“Stay in the scripture and stay close to God. Without a Christian faith, you don’t have much,” advised Jim Riley. “For young people, the most important thing is to give your kids the right guidance and spiritual guidance. Teach them to know the Lord because in the end, that’s all we have.”
Jim Riley maintains a strong faith and does his best each day to let others see Christ through him. One of the ways he has shown his faith to others has been with the hard work he is known for doing.
Working hard is a value that was instilled in him when he was growing up, and he has always remembered the importance of it.
“I was raised up around Clarkco. My dad had a farm, and we were brought up to work,” Jim reminisced. “Working was just what we did. A day for us was from 6:00 in the morning to 6:00 at night. Half a day on Saturdays was from 6:00 in the morning to about 2:00 in the afternoon.”
He valued his education and made sure to continue his education after high school. He also continued to work hard and began working with the army, becoming the first in his field of study to participate in the co-op program.
“I finished school in Quitman at Zack Huggins in 1961 and went to Mississippi State and got an accounting degree there. I was the first accounting co-op student at Mississippi State,” remembered Jim. “I went to work for the National Defense Fund, which is part of the Army. I went to Huntsville, Alabama, as a co-op. I’d work for a semester and go to school for a semester. I started doing that my first year to help out with my expenses. It was great, but I got tired of it dragging out my getting my degree. I finally took a leave of absence from the Army and went straight to school and graduated in August of ’65.”
He was able to procure a job with a major CPA company once he obtained his degree.
“For my first job, I went to work with a national CPA firm in New Orleans. I did mostly auditing. I did some tax work,” recalled Jim. “I travelled; I went from the Mississippi Gulf Coast all the way to Texas. We worked in Texas and all across Louisiana. About 80% of the time, I was going and on the road. They had an office in Jackson, and I requested a transfer. I did transfer, but I was only in Jackson for about a year.”
Eventually, he decided to take a new job that brought him back home to Clarke County. He remained at that job until he retired.
“I took the job here in Quitman at the Quitman Knitting Mill. Mr. Walter ‘Buster’ Couch was the manager, and he kept calling and begging me to take the job over here. I intended to stay longer with the CPA firm, but he kept calling and encouraging me to come be the controller at the textile mill, so I finally accepted the job. I started out as the plant accountant,” informed Jim. “I was there for 35 years and became the chief financial officer for them. It was a divisional office, so we had several. At one time, we had 14 different plants, and I was in charge of the one in Mississippi. Our sales office and corporate offices were in New York. I went to New York every month for I don’t know how many years—sometimes two or three times in one month. I stayed there until I retired in August of 2002. At that time, the mill was shutting down.”
He didn’t stop working just because he retired, though. Never complacent, Jim decided to spend his newly acquired free time volunteering and being a blessing to others.
“After I retired, I started to do a lot of volunteer work. I went with a group of men to Port Charlotte, Florida. They had a hurricane down there pretty quickly after I retired, and we were repairing houses and churches and everything down there,” explained Jim. “When Katrina came along, I went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast several times and worked a week at a time helping down there. I went with men from the Baptist church, and we did a lot of work down on the Gulf Coast.”
Organizations in Clarke County have also benefited from his desire to volunteer and assist others.
“I volunteer with Friends of Clarkco,” said Jim.
The work he is most well-known for in the community, however, is what he does with an organization out of the Methodist church. For 20 years, he has donated his time and strength to blessings those in need through a ramp ministry.
“I got involved with the Methodist church doing ramp ministry building handicap ramps. The whole organization does Clarke, Lauderdale, Newton, and Kemper Counties. We have done some just over the edge in Jasper and Wayne Counties. Before the pandemic, we were doing probably 150 ramps a year. That was all the locations. We’ve done a lot less the past two years since the pandemic started, but we still do what we can,” informed Jim. “I’ve been doing that for 20 years. We go build ramps at houses for people who need them. I’ve been in charge of it for Clarke County, but I’m resigning since I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I wasn’t in charge of it for half that time. The man who was in charge when I started helping out moved to Florida. They asked me if I would take it over, and I told them no but that I would help. Of course, nobody else ever came along so by default I’ve been over it for about 12 years. I’m going to continue to work some, but I’m just not going to be in charge. I’m getting somebody else trained to hopefully do what I do with that.”
He did more than just show up to a site and build the ramp. Jim would assess the property and develop the plan needed before getting a crew together to make it happen.
