He goes by Jim, but his full name — James Randolph Whetstone — sounds like it belongs in the same novel as the place where he started life: just across the railroad tracks from Blue Mountain Mill Village, in a family home in Alabama, on the third of July, 1940. He was the son of John Harvey and Mishie Lawler Whetstone, the second of four children, growing up alongside his older brother Terry, his sister Patricia, and his younger brother John Jr. 



He graduated from Alexandria High School in 1958, and barely let the ink dry on his diploma before enlisting in the United States Navy that same May. Boot camp came first — twelve weeks in San Diego — followed by Naval Air Technical Training in Norman, Oklahoma, and eventually a posting to Naval Air Station Brunswick, Georgia. He served three years and twenty days in total, and those years had a way of shaping more than just his resume.

It was a trip home on leave from Norman that changed the course of his personal life. Through a mutual friend, Jim met Ruth. They clicked, they dated, and on November 27, 1959, they were married in his parents' home in Blue Mountain — the same house where so much of his story had already begun. He was nineteen years old.

The early years of their marriage had the quality of two people figuring it out together. In 1960, Jim and Ruth bought their first home in Darien, Georgia. After about a year, they made their way back to Blue Mountain, where Jim took a job at Union Foundry as a shipping clerk. He stayed five years, then moved on to the Anniston Army Depot as a WB-5 laborer. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, he started going to school.

That part of Jim's story deserves a moment. He enrolled at Gadsden State Community College while working full time, then transferred to Jacksonville State University, graduating in 1970 with a degree in accounting and a minor in economics. Thirty years old, a working man with a family, and a college graduate. It was the kind of thing that doesn't happen without a certain stubbornness of purpose.

The degree opened doors. Jim joined Kirkland, Smith, Taylor & Payne Accountants, spent five years there, then moved to a private firm in Gadsden. He earned his CPA designation and later joined Kemp & Associates. And then, eventually, he did what all of that hard work had quietly been pointing toward — he opened his own practice.

Through all of it, Jim and Ruth were raising their two daughters, Janet and Beth, in Wellington, Alabama. Both girls graduated from Alexandria High School, the same school their father had walked out of more than two decades before, diploma in hand, ready to go enlist in the Navy. Some people spend a lifetime running toward something new. Jim's story suggests he always knew what was worth keeping.

Jim retired in 1992. From a family home across the railroad tracks in Blue Mountain to a practice that bore his own name, his is a life built deliberately — one decision, one year, one commitment at a time. Today, Jim calls Legacy Village of Jacksonville home.