Getting to know your neighbor
Editor’s Note: Getting to Know Your Neighbor is a regular feature spotlighting residents in Franklin County and how they look at certain things.
Name: Will Stults
Hometown: Russellville, AL
Place of employment: Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, TVA
Q: What is the best thing about your job?
A: The best is a double-edged sword at times, but I have a three-hour daily commute. It gives me time to think, listen to podcasts, write songs, and keep up with friends and family through phone calls. I have done it for almost ten years and came close to moving but am now grateful for the things I’ve learned staring out a windshield.
Q: If you weren’t in your current profession, what would be your ideal job and why?
A: I love professional wrestling and always wished I could be in charge of the WWE. It would be fun to decide what’s going to happen each episode and come up with new characters.
Q: If you could change places with anyone for a day, who would it be and why?
A: There are a lot of selfish ways to go with that but I think I’d learn the most by being my wife for a day. It would be interesting to see what the world looks like from her point of view.
Q: If you could sit down to dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
A: I was very close with my great grandmother, Lorene James. I would love to get to sit down with her again so we could laugh about everything that has happened since she passed. She couldn’t keep a secret and back then Icouldn’t either, so we’d have a good time like we used to.
Q: What’s the best present you’ve ever received?
A: When I was five I moved to Nebraska to live with my Dad for the next eleven years. Right before we left, my grandmother, Phyliss James, gave me a little stuffed cow and told me if I hugged it in Nebraska she’d be able to feel it in Alabama. I used to ask her if she’d been feeling them every time we talked. Now it’s sitting on a shelf in our living room and reminds me I’m loved every time I pass it.
Q: What is your favorite childhood memory?
A: Pretending me and my brother Catlin coincidentally woke back up at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve the year Santa Carter brought a Super Nintendo. We stayed up playing Street Fighter II until about 5 a.m. then got in trouble for falling asleep over and over on Christmas Day.
Q: What do you think of as your greatest accomplishment in life?
A: I’m going to go the cheesy route on this one and say my son, Dalton. I think it’s our job as parents to move our children a little further down the path and I can see he’s smarter than I was already.
Q: If you only had one meal left, what would it be?
A: I’d take all my family and friends to the Amish Buffet in Moulton. I like to try new things and they’ve got stuff you’ve never heard of.
Q: If you won a million dollars, what would be your first purchase?
A: I would buy my wife, Amanda, a rock so big she’d have carpal tunnel wearing it in a week’s time.
Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
A: I would love to take a golfing trip to Scotland so I could be closer to where my people came from and make a mockery of the sport they invented.
Q: If you were the President of the United States, what would be the first law that you would enact?
A: I would address literacy. I was shocked to hear that Detroit had a 47 percent illiteracy rate. Somewhere I heard “Our future as a country is only as bright as its citizens.” When I hear people talk about how many idiots there are, I can’t help but think “Wait and see where we’re headed.”
Q: If you were in local government, what things would you change in the area?
A: I would address the way we handle drug addiction in our county. Punitive measures only keep people stuck in the system. A more healing approach would have healthy, functioning people back to their families and productive in society sooner. Some of the craftiest people I know are addicts, which makes me wonder how they could have been applying that energy elsewhere.
Q: What’s your favorite thing about Franklin County?
A: Cedar Creek Lake. I asked to have my ashes spread there and someone told me it was illegal. So dump me out on the way to Slick Rock and I’ll walk the rest of the way.
Q: What is something interesting about you that most people don’t know?
A: I did well on my ACT but turned down a full-ride scholarship to go to work