George Breckenridge, 68, telecom executive

As an avid antiques collector for many years, George Breckenridge Jr. had dreamed of opening an antiques gallery.

In 2002, after retiring as vice president of corporate development for KMC Telecom in Atlanta, Mr. Breckenridge was able to fulfill his dream.

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George Breckenridge Jr., a co-founder of Atlanta Antiques Gallery in Chamblee, collected jukeboxes and Art Deco items.

He and his wife, Tricia Breckenridge, opened the 11,000-square-foot Atlanta Antique Gallery in Chamblee. The venture was successful, and Mr. Breckenridge expanded the business by creating and maintaining a Web site that attracted customers from all over.

“We knew the real antiques collectors of the world weren’t in the South. They live in the Midwest and up through the East Coast,” said Tricia Breckenridge of Alpharetta. “He did the photography and maintained the Web site. It accounted for about 50 percent of our business.”

Mr. Breckenridge, 68, died Tuesday of heart failure at Atlanta Medical Center.

The funeral is 3 p.m. Friday at H.M. Patterson & Son, Oglethorpe Hill Chapel, which is in charge of arrangements.

A native of Harrisburg, Pa., he earned a business degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J. He had always been interested in radios, and got a job designing car stereos for Blaupunkt and Toko America for Ford and General Motors.

He began designing radios for luxury cars, and started his own car radio business.

He and his wife moved in 1996 to Atlanta, where Mrs. Breckenridge was one of the founders of KMC Telecom, which was building fiber-optic networks, she said.

Her husband was the company’s 20th employee, she said.

Both Breckenridges enjoyed hunting for antiques. Mr. Breckenridge focused on old timepieces, Art Deco items, cameras, radios, jukeboxes and record albums.

“We have about 2,000 albums of big band music,” she said.

After retiring from the telecom business, the couple rented and renovated space in a commercial building on Chamblee’s “Antiques Row,” creating rows of clean glass cases displaying items that were mostly 45 years old or older.

The Atlanta Antique Gallery rented space to as many as 140 dealers and was voted “best antique store” in 2006 and 2007 by readers of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The couple sold the business in August and planned to travel extensively, Mrs. Breckenridge said. They recently went on a 10-day road trip that included antiquing, she said.

“Our plan was always to build it and make it a success and then sell,” she said. “We wanted to travel and enjoy ourselves.”

Additional survivors include a brother, Barry Breckenridge of Hawthorne, N.J.