POWERGRAMS

23 partner, Greg, took a lessor operational role 13 years ago but remains involved in all major decisions and holds a seat on the board of directors. Jimmy could buy an island and live out his days, or move his headquarters to a cosmopolitan city, but he's satisfied with his small-town status. Mitchell Carter remembers Rane phoning him nearly 20 years ago, offering management training to keep Carter locally employed. "Jimmy Rane really looks at employees like family. He's just a great guy," he says. "Most evenings when I leave the plant, he'll be over there working. He's always the last to leave the building." Amanda Davis' family always worked at West Point- Pepperell. When it closed, "people thought that was going to close the town. But Jimmy Rane has done so much," she says, noting that her daughter is one of nearly 500 students since 2000 to receive a Jimmy Rane Foundation College Scholarship. "A lot of people owe a lot to Jimmy Rane, and I do, too." Rane credits his success to his parents, Tony and Libba, who were early community leaders of Abbeville. Jimmy has named subsidiaries of Great Southern after Greenbush, the Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood where his father grew up. In the 1950s, Pepperell President Homer Carter often drove through Abbeville on the way to his beach house. He sometimes stopped for spaghetti at the Village Inn, owned by Jimmy's father. Carter would ask Tony about Abbeville because Cuthbert, Georgia, about 35 miles east, was being considered for a new Pepperell plant. Carter said Abbeville needed a Chamber of Commerce, among other community upgrades. Rane helped organize the Abbeville chamber and was its first president, the same year Carter was persuaded to open his pillow-case and sheet plant in Abbeville. "I always say Dad's spaghetti won the deal," Rane says of dinners served Carter before Abbeville clinched the plant, which for decades employed 1,400 local workers. In the new millennium, Pepperell began decreasing its staff before shutting down in 2008. "Abbeville began to die, was just withering on the vine," Rane says. He would visit his parents each afternoon for a scotch and soda, and inevitably the conversation ended with them regretting that so much of their hard work begun in the 1940s was going down the drain. "I was determined to do something about it," Rane says, recalling that he began buying and renovating buildings, meeting with community leaders, receiving government grants, "putting a brick in the wall day by day" that would help lead to the new but old-looking downtown. Rane, who was the first of his family to earn a college degree, was a part-time Henry County judge from 1973 until 1977. In the early days of Great Southern, he had an office on the Abbeville square, with two black manual telephones: One he answered for the Jimmy Rane Law Office; the other for Great Southern Wood. After a few years, he began devoting most of his time to the lumber business but he still has a law license and does legal work. "I learned a lot dealing with a lot of things: some funny things and some tragic things," he says of his early Positive Maturity magazine named Rane to its "Top 50 Over 50" Alabamians. PHOTO COURTESY POSITIVE MATURITY MAGAZINE

• Cover