It was Michael Hollis’ destiny to be a leader, not a follower. He set a high bar as a teenager, and he kept raising it as an adult.
Mr. Hollis may be best known for starting an airline -- before he was 30 -- after which he formed a broadcasting company, helped establish a petroleum company, launched a debt-collections company and even left time to help save his beloved Grady Memorial Hospital.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
Not all of his ventures turned out the way he planned, but the fact that he kept trying was classic Michael Hollis, said a long-time friend.
“He believed in himself, and had a lot of self-confidence,” said Daniel Kolber, a friend of 37 years and a local attorney. “He wasn’t afraid of rejection. Every time he got a ‘no’ he felt like that was one more ‘no’ closer to a ‘yes.’ ”
Michael Robinson Hollis, of Douglasville, died Monday at his home of complications related to pancreatic cancer. He was 58. A funeral service is planned for 10:30 a.m. Monday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta. Entombment will follow at Resthaven Gardens of Memory.
It was evident long before he incorporated Air Atlanta in 1981, when he was 27, that Mr. Hollis would do big things. He was head of the Atlanta Youth Congress at 15, and at the same time he worked on the mayoral campaign of Sam Massell, who later appointed a young Mr. Hollis to a community-relations commission that helped address race.
“He was a boy wonder and helped us understand issues just surfacing in that arena,” said Mr. Massell, president of the Buckhead Coalition and a former Atlanta mayor.
When Mr. Hollis was 16, he talked his way into a job in the Braves' public-relations department, was selected as a Georgia delegate to the White House Conference on Youth and spearheaded the organization of Young Atlantans for Maynard Jackson when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1969, before he was elected mayor. Mr. Hollis accomplished all of this before he graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, according to a 1985 Atlanta Journal article.
Mr. Hollis went to Dartmouth College, where he graduated with honors, then to the University of Virginia School of Law, where he became the first black national president of the student division of the American Bar Association. After law school, he returned to Atlanta briefly before being appointed associate chief counsel by then-President Jimmy Carter to investigate the legal ramifications of the Three Mile Island nuclear power-plant accident near Middletown, Pa. in 1979.
After that assignment, he became vice president for public finance at the New York investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., which he left in 1983. By 1984, three years after he incorporated the airline, planes were in the air. The airline shuttered in 1987, but that did not squash Mr. Hollis’ entrepreneurial spirit, Mr. Kolber said.
“He did so much more after Air Atlanta,” his friend said. “And his work with Grady was near and dear to his heart.”
Born at Grady Memorial Hospital, Mr. Hollis served on both the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority and the hospital board. In addition to his work with the hospital, Mr. Hollis was a founding trustee of Clark Atlanta University and had served as a member of the Emory University Board of Visitors.
Julius H. Hollis said his brother was “a gifted entrepreneur who could apply his skill sets in variety of industries.” He said his brother created opportunities for others “through business, government and academic pursuits.”
In addition to his brother, Mr. Hollis is survived by his wife, Deena Freeman Hollis of Douglasville; sisters Virginia E. Hollis of Lithonia and Joan Hollis Mitchell of Atlanta; and another brother, Flem H. Hollis of Roswell.
