Untitled Document

Monday, March 27, 2006

Good morning! Here's your daily summary of news coverage of Auburn University.

NOTE: when articles are pulled over in text form from the Web, formatting errors and typos may appear due to the transfer of information from one format to another. These errors are not in the original articles.

Total Clips: 5

	Date	Outlet
Yella Fella preserves wood and hometown	03/27/2006	The Birmingham News
More Perryville land may be saved	03/26/2006	Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
Women, blacks find more jobs in state government	03/26/2006	Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
Auburn trustee discord surfaces again	03/25/2006	Montgomery Advertiser
'Very positive'	03/25/2006	Opelika-Auburn News


Yella Fella preserves wood and hometown 03/27/2006 The Birmingham News Bob Carlton		Return to Top
Story on AU Trustee Jimmy Rane was also picked up by The Associated Press and reported by the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune. ABBEVILLE - Jimmy Rane drives his Lexus SUV around his old hometown, and remembers how it used to be back when he was a kid. "I grew up here," he says. "I love Abbeville. In large part, who I am today is because of Abbeville. "I couldn't see it vanish into obscurity, so we've tried to do something about it." Best known as the president and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving company and the jolly, round funnyman in those YellaWood commercials, the 59-year-old Rane is still a country boy at heart. And thanks to his and other city leaders' efforts to preserve their town, Rane can not only dream about the past, but still live in it. The memories are everywhere. The old Standard Oil filling station where he used to buy gas for his lawnmower now houses Great Southern's purchasing department. "When we bought this, we were in desperate need of office space and, really, the smart thing would have been to just knock it down and we could have built something back a lot cheaper," Rane says. "But I had such fond memories of coming down here when I was a boy. It seemed wrong, it seemed criminal, to tear it down." Restored to its former glory, the station is like a shrine to America's automotive history, complete with 1930s-era gas pumps, which the company still uses to fuel its fleet of automobiles and which curious travelers sometime pull up alongside to ask for a fill-up. At the other end of town, the Henry County Livestock Co. building once owned by his father, Anthony Rane, and where Jimmy and his kid brother, Greg, worked during the weekly livestock auctions, has been preserved as a meeting hall for Great Southern's corporate functions. In the adjoining office where the cattlemen used to make their transactions, Rane has built a replica of a country store and barber shop. On Saturday mornings, he comes in to relax in the barber chair and listen to Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind" on his Seeburg jukebox. On Kirkland Street, the main drag that runs down the middle of this town of about 4,000, the dentist's office where Dr. James Simonton drilled on Rane's teeth is now home to the Greenbush Logistics trucking line, a Great Southern spinoff company. "His chair sat right under this skylight," Rane recalls. "I remember as a boy being in that chair. He called his drill `Woody Woodpecker.' He would say, 'We're going to let Woody Woodpecker work a little bit.' " One old downtown storefront has been dressed up to look like a Buster Brown shoe store and another to resemble a Philco TV and radio dealership. Across the street, the former Bill's Dollar Store now houses a conference room where the Chamber of Commerce meets. 'A wonderful tribute' Coming soon is a soda fountain and restaurant named Huggin' Molly's - in honor of the legendary, 7-foot town ghost whom old-timers say would roam the streets bear-hugging unsuspecting victims. It is scheduled to open later this spring, and the interior will include an exact replica of the soda fountain from Mr. Gower's drug store in "It's a Wonderful Life," one of Rane's favorite movies. "What wonderful values that movie teaches everybody," he says. "If we can re-create some of that and begin to establish that kind of wholesome attitude, then this will be a wonderful tribute." Rane also has long-term plans to do something - he's not sure what - for the Abbeville train depot, the old Archie Theatre and a row of rundown houses that date back to around the Civil War. Over the past 10 years, Rane and Great Southern Wood have poured more than $1 million into those projects, Rane says. But others have also made significant contributions, he adds. His efforts have helped invigorate downtown, and at the recommendation of Henry County historian T. Larry Smith, Rane received a distinguished service award from the Alabama Historical Commission in 2001. "I'm not on his payroll, but as a historian, I have a great respect for what he's done," Smith says. "He puts his money where his mouth is, and his heart. He loves Abbeville. He loves Henry County." 