In the days when cars had fins and AM radios, Harvey Strother was king of the road.

A lawyer who decided he'd rather be an automobile man, as this breed called themselves, Strother eventually owned five car dealerships in Marietta and Valdosta.

By the 1970s, he controlled millions —- back when a top Ford Mustang sold for about $3,400 and a million dollars was worth seven digits.

In less than a decade, he sprinted from service manager at a Chevrolet lot in Atlanta to owner of a Ford dealership, which he moved from downtown Marietta to the top of the hill on Cobb Parkway. Other dealerships followed, including Marietta Toyota in 1975, which the family still controls.

With a house in one of Marietta's best neighborhoods, a half-interest in a Beechcraft Queen Air aircraft, country club memberships in Kennesaw and Marco Island, Fla., and a silk touch with car buyers, every lane on the highway of life was open and green-lighted for the Decatur-born son of a railroad engineer.

But Strother, a middle linebacker type with a hearty grin and firm handshake, was being pursued by a disease that had more horsepower than he could buy and an engine so silent he never heard it closing on him.

His struggle filled the final chapters of his life with Faulknerian pages of love, loneliness, family spats and tragedy.

Harvey Strother, who hunted in Canada, fished the oceans and could crush a golf ball 260 yards off the tee —- with a persimmon driver —- started sinking into depression that his family says led to alcoholism.

It began in the mid-1990s after the leukemia death of a Marietta woman with whom he had a 20-year affair, court documents say.

A bourbon man for most of his years, Strother in his twilight was drinking up to 1 1/2 gallons of vin de gouttiere —- the wine in the box with the plastic spigot —- each day.

His doctor said Strother's blood-alcohol level at the end of a day approached .40, a near-comatose state for most people, but that quitting drinking probably would kill him. Continuing probably did.

When he died in 2004, a week after his 78th birthday, Strother was worth about $37 million. He left it to a wife, three children, grandchildren —- and an estimated $6 million to a mistress who had accompanied him to a lawyer's office in Naples, Fla., when he changed his will three weeks before his death.

Including that last visit, Strother had amended his will three times in four years, each change bestowing more and more of his estate on Anne Melican, a psychological counselor and Strother's mistress of seven years.

Described in court papers and by Marietta friends as a driven man who got his way, Strother added a stringent penalty clause to his will in his final days: Any heir who contested the changes would be disinherited.

Final days

Beginning Monday in a Cobb County courtroom, a jury will be asked to decide whether Strother was independently capable of knowingly making those changes to his will or was addled by alcohol and unduly influenced by Melican, his junior by three decades.

Melican and her attorney declined to comment about the case. Members of the Strother family, through their attorney, declined interview requests.

Family members, through sworn statements and their attorney's court filings, have attempted to portray Melican as crafty woman who craved expensive gifts —- court documents indicate Strother spent nearly $200,000 on her jewelry alone —- and used alcohol and sex to manipulate him.

Melican said in a sworn statement that when she met Strother on Marco Island in late summer 1996, he said he was a widower. Several months later, he said he had not shared a bed with his wife in 20 years, but admitted he was still married.

Melican recalled the moment and how it struck her in a January 2006 sworn statement: "So I knew. ... But you know something? It's almost too late then. I was completely captivated by Harvey, and I think he by me."

At stake for Melican and her adult son: a $7,900 monthly allowance, a Marco Island condo last estimated at $1.3 million, a 53-foot Carver yacht called "The Lady Anne," a yacht club slip, three cars and the payoff on a $575,000 Cape Cod condo.

Although cases about wills rarely attract attention in a county-seat town that has plenty of raw politics and widely regarded lawyers handling their own high-profile cases, those who know the Strother family are keenly aware the fight is coming to trial.

They are saddened that some potentially embarrassing chapters in Strother's life will be aired.

"It's horribly unfortunate because it brings a different ending to what we all pictured Harvey being," said Wally Gresh, a golfing buddy and occasional co-pilot who knew Strother for 40 years.

"He was the last person that I would have thought of who would have gone this way," said Gresh, whose family operates S.A. White Oil Co.

Gresh said Strother was a strong financial supporter of the Salvation Army and that he suspected Strother had a large role in financing the Water Street building where the local chapter has its headquarters.

Three weeks before Strother died of congestive heart failure, he was in a lawyer's office in Naples at 8:30 a.m. to make the final changes to his will. He sat in a wheelchair and was tended by Melican in a "very caring" way, one of the witnesses to the changes said in a sworn statement. The session also was videotaped.

James Karl, the lawyer who drafted the changes, said in a sworn statement that he was certain Strother was not under the influence of alcohol at the time.

"I wouldn't have allowed him to execute this if I thought he had been drinking," Karl said.

A few days later, one of Strother's friends, a veterinarian, visited him at the condo he shared with Melican.

In a sworn statement last year, Dr. Walter Young provided the grim account of what he saw:

"Harvey was sitting in a chair in the dining room. Harvey was drunk and had a box of wine on the table with a faucet coming out of the box. He had a 16-ounce plastic cup that he would fill with wine from the box. Harvey was wearing a diaper.

"The night that I left the condominium ... my personal observation was that Harvey was not competent to handle any business in an effective manner," he said.

Young also said he believed drinking led to Strother's death.

Shortly after that visit. Melican sent Strother back to Marietta. Young said she and her son were planning a ski trip to Vail, Colo., and that she was sending Strother to Marietta because he was too ill to go to Vail.

He died at WellStar Kennestone Hospital, on a hill that overlooks downtown Marietta and the brick buildings where the story of Harvey Strother's success began.