Good News Stuff

Good News Fridays: How Alabama’s Only Billionaire “Yella Fella” Jimmy Rane Saved His Hometown

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Welcome to the Good News Fridays segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Good News Fridays will feature something good, wholesome, positive, and overall something great. After a long and stressful week, we all need something good to read or watch on Fridays! Enjoy a heartwarming post below!

Over the last half century, Jimmy Rane transformed his family’s backyard lumber treating plant into $1.8 billion (2021 sales) Great Southern Wood Preserving, the country’s biggest producer of pressure-treated lumber, while starring in the company’s commercials as his cowboy alter-ego “The Yella Fella”. He’s claimed a few other titles along the way: Alabama’s only billionaire, longest serving trustee of his football-crazed alma mater Auburn and closest confidant of the state’s two most powerful politicians (note: college friends with Governor Kay Ivey; other is recently retired U.S. Senator Richard Shelby.) But he never forgot about Abbeville, the town of 2,000 that raised him, where he lives to this day—among the 1950s-style buildings he helped restore.

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