'We trust folks' Founded circa 1823 in the southeast corner of Alabama, Abbeville was named after a nearby creek the Indians called Yatta Abba, meaning "a grove of dogwood trees." A decade later, it became the county seat of Henry County, which was known as the "Mother County of the Wiregrass." A fire in 1906 destroyed much of the town, and most of the businesses had to be rebuilt, creating many of the storefronts that are now downtown. When the timber and textile industry prospered, so did Abbeville, Smith says. But as those jobs gradually left the area, so did many of the mom-and-pop stores around the town square. Although downtown is starting to come to life again, it still moves at a slow enough crawl that barber Wayne Armstrong can leave his shop unattended if he wants to take an afternoon stroll along Kirkland Street. "We don't mind putting up a sign and walking out and leaving it unlocked," Armstrong says. "In Abbeville, we trust folks." One of the biggest boons to downtown came in 2000, when the city received a $1.2-million downtown revitalization grant. City leaders used the money to make street and sidewalk improvements, to install street lamps and to bury power lines underground. Herndon Oil Co. has since moved its corporate offices downtown, and when gift shop owner Winnie Landsverk outgrew her former space two years ago, she moved into an old department store that Rane bought and restored. When Huggin' Molly's opens, it will lure travelers off U.S. 431 and into town for a sandwich and a milkshake. "We've got actual businesses now," Abbeville city attorney Derek Peterson says. "For a little county-seat town in southeast Alabama, we're pretty busy." Still, it's too early to tell if the revitalization efforts have had much of an economic impact, city clerk Jim Giganti says. But those efforts did inspire Armstrong to spruce up his barber shop a couple of years ago. "It's wonderful," Armstrong says. "It's brought a lot of pride to town." 'A lot of juggling' Jimmy Rane inherited his passion for the past, as well as some of his entrepreneurial instincts, from his father, a second-generation Italian immigrant everybody around here calls "Mr. Tony." Rane's father still prefers a manual typewriter to a computer, and when Jimmy and his wife, Angela, and their teenage daughter, Lindsay, come to visit, he prepares his secret family spaghetti sauce, which his mother brought from Italy. Jimmy may serve it on special occasions at Huggin' Molly's. During World War II, Anthony Rane married a Henry County girl named Elizabeth "Libba" Mills - "a long-legged Southern gal with the good looks of a war-time pinup centerfold," he recalls in his book, "Mr. Tony's Lessons of La Famiglia." After the war, Mr. Tony and Miss Libba came to Abbeville to put down roots and start a family. Married more than 60 years, they live in the same house where Jimmy and Greg grew up as little boys. In addition to his stockyard business, Mr. Tony, who turns 90 in July, owned a restaurant, a supper club, a furniture store, a jewelry store and four Holiday Inn franchises in southern Alabama and the Florida panhandle. "There was a lot of juggling," Anthony Rane says. "I was working her (his wife) to death, the kids and everybody else." Jimmy, meanwhile, got a business degree from Auburn University, where he now serves on the board of trustees, and a law degree from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham. While working as a lawyer in a one-room brick office across from the Henry County Courthouse, Rane started Great Southern in 1970, when he bought a small fence-post manufacturing plant after his first wife's father, who owned the company, was killed in a car wreck. In those days, he not only ran the business but also drove one of the trucks. He would put on his overalls to go to work at the wood plant early in the morning and then come home, take a shower and change for his law practice. The pressure of starting the business eventually cost him his marriage, though. Rane has a 31-year-old daughter, Ashleigh, and a 29-year son, James, from that marriage. 