintessential tavern. Not a joint or a nightclub, but a real tavern, where a body can find a properly cold beer, a burger at a reasonable price, and a place to talk. Regulars call it “The Shrine”; The Wall Street Journal once called it a “a smoky dive”--which the staff promptly printed on T-shirts.

Manuel’s is smoky. The wagon-wheel light fixtures, looking like they came from a long-closed family steakhouse, don’t match. There are pictures of John and Robert Kennedy over the bar and beer signs on the walls and a painting of a nude woman over the booths; a patron once handed it over as payment for his bar tab.

Manuel’s has big round tables, so friends can gather and talk, and it’s bright enough for patrons to see who they’re talking to. That’s important to Maloof, and it’s his tavern--and his years of holding court there--that propelled him into politics, where he landed as chief executive officer of booming DeKalb County.

Maloof, now 64, grew passionately interested in government in his youth, listening to the politicians and the government workers in the Tip Top Billiard Parlor, the Atlanta tavern and game room run by his father, Gibran Maloof, a 1907 immigrant from Beirut. Manuel’s own tavern, which he opened in 1956, soon became a meeting place for politicians, journalists and academics, who talked into the night about the issues of the day.

“My father was one of the best Americans that ever lived,” Maloof said. “He just believed that we owed this country. While he never encouraged me to go into government . . . he sort of instilled in me that we owe it, and we ought to pay it back.”

Maloof at first thought politics would not be open to him because of his foreign extraction, the fact that he was a Catholic--”not too popular in the county in those days”--and because he was in the bar business.

Unofficial Headquarters

By 1972, Maloof had become known as the behind-the-scenes godfather of Democratic politics in DeKalb County. The tavern was an unofficial party headquarters, and Maloof supported the party financially when it was strapped for cash. That year brought a race for a DeKalb County Commission seat, “and nobody would run as a Democrat,” he said.

“I was trying to get some people to run, and everybody copped out. So it came down to the clock running out, and I said: ‘What the hell, I’ll just do it, just to be a token candidate. We cannot allow it to go unchallenged.’ ”

He lost. But he was pleasantly surprised to land 42% of the vote, and two years later he tried again, winning this time, an at-large post. He served until 1978, then stepped aside. Maloof said he couldn’t take it anymore.

But in 1980, he jumped back into politics, beating the incumbent county commission chairman. In ‘84, he won the newly created post of chief executive officer.

Maloof is hardly a polished politician. He sporadically threatens to quit. He says what he thinks: “I believe they take my word if I tell them something; they know I’m not going to lie to them.”

And he plunges into the nuts-and-bolts of government, running the county the way he runs his business: Never spend money unless you have to, and never pay the asking price.

This year, Maloof is seeking his second term as CEO, the last he’s allowed by law. And that, he said, will be it. “I’ll be 68 years old. If I even live that long I’ll be thankful.”

Maloof has long fought diabetes, a disease underlying his other health problems. One leg is larger than the other, leaving him with a laborious gait. He was soaking a painful foot earlier this year when he was scalded and complications set in--infection, pneumonia, blood clots in both lungs.

“They wrote my obit,” Maloof said with a laugh. “They’ve still got it out there in the office. They wrote me off.”

He recalled lying in his hospital bed, terribly ill, seeing “this cliff, in my mind, that I was going to fall off of and die. It was all covered with all this slimy, green vegetation, vines and stuff. And I could look down in there and see this hole. I was going to fall off of there. And all of a sudden, they just pushed me back.”

It was, Maloof believes firmly, the prayers of his many friends that saved his life: “I’ll believe that till my dying day.”

Maloof was told that he’s mellowed.

“No, that’s not so,” he growled. “I’ve always said there’s the blessed and the damned: The blessed are those who don’t give a damn, and the damned are those who do. Somehow or another, I was always the damned, because . . . if I think something’s not right, I’m not going to just let it slide.”

‘Lot to Think About’

Maloof acknowledged that coming close to death “gave me a lot to think about. You get in these jobs and you get to wondering--everything I do must make somebody mad. But there was a genuine outpouring of affection in those prayers. That was the nicest surprise.”

Maloof was a delegate to this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, for another son of immigrants, Michael Dukakis. Maloof is an unabashed old-style Democrat. In a time when “liberal” is a political profanity and Ronald Reagan calls Dukakis “an invalid,” Maloof worries what has happened to his country and its politics.

“They throw up these walls, and you’re a way-out left-winger because you care about people,” he said. “All of a sudden, it isn’t right to say what you think. And we are losing that ability, I think.

“What happened to us? Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten old . . . .”

These days, Manuel’s Tavern only sees Manuel once or twice a week; he doesn’t have the time. His brother, Robert Maloof, and his children run the original tavern and two branches in the suburbs.

But there was a time when Maloof ran his bar morning till night, and his friends gathered round. Politicians and journalists would argue politics. Faculty members from nearby Emory University would hold after-class seminars; a religion professor named Tom Alitzer was explaining his “God is dead” theory at Manuel’s long before the rest of the world heard about it.

Maloof still prides himself on building a tavern where cussing too loudly will get you tossed, where a woman can sip a beer without getting hit on, and where talk and friendship are the best entertainment.

Maloof has firm ideas about how he wants people to remember him years from now, when he’ll be running neither their county nor their bar.

“I hope they just say: ‘He knew what he was doing. He cared. He really cared.’ ”