How A Crime Fighting Cowboy Became Alabama’s Only Billionaire

You know what that means?” Jimmy Rane, the 76-year-old founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, a lumber treating outfit, asks with a chuckle, picking up an axe in his Abbeville, Alabama, office and pointing at the letters GATA inscribed down its handle. “It means ‘get after their ass.’ And you’ll see that motto in every Great Southern building.”

The mantra was originally intended to fire up Georgia Southern University football fans back in the 1980s. Rane’s co-opting of the phrase is just one way the lifelong Alabama resident has tried to marry the public’s perception of his business to the South’s second-most-popular religion: college football. crocs cowboy boots for sale