'A terrible addiction' Since its beginnings as a three-man operation, Great Southern - which became famous for its slogan, "If it doesn't say Osmose on the yellow tag, believe me, you don't want it!" - has grown into a $600-million-a-year business. It employs about 800 workers in eight plants in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Mississippi, with 140 of those employees in Abbeville. But Rane has kept the business where it began. Instead of building a big corporate headquarters to house all of the company's divisions, though, he has spread them around in older buildings all over town. "You can stroll down Kirkland Street and see Jimmy Rane's tracks and his impact on both sides of the street," Smith, the county historian, says. Almost every building is filled with memorabilia Rane has collected over the years, from vintage Coca-Cola machines to old-timey, black dial telephones to a Schwinn Black Phantom bicycle to hundreds of rare signs advertising everything from Woco Pep gasoline to War Eagle cigars to Nesbitt's orange soda. He finds them on eBay, at antique shops and along the side of the road. It's a hobby, he jokes, that his gotten him in trouble with his wife. "It's an addiction, a terrible addiction," he says. "I just have this thing about old things. I cannot stand to see them thrown away. A lot of times people just give me things because they know I like 'em and I try to find a place to put 'em. "Every one of them has a story, and if you just take the time to listen, it's better than most novels and certainly better than any movie." Former Alabama basketball coach Wimp Sanderson, a pitch man for Great Southern Wood who has dropped into town for a meeting, teases Rane about his obsession. "He won't buy nothing unless it's old," Sanderson says. "It's got to be old. If something's brand new, he won't buy it. The older it is, the more he'll pay for it." But for Jimmy Rane, the little kid in the big Yella Fella hat, everything old is always new again.
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More Perryville land may be saved 03/26/2006 Lexington Herald-Leader (KY) Schreiner, Bruce		Return to Top
Story quotes AU history professor Ken Noe. Preservationists have their sights on acquiring property where the Confederacy's hopes for claiming Kentucky were dashed. It was on the same ground that a division of Tennessee soldiers launched the opening Confederate assault on Union troops in what became the biggest Civil War battle in the Bluegrass State. About half a mile away, Confederates led by future Kentucky Gov. Simon Bolivar Buckner fought an Indiana regiment. Now, both properties are on the market near Perryville, and the state budget being written by legislators might help preservationists close the deal. The House and Senate tucked into their spending plans funds for use by the Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association. Additional funds would go for a re-enactment at Perryville being touted as the largest such national event this year. Budget negotiators from both chambers are trying to hammer out a final budget. The availability of the land is seen as a prime opportunity to forever protect an area that preservationists say still looks much as it did when the fighting erupted. "When you're on this battlefield, you're in 1862," said Chris Kolakowski, executive director of the Perryville preservation group. Nearly 7,500 soldiers were killed or wounded during five hours of savage fighting in the October 1862 battle on the hills outside Perryville in Central Kentucky. In describing the Southern assault, one Confederate infantryman later wrote, "Such obstinate fighting I never had seen before or since. The guns were discharged so rapidly that it seemed the earth itself was in a volcanic uproar. The iron storm passed through our ranks, mangling and tearing men to pieces." Despite pushing back Union lines, the outnumbered Confederates retreated later after the battle and kept marching south until reaching Tennessee. It secured Kentucky firmly for the Union for the rest of the war, Kolakowski said. Today, the Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site takes in 517 acres of rolling hills. Adjoining property that's now for sale totals 166 acres, and preservationists are trying to make a move on them, Kolakowski said. Preserving the battlefield allows visitors to retrace the combatants' steps, giving them an insight into an important piece of Kentucky and American history, he said. "It really brings Perryville alive to people in a way that a book and a map can't quite convey," Kolakowski said. State Rep. Mike Harmon, R-Junction City, said the battlefield site in his district has become an important tourist attraction. Ken Noe, an Auburn University history professor who has written a book about the battle, said the preservation of the Perryville battlefield