“If somebody needed a ramp, I’d go out, do a plan, draw it up, and make pictures,” explained Jim. “We have a shop in Kemper County since that’s where all this is headed up. They do a prebuild, and they’ll build the rough frames for it. We recycle materials too, so if we take one down that’s in good shape, we’ll take it and use it somewhere else. I have about 20 men, and I’ll text them a few days before I’m ready to put one in to see if they can help. I usually get about half; if I can get around eight men it’s enough.”
Although he has devoted a great deal of time to his work with the ramp ministry, Jim has also gone other places to share the word and minister to others. His wife was also an accountant and retired around the same time he did; since then, the couple have attended other mission trips and enjoyed being able to bless others.
“My wife and I have both gone on a couple of mission trips since we retired. We went up to Maryland and spent a week working on a church in Maryland. I went to Trinidad and spent a week on a mission trip down there. We’ve done some of the local mission stuff. It’s been rewarding to help people out like that,” expressed Jim. “The Trinidad mission trip was really needed, but we can’t even go down there now because of the pandemic. We worked with the children doing bible studies. When I went, it was around Christmas. We did what we called Christmas trees and carried down a lot of stuff to give them like food and toys. The man who was in charge down there has been up here. We were bringing him up once a year, and he was going around to different churches raising money for his church down there. He has about three different Sunday schools for kids, and they’re real devout.”
While he loves spending time working with the various ministries, there are things that Jim loves to do in his free time. Over the years he has enjoyed spending time with his family at home doing different things, such as fishing, and has traveled a great deal.
“I like keeping up yard work and my shop. I have a shop that I built, so I go out there and work. My main entertainment is fishing. I like to fish,” declared Jim. “We have an RV. We travel and used to make a lot of trips out west, but the last two years have been kind of shut down. We love going out west to Montana and all. On our last big trip, we went to Utah and spent a month there. They have six or seven national parks in Utah, and we went to every one of them. Glacier National Park in northern Montana right up next to the Canadian border is nice. We spent a month out there one year. We like to just go and take a month and take our time. We liked the badlands in South Dakota where Mount Rushmore is. It’s beautiful up in there.”
They have enjoyed all the trips they’ve taken, but they haven’t always happened without flaws. One incident left Jim feeling grateful to the Lord for protecting him and others around him from a situation that could have ended badly otherwise.
“I’m getting uncomfortable driving in the big cities because it’s already long, plus we pull a car behind it. It gets a little bit nerve racking when you get older,” proclaimed Jim. “One time, we were going somewhere, and the traffic in Baton Rouge had gotten real bad. Rather than go all the way across I10 like we’d been doing, I told my wife that we were going to go through Natchez and miss Baton Rouge. When we left home, I was having problems with my steps going up and down when you open the door. We got to Louisiana and stopped at a casino to stay the night. When we got there, I was looking at the book for the RV and saw where it said something about some type of grease needed to be on the steps. I decided we would just take the car loose and go get the grease we needed. I came back and hooked the car back up, but I forgot to put a pin into it. We made it all the way through Houston before that thing came loose. I looked in my rearview mirror, and my car was passing me. I was saying to look at the fool trying to pass me, and then I realized it was my car. It had swung out but didn’t come all the way loose. I coasted to a stop on the side of the road. We were only 40 miles from where we planned to spend the night. One side had dropped down and it scarred it up some. I took the car loose, and my wife drove the car to our next stop. I went to an auto parts store and bought a pen to take care of the scratches. I told my wife the Lord was looking out for us because it would’ve been bad if that thing had come all the way loose in all that traffic.”
Jim has been blessed with good health over the years. He has experienced sickness, but it was overcome without incident. The only way he can describe his experience with having such good health is that it is humbling.
“I did have prostate cancer in 2009. I had surgery in Birmingham in September of 2009. They did a laparoscopic surgery on my in Birmingham on Thursday morning, and Friday afternoon I was back home in Quitman,” recalled Jim. “They removed all the cancer, and I didn’t have to have anything else. I had to go every six months to have it checked for 10 years. Now that it’s more than 10 years, I don’t have to go have it checked anymore.”
Not a day goes by that Jim isn’t hard at work trying to make someone else’s day better, whether it is through a ministry or simply offering a friendly smile and listening. No matter what comes his way, Jim will continue to spread joy through the community.
