Earl “Bubba” Hiers, who left a career in landscaping to help his sister Paula Deen rise to fame and grow her restaurant business in Savannah, Georgia, just passed away at the age of 65.

“Bubba was the greatest brother who was loved by so many people,” Deen said in a statement. “We will miss him dearly.”

Hiers reportedly passed away last week after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Back in 2000, Deen was a single mother who had just moved to Savannah from across the state. Her first business was selling bag lunches, and this was so successful that she opened a small restaurant called The Lady & Sons in the city’s downtown historic district.

“I dreamed that someday my boys and I would find a way to drag Bubba into the business with us,” Deen wrote in the forward to Hiers’ 2007 cookbook “Uncle Bubba’s Savannah Seafood.”

Hiers sold his landscaping business and moved to Savannah in 2002 right before Food Network launched the show “Paula’s Home Cooking,” which made her a household name. Deen said that Hiers helped her buy and renovate a larger building that expanded her restaurant from 90 seats to a multifloor eatery that served up to 2,000 meals each day. Deen also helped Hiers find success himself when she assisted him in opening Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House in 2004.

“Without Paula’s support, sensible advice, and unconditional love, I’d probably be a lost soul,” Hiers wrote in the introduction of his cookbook.

Things took a turn for the worse for Hiers and Deen when Uncle Bubba’s manager filed a lawsuit that accused Hiers of sexual harassment. When Deen’s legal deposition for the case became public in 2013, it was revealed that she had admitted to using racial slurs in the past. This caused Food Network to cancel her show in June of 2013, and Uncle Bubba’s lawsuit was quietly settled out of court the next year.

Polly Powers Stramm, a Savannah author who co-wrote Hiers’ cookbook, said that after that, “he kind of dropped off the map.”

“He was pretty talented in his own right. He could cook and all that, hunt and fish,” Stramm said. “He was always very much a gentleman to me.”