has become a model for the rest of the nation. "In this day and age with federal funding and state funding often drying up for battlefield preservation, Perryville offers an example of what people around the country can do," Noe said. Some state money also would be used to refurbish and place interpretive signs in historic Merchants' Row, the antebellum commercial district in Perryville. Meanwhile, the proposed state appropriation would help stage a national Civil War re-enactment set for Oct. 7-8 at the Perryville battlefield. It is billed as the largest Civil War re-enactment in the country this year, and organizers expect about 25,000 spectators and about 5,000 re-enactors, Kolakowski said. The same event came to Perryville in 2002, he said, and drew re-enactors from 38 states and five countries. Copyright © 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader


Women, blacks find more jobs in state government 03/26/2006 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer _		Return to Top
Story quotes AU professor Bill Sauser. It also appeared in the (Florence) Times-Daily, The Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune and Gadsden Times. PHILLIP RAWLS Associated Press MONTGOMERY - Women and blacks are employed in much greater numbers by state government agencies than in Alabama's overall work force. In state agencies, the work force was 55 percent female and 40 percent black last year, according to the state Personnel Department. Alabama's overall work force, including both the public and private sectors, was 47 percent female and 22 percent black in 2004, the latest figures available from the state Department of Industrial Relations. "We have a greater percentage of women and a greater percentage of minorities in our work force. It can be attributed to the competitive process where people compete on merit," said Jackie Graham, director of the state Personnel Department. Bill Sauser, a management professor and an associate dean for business at Auburn University, said the overall state employment figures mirror the state's population. He said state government's higher numbers are the result of several factors. Some changes were brought about grudgingly by racial discrimination lawsuits. Other changes came from a desire to have employees who could relate to all parts of Alabama's population. And some changes were caused by more women entering the work force and getting training in traditionally male jobs. Whatever the reason, "I think we are all better off for this," Sauser said. Graham said blacks and women in state government now fill every type of job from custodian to physician. Graham is the second woman to serve as state personnel director. When people apply for a job with a state agency, Graham's department ranks them based on tests or their education and experience. From 1970 until last year, a federal court order prohibited state agencies from passing over a black applicant to employ a lower-ranking white applicant. A federal judge suspended the requirement last year after the federal government, which originally sued the state over discrimination, agreed with the state that it was time to lift the requirement. The numbers told the story. In 1976, blacks filled less than 16 percent of the jobs in state government, and many of them were in custodial positions. Now, the number not only stands at 40 percent, but blacks have made inroads into midlevel and high-level jobs. For instance, blacks now fill 52 percent of state government's protective service jobs, which include law enforcement positions and correctional officers, Graham said. There are, however, wide variations between types of jobs. Blacks fill 57 percent of the service and maintenance jobs, but only 24 percent of the official and administrator jobs. The state Department of Transportation still operates under a federal court order on minority hiring. The black employee who filed the lawsuit in 1985 is now dead, and the case has cost the state $175 million. But the impact is clear. The department's staff is now nearly 36 percent black. Women are also making significant inroads into what was once a largely male agency, making up 27 percent of the DOT staff. The highway department divides the state into nine divisions, and one of those divisions is now headed by a woman - Dee Rowe in Tuscaloosa. Also, women now oversee the department's training and equipment bureaus, Assistant Director Dan Morris said. Morris, who had one woman in his engineering class at Auburn University some 40 years ago, said the change is the result of more women going into fields like engineering. "They have done very well in state government," he said.
