Tom Raney (’79, marketing) serves as senior vice president of JE Dunn Construction. “We are very proud to have a large percentage of Auburn graduates helping our clients realize their dreams and accomplish their goals,” he says. His daughter, Sally, is a sophomore in the Harbert College of Business.
William J. White
(’73, business administration) works for the Alabama Department of Transportation as payroll administrator, a role he has served in for 36 years. He plans to retire in 2017. He’s the proud parent of three daughters with college-degrees —one a doctor and award-winning author, one a civil engineer who graduated from Auburn, and one an Auburn-educated registered nurse.
Stuart Schoppert (’74, MBA) is retired and Stevan D. Williams (’79, accounting) serves as “relaxing at the lake” in rural Texas. He en- chief financial officer of the Robert Trent joys fishing and hunting, but also remains Jones Golf Trail in Birmingham, Alabama. active doing chores on his farm. Larry Willingham (’72, business administraMark Wanamaker (’79, finance) is a sales man- tion) is self-employed as a realtor in Gulf ager for energy storage at Lockheed Mar- Shores, Alabama, specializing in vacation tin Energy. He serves as a sales manager and personal real estate. His hobbies infor its lithium ion energy storage system—a clude fishing and boating. turn-key energy storage solution for utility, commercial, and industrial electricity ap- John Youngbeck (’77, transportation) owns plications. He lives in Greenwood Village, and manages a logistics consulting and a suburb of Denver, Colorado, with his wife transportation infrastructure financing Suzanne and three children. business.
1980s Frederick Arthur (’89, economics) serves as brand building manager for Orgill Incorporated in Memphis, Tennessee. He spent 25 years in corporate outside retail in forecasting, buying, planning, and marketing with companies including Parisian, Saks, Inc. Magazine, Disney, and ESPN. In his current role, he advises and provides marketing counsel to more than 6,000 dealers and retailers. His oldest child, Avery, graduated from the Harbert College of Business in May 2016 with a marketing degree. His middle child, Davis, will graduate from high school in 2017 and has been accepted by Auburn, as well as other universities.
Georgia jurist leverages business education in wielding his gavel well When judicial decisions are made that involve taxes, insurance, or other regulations that might impact Georgia’s billion-dollar economy, it’s important to have a strong business background. HAROLD MELTON, presiding justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, has such a background—and he earned it at the Harbert College of Business. “You see litigation about everything, but business cases are very common in our court,” says Melton, an Atlanta resident who earned a degree in international business from Auburn in 1988 before pursuing a law degree at Georgia. “It’s very helpful to have a sense of corporate forms, accounting and basic business principles. Business is definitely in play for a lot of what we see.” Georgia’s GDP approached $500 billion in 2015. Court decisions on legislation regarding tax structures, incentives, zoning, etc., have broad economic implications. “Above all else, we have to have predictability and reliability, and if the business world feels like
there is no sense of reason to our business decisions, then that might be one factor in businesses looking elsewhere to operate,” says Melton, who has served on the Supreme Court of Georgia since 2005. “We want to get it right and we want to be clear. “But the level of detail and complexity in the deals that are being struck as of late has really increased. You might have a number of different business relationships and corporations or subsidiaries and you almost have to chart and graph them sometimes just to figure out who is doing what, who is responsible for what and try to provide further clarity and follow the rules based on what’s in play.” Melton notes that people can be confused about the role of the state Supreme Court. “A lot of times it’s hard for people to understand that cases we get are not necessarily before us because of some overarching, important issue that the public might identify with,” he says. “Sometimes it might just be a legal question that needs to be cleared
up and that legal question might arise in a case that may not have a lot of visibility to it. Sometimes there are cases that come before us, like murder cases, that are before us just because that’s what the statute requires. We hear appeals in cases that, on the face, might look like the legal questions are very clear, or guilt or innocence might look very clear, but still the appeals process has to be followed.” Melton, elected as Auburn University’s first African-American SGA president in 1987, says the position was “the best education I ever had” and prepared him for his duties today.
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