Brunswick’s mayor finds connection to Golden Isles
by Keith Laing, Golden Isles Magazine
September/October 2006
Since leaving his native Ohio in 1979, Bryan Thompson has changed addresses 21 times.
As an actor and art consultant, he breezed through small towns just like Brunswick across the Southeast, staying only long enough to leave a touch of creativity in his wake.
However, as the nomad carried boxes into a coastal Georgia home for the first time in 1999 after accepting an offer to head the Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association (GIAHA), Thompson sensed that this relocation would be different. Unlike every other move he had made in his well-traveled adult life, this trip was one-way.
“I’d moved around for years, but as I was moving a box up a flight of stairs that day, I had an epiphany and said, ‘I’m not going to be doing this anymore’,” he says. “I knew I was going to be around (here) for the rest of my life.”
Surprisingly to him, but probably not to those who have always known the hidden treasure that is the Golden Isles, the area began tugging on Thompson’s heartstrings even earlier than that fateful day. He visited Brunswick for a few weeks in 1996 and says it was love at first sight.
“I was working as a consultant for the state arts council,” he recalls. “I was brought in for a month by the GIAHA to help them and the school system put together a long-range arts plan.
“I’ve lived in communities all throughout the South, but this was the first place I came to that, when I left after a month, I felt like I was getting gypped,” he says. “It felt unfair that I had to leave because I felt connected to the area.”
That connection led Thompson, 52, to not only make Brunswick his permanent home a few years later, but in just shy of a decade, prompted him to go from being a visitor to the Golden Isles to becoming a preeminent voice of leadership for the community.
By the time he was elected mayor in 2005, Thompson had moved from being executive director of the Downtown Development Authority, an agency focused on the revival of downtown as a destination for commerce, to president and chief executive officer of Blueprint Brunswick, a not-for-profit community development agency bent on boosting development not only downtown, but throughout Brunswick.
But his rise to the epitome of community leadership was not intentional, Thompson says.
“I did not set out to run for mayor,” he says.
“I set out to find some good qualified people to run, but most people I talked to said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’”
What You See Is What You Get
Thompson’s wife Heather Heath, who coincidentally followed him as GIAHA executive director before their marriage five years ago, says that although her husband�s job description may have changed from entertainer to community leader, one thing has remained the same: Him.
“Everywhere he’s been and everything he’s done, he gives 110 percent of himself,” she says.
But Thompson says that his meteoric rise says more about the community he loves than it does about him.
“I’ve been here nine years and I’m mayor,” he says, almost in amazement. “I’m from Ohio. That should say something about the acceptance level here.”
Thompson adds that the people he is now charged with leading remind him of the people he left behind in Ohio.
“When you grow up in a small town (outside the capital city of Columbus), you’re used to dealing with folks on a certain level,” he says. “You can’t put on any pretense because everybody knows you up and down, and your daddy and his daddy.
“I really like the people here,” he continues. “They’re real. You know where you stand…I don’t get that people here are trying to be anything other than what they are.”
The same is true of him, Thompson says, which he thinks explains his overwhelming popularity.
“It goes back to what I was saying about them,” Thompson says. “What they are seeing (with me) is what they’re getting. I’m kind of wordy sometimes, but I think my intentions are in the right place.”
Those who know Thompson best agree with his self-assessment. Heath says Thompson’s upfront nature endeared Brunswick to him just as quickly as he fell in love with it.
“He does what he says he’s going to do,” she says. “He has done that in every role he’s had since he moved here. He works hard and he’s honest and all of the work he does is for others.”
From the outside, looking in
That is why even people who have called the Golden Isles home their entire lives, such as Glynn County Commissioner Cap Fendig, appreciate the transplanted mayor’s efforts.
“The community found itself a motivated individual to lead in the revitalization of downtown and the flavor of his success in those efforts led the community to have a confidence in him that resulted in him being elected mayor,” says Fendig, a member of the Blueprint Brunswick Board of Directors that oversees Thompson in his job as the organization’s president.
Heath adds that in the five years she has been married to Brunswick’s adopted son, as well as in the nearly 20 years she has known him, he has always exuded a likable quality. “I’ve known Bryan for quite a number of years because we both worked as actors in Atlanta,” she recalls. “I thought he was some strange, highly energetic guy, but we became friends.
“He throws himself whole-heartedly and with full impact into what he’s doing. He’s exceptionally full of energy all the time, and that energy (now) is directed at making Brunswick an even better place to be.”
Other community leaders who are also life-long area residents, such as school board member LaVerne Cooper, agree that Thompson is now as much a part of Brunswick as the oak trees that grace its streets. In fact, Cooper says, Thompson became an integral part of the community as soon as he arrived.
“He’s one of those people who didn’t come in as an outsider,” says Cooper, also a member of the Blueprint Brunswick Board of Directors. “He came in as if he were a Brunswick person. It was just as if he had always been here, because he’s so easy to know and get to know.”
Cooper adds that Thompson’s concern for all of Brunswick’s residents was apparent long before he became their mayor.
“He just seems to love and care about all people,” she says. “He doesn’t seem to (do) any favoring. He is concerned and cares about everybody and takes everybody’s concerns seriously, no matter if they are at the top of the ladder or the bottom.”
It is no surprise, then, that the migrant maestro made the Golden Isles his home away from home and that Brunswick made him its leader.