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Auburn trustee discord surfaces again 03/25/2006 Montgomery Advertiser __		Return to Top
Montgomery Advertiser editorial on lawsuit over trustee terms. Anyone who has followed the turmoil involving the Auburn University board of trustees for a decade or more knows that the relationship among board members and between the board and other university groups has been strained. But court documents filed in a lawsuit against the trustees show that matters may have been worse than most people believed. The lawsuit against the board was filed by Auburn trustee Dwight Carlisle of Alexander City. It seeks to clarify the length of terms of some trustees. It was being heard by Lee County Circuit Judge John Denson, himself a former trustee. This week Denson stepped aside from hearing the lawsuit. Frankly, as a former trustee, he should never have been handling the case. But the information contained in a motion to force Denson to recuse himself from the case further fuels rumors of intrigue and hard feelings that have surrounded the Auburn board for years. The Opelika-Auburn News reported that a motion asking Denson to remove himself from the lawsuit claimed that the judge, who was a trustee from 1980 to 1999, had 'deep personal animosity' against some of his fellow board members. The court filing, according to the newspaper, even contains an affidavit from former Auburn athletic director David Housel who said he was told by Denson in 1994 that Montgomery trustee Bobby Lowder had told Denson, ''John, I can have you killed with no problem.'' Small wonder that the Auburn trustee board has been such a lightning rod for controversy. Over the years the board has received votes of no confidence or been strongly criticized by faculty, staff, students and alumni groups. It has been a focus of an investigation by the university's accrediting agency, and successfully sued by the news media (including the Montgomery Advertiser) for excluding the public from its meetings. Board dissension at least publicly had appeared to have quieted, but this lawsuit suggests that controversy still simmers under the surface. That's not good news for Auburn University, which has been hurt by the infighting on the board for far too long.
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'Very positive' 03/25/2006 Opelika-Auburn News William White		Return to Top
Story on comments by Rep. Mike Hubbard and Sen. Ted Little to the Auburn Chamber of Commerce regarding AU's FY07 state appropriation. Auburn University is getting a very positive budget from the Alabama Legislature for fiscal year 2007, and a new bill governing AU's Tiger Card program has been applied to all four-year colleges and universities in the state, area lawmakers said Friday. Rep. Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, and Sen. Ted Little, D-Auburn, addressed about 50 local business leaders in a Coffee & Conversation event Friday morning at the Auburn Chamber of Commerce, set up to keep chamber members informed on legislative matters. Hubbard called AU's share of the state education budget "the largest appropriation in the history of the university." "I think pretty much everything the university asked for is funded and then some," said Hubbard. "We were able to get some extra things in the budget I've been working on." The budget bill passed by both the House and Senate and awaiting Gov. Bob Riley's signature is the largest ever at $288 million. In 2004, the operating budget for both AU and Auburn University Montgomery was only about $207 million, Little pointed out. "The education budget has already passed the Legislature and is on the governors desk," Hubbard said. "We are not sure what the governor will do, but he is pleased overall with the budget as I am." AU's state funding share includes about a half million dollars for the Auburn-Opelika Robert G. Pitts Airport, Hubbard said. "This is valuable because we can leverage that with federal dollars to turn that into millions of dollars for our airport," Hubbard said. Little said the university's budget has a definite ripple effect on the local economy. Little said the so-called Tiger Card legislation has been worked out to include all four-year institutions of higher education in the state. "I expect the bill to pass," he said. An amendment to the bill will apply a ceiling on the transaction fee not to exceed 5 percent. The new law doesn't include any provisions that require institutions to return payments to the participating business owners with a certain limit of time, as had been proposed. But Little felt sure that local merchants and AU officials would eventually come to terms. "I have been assured by Auburn University that they are going to work out some kinks and make their turn-around time much more reasonable," Little said. "I think that will be good for a lot of businesses." The new Tiger Card regulations will go into effect July 1, Little said. Among the other legislative topics touched on by Little and Hubbard were regulations pertaining to the length and power of boats on Alabama Power lakes; eminent domain and blight; raising the minimum income for a family of four before being taxed; tax sales; the tax-fee holiday; rewriting the Alabama Constitution; and the timing of runoff elections. The early morning meeting preceded a daylong open house for the building at 714 E. Glenn Ave. shared by the chamber and the Auburn-Opelika Tourism Bureau. Renovations and a new addition were recently completed at the site of the old Central Bank building built in 1970. In 1988, the chamber moved into the old bank building and made it home. With several minor upgrades made through the years, the chamber board decided to make the investment and fund the improvements inside and out. The building now includes more than 5,000 square feet with nine offices, a large meeting room, a small meeting room, a workroom and fully equipped kitchen. The Auburn-Opelika Tourism Bureau doubled its space with the addition. Previously working within two offices, they now occupy a three-suite wing of the building.
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