SATSUMA, Ala. — At an age when most people would be content to look back, Satsuma centenarian author James R. “Jim” Hollon is still looking ahead. The 102-year-old, a World War II Marine, former farm hand and longtime life insurance man turned investor, has published his fourth book, a slim guide to character and conduct that he hopes will land in the hands of young people just starting out.
The new title, “Right and Wrong: The Line Still Exists,” reached shelves in July. In it, Hollon draws on decades spent in business and the countless people he met along the way — many of them on front porches, during the 28 years he spent going door to door for a life insurance company — to make the case that honesty and good character still matter as much as they ever did.
For Hollon, the book is less a memoir than a message. He wants it to serve as a road map for students leaving high school or college, a reference they can return to when life gets complicated.
A childhood on the farm in Florala
Hollon was born in 1924 — four years, as he likes to point out, before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. He grew up in Florala, a small town in Covington County that sits right on the Alabama-Florida line in the Wiregrass region of south Alabama.
His early years were spent working alongside his father on a 320-acre farm, raising peanuts, cotton and corn, the same staple crops that defined much of the rural Deep South economy for generations. The work bore little resemblance to modern agriculture. Today’s growers rely on large tractors, mechanical pickers, GPS-guided equipment and an array of technology that would have seemed like science fiction to a young farm boy in the 1930s. On the Hollon farm, the harvest came in through muscle and mule power. Tractors existed, Hollon recalled, but they belonged to families who could afford them.
He stayed on the farm until he was 23. Then a broken promise pushed him to make a change.
“At 23, [my father] had promised to give me half of what we made that year, and he didn’t give me any,” Hollon said. “So, I quit.”
A Greyhound ticket to Detroit
Rather than stay put, Hollon decided to take control of where his life would go. He bought passage north on a Greyhound bus and headed for Detroit, then the beating heart of the American automobile industry.
“I realized that my life was going to be the direction I put it in, so I called the Greyhound bus and rode it to Detroit, Michigan,” Hollon said. “It was below zero that day, and while I was looking around for a job, somebody told me to go to Ford Motor Company — that they would hire me. They told me to say I was from Alabama, that they liked to hire people from Alabama.”
Hollon’s trip followed a well-worn path. During the first half of the 20th century, millions of Southerners — Black and white — left farms and small towns for factory jobs in Northern and Midwestern cities, a movement historians often describe as part of the Great Migration. Detroit’s auto plants were among the biggest magnets, offering steady wages that were hard to find in the agricultural South.
When Hollon arrived at Ford, the line of job seekers was long, each person hoping to talk his way into work. He was dressed in the winter gear the military had issued him during his service as a Marine in World War II — clothing well suited to a subzero Michigan morning.
“I’m standing there when a man comes up to me and asks ‘Where are you from?’ I told him I was from Alabama, and he said ‘Go over there and see that guy. He’s gonna hire you,’” Hollon said. “And that was how I shifted my life compass.”
He worked at Ford for roughly six months before deciding his future lay back home in Alabama — and in a college classroom.
Auburn and a career-defining elective
Hollon enrolled at Auburn, where he studied industrial management. At the time, the school was officially known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute; it did not formally take the Auburn University name until 1960. The postwar years brought a wave of veterans to campuses across the country, as federal education benefits for returning service members opened college doors to a generation that might otherwise have gone straight to work.
It was a pair of elective courses that set the direction for the rest of Hollon’s working life.
“I got my degree in industrial management. There were two elective courses: one of them was life insurance and the other was property, casualty, and automobile insurance,” Hollon said. “I fell in love with the life insurance course, and that’s what made my career.”
After graduating in 1950, Hollon took his first post-college job at Anniston Army Depot in Calhoun County, a major Army installation in northeast Alabama known for maintaining and overhauling combat vehicles and other military equipment. His assignment there involved investigating funds.
“I was given a job to do some investigation and analyze some things within the depot,” Hollon said. The work taught him something important about himself: government service was not where he belonged. His heart was still in life insurance.
Twenty-eight years on the road with Liberty National
So Hollon took matters into his own hands once again.
“One day, I went to Liberty National Life Insurance and recruited myself to work for them, and I worked there for 28 years,” Hollon said. “Four days a week from March 23rd, 1953, until August 31st, 1981. I went from house to house riding and collecting insurance.”
