(Above: Yellowhammer CEO Cliff Sims interviews Great Souther Wood CEO Jimmy Rane)
Yellowhammer’s video crew sat in a nearly empty 1950s-style soda shop in Abbeville, Ala. around 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon and started recapping everything we had seen over the previous several hours.
Abbeville, the oldest remaining colonial settlement in East Alabama, is a town of just under 2,700 people in the southeast corner of the state. Its population in the 1950s was roughly the same as it is today. It has one high school, one middle school and one elementary school, and is served by a single radio station — WESZ, “Oldies 98.7.”
Many of the downtown storefronts and a local theatre marquee have been restored to the way they looked at a time when Elvis was emerging as the face of rock-n-roll and the jury was still out on whether capitalism or communism would prevail as the globe’s dominant economic system.
It’s the kind of town that isn’t so much stuck in the past as it is nostalgic — sentimental about the values that its residents have passed down to each other for generations.
And at the center of it all is the town’s most famous resident, Jimmy Rane, perhaps better known as “The Yella Fella.”
Rane founded Great Southern Wood Preserving in Abbeville 44 years ago when he started peddling treated lumber out of the back of a red, 1961 pickup truck. Today the company is the largest of its kind — not just in Alabama, not even just in the United States, but in the entire world.
“We’re in 27 U.S. states, every Caribbean country, every central American country, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uraguay, China and Taiwan,” Rane had told us at his company’s headquarters earlier in the day. “We’re competing on a world stage.”
The company employs roughly 1,000 people. But even after hearing the details of Great Southern Wood’s almost unfathomable success on a global scale, it was Rane’s devotion to his rural Alabama hometown that stuck out above it all.
Rather than expanding Great Southern Wood’s Abbeville headquarters as the company grew, Rane chose to renovate buildings in other parts of town, like the old Standard Oil gas station, and turn them into office space. By doing that the company’s exponential growth has had an even greater impact on the town.
His passion for historical preservation has led him to renovate properties all over Abbeville. Even the the soda shop the Yellowhammer crew stopped in before leaving town, Huggin’ Molly’s, was opened by Rane in 2006.
We covered a lot of ground in the on-camera interview conducted in Rane’s second-floor office at Great Southern Wood HQ — from his thoughts on the economy and his non-profit foundation, to his role as President Pro Tem of the Auburn University Board of Trustees and the Super Bowl commercial in which he played a starring role.
But it was Rane’s final answer of the interview that lingered with me as we packed up to head north.
It has been suggested in the past that Great Southern Wood’s business would actually benefit from moving out of Abbeville, that a relocation to a larger hub of commerce would further strengthen the company’s robust bottom line.
“Why Abbeville?” I asked. “What makes this place so special?”
“Why not Abbeville?” Rane replied with the slightest glimmer of a tear welling up in his eye. “I think that’s the better question. Abbeville is home. I’ve lived here all my life. My mother’s family has been here a long time. My friends and family are here. Abbeville is composed of really fine, educated people who want an opportunity… so why not? I want to do all I can to help make Alabama as great as it can be.”
Yellowhammer’s full interview with Jimmy Rane can be viewed above. Like “The Exchange” and want to make more episodes possible? SHARE this post on Facebook, Twitter and email quickly and easily by using the buttons below.
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