Three join ranks in JA Business Hall of Fame

By Jamie Jones
Dalton Daily Citizen

April 29, 2008 11:12 pm

— For Trisha Bethel, Tuesday night’s Junior Achievement Northwest Georgia Business Hall of Fame induction banquet at the trade center was a lot like Christmas. For her sister, Cathy Rauschenberg, it was reminiscent of Easter.
Their father, the late Tom Jones, and Jim Boring and Ken Boring joined nine other civic and business leaders as they were inducted into the business hall of fame. Bethel said the event, which was attended by several hundred people, reminded her of Christmas because her children were there. And Rauschenberg said it seemed like Easter because she and Bethel were wearing corsages, and their father made sure his daughters and wife always wore them on Easter.
“He truly felt that Dalton and everyone he met was family,” Bethel said. “He would have loved to have been here to night to greet everybody at the door and give them a hug.”
The event, in its third year, has become Junior Achievement’s primary fundraising tool. It serves another purpose: To raise awareness of the organization.
Junior Achievement uses volunteers to teach students from elementary school to high school how economics and finance apply to the real world. About 250 volunteers during the school year teach some 8,000 students in the eight-county Northwest Georgia district, which includes 39 schools in Murray and Whitfield counties. The nonprofit organization has been in Dalton since 1964.
“You don’t know how important it is until you walk into a classroom and see the children light up,” said Tom Woodby, chairman of the Junior Achievement board of directors.
The Boring brothers are natives of Maryville, Tenn., served in the military during World War II in the 1940s and attended the University of Tennessee. In their professional careers, they operated a crushed stone quarry in Whitfield County for 30 years before leasing it to Vulcan Materials. The brothers, as part of an investment group, bought Hardwick Bank and Trust from a Chattanooga bank in a bankruptcy sale.
The community has been a part of the brothers’ lives as well. Ken and his wife, Dottie, endow a nursing scholarship at Dalton State College and an engineering scholarship at the University of Tennessee. Jim has been involved with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northwest Georgia, and the Whitfield Healthcare Foundation.
“It’s been a terrific ride,” Ken Boring said.
Jones was born in Dalton in 1916 and later graduated from Dalton High School. After graduating Georgia Tech in 1939 where he served as the senior class president, he entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1941, emerging in 1945 as a major. In 1957, he and J. Rollins Jolly founded J&J Industries. The company is now the largest commercial-only carpet manufacturer in the country.
Jones served on the Dalton Board of Education for 26 years. He served as a vice president and a trustee for the Dalton Education Foundation. Each year, the Dalton Education Foundation gives the system’s top teacher the “Tom Jones Educator of the Year” award. He was also a past president of the Dalton-Whitfield Chamber of Commerce, the Carpet and Rug Institute and the Dalton Rotary Club.
Jones died in 1988 at 72.

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Three more inductees were added to the Junior Achievement Northwest Georgia Business Hall of Fame on Tuesday night. The late Tom Jones, Jim Boring and Ken Boring comprise the third class of inductees.
The inaugural class in 2006 was Coronet Industries co-founder Jack Bandy; the late Alan and Shirley Lorberbaum, who co-founded the company that would become Mohawk Industries; V.D. Parrott Jr., former general manager of Dalton Utilities; and the late Catherine Evans Whitener, who is credited with helping the carpet industry along in its infancy.
The 2007 class included James E. Brown, the founder of Brown Printing; Norman Burkett, administrator of Hamilton Health Care System for 37 years; Harry Saul, founder of Queen Carpet (which was sold to Shaw Industries); and Jack Turner who headed several banks.

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