Liberty National, a Birmingham-based insurer, was for decades a familiar name in Alabama households. Like many life insurers of that era, it relied heavily on what was known in the industry as “home service” or “debit” insurance, in which agents worked an assigned route, visiting policyholders at their homes to sell coverage and collect premiums in person, often weekly or monthly. The model put agents on a first-name basis with families across their territory and gave them a front-row seat to everyday life in communities large and small.
For Hollon, those years on the road became a long education in human nature — and, eventually, the raw material for his latest book.
“I can tell you about any kind of people that you want. I’ve experienced the nicest people who had good character,” Hollon said. “My life’s work has been to help people — help them get on the right compass for their life.”
Why he wrote “Right and Wrong”
Hollon said his motivation for writing “Right and Wrong: The Line Still Exists” was to help steer young people away from the wrong path — something he believes he sees happening more often today than in his youth.
“Today, it’s like a 20 year old can shoot someone and go to prison, spend 10 years in jail, then come out just like nothing ever happened,” he said. “Back when I was 20 years old, if somebody did something bad and the community found out, they were outcast. There was a bad sting and the consequences were terrible.”
His goal is to get the book into schools. He envisions it as a kind of graduation gift, a steady guide that young adults can keep on the shelf and consult as they navigate careers, relationships and the choices that shape a life.
“The high school principal, or the person graduating a student from college, needs to hand students a copy so they can have a guide that is solid that they can return to,” Hollon said.
At the center of his philosophy is a simple idea: a person’s path depends largely on character, and character shows itself most clearly through honesty.
“When you’re dealing with someone and they’re not honest with you or they do bad things in life, you don’t want to deal with them. The character has been so important in the people I’ve dealt with,” Hollon said. “Sometimes it feels like the world can reward bad character, too, but in our personal lives, I think we all enjoy people who are good. Honesty is a big part of that.”
Three earlier books on money and investing
“Right and Wrong” is Hollon’s fourth published work. His three earlier books focus on personal finance and investing, reflecting the second act of his career as an investor. They include:
- “Raisins in the Squash”
- “Smart Investing”
- “The Deferred Compensation Plan”
Deferred compensation — the subject of that third title — refers broadly to arrangements in which a portion of an employee’s pay is set aside to be paid out at a later date, often in retirement, and frequently with tax advantages. It is the sort of long-range planning topic that fits naturally with a career spent in life insurance, an industry built on preparing for the future.
Next up: “You Have To Grow Some More”
Hollon is not finished. He is already planning a fifth book, inspired by a conversation with his son, a former hospital executive.
“It’ll be called, ‘You Have To Grow Some More.’ My son retired from being a hospital CEO two years ago,” Hollon said. “One day his boss walked in and told him, ‘Another man wants your job, meaning, you ain’t got one no more.’ He calls me that night to tell me. You want to know the first words I spoke to him? ‘You got to grow some more.’”
According to Hollon, his son went on to become CEO of four hospitals — proof, in his father’s view, that a setback can turn out to be a redirection. That idea, that hard times can point a person toward something better, is the theme he wants the next book to explore.
A full life in Satsuma
Today, Hollon makes his home in Satsuma, a small city in north Mobile County along the U.S. 43 corridor just north of Saraland. He and his family have plenty to be proud of: his three children have built careers in health care, technical writing and computer programming.
At 102, Hollon still keeps a demanding daily routine. He tends a backyard garden he planted himself, growing collards, eggplant, strawberries, cabbage and much more — a fitting pastime for a man who learned to work the soil as a boy in Covington County nearly a century ago.
He also stays busy with people. Hollon visits with someone nearly every day, and he still helps clients and friends with their financial investments, usually over a warm cup of coffee. With help from others, he keeps active both inside and outside the house, and he shows no sign of slowing down.
What readers should know
- The book: “Right and Wrong: The Line Still Exists” by James R. “Jim” Hollon was released in July.
- The theme: Lessons on honesty, character and personal responsibility drawn from a long career in business and insurance.
- The audience: Hollon hopes schools and colleges will share it with graduating students.
- Other titles: “Raisins in the Squash,” “Smart Investing” and “The Deferred Compensation Plan.”
- Coming next: A planned book titled “You Have To Grow Some More,” about turning setbacks into new directions.
For a man whose life has stretched from mule-drawn plows to smartphones, the central lesson has stayed remarkably constant. Where a person ends up, Hollon believes, depends on the direction he or she chooses — and on whether that person is willing to stay honest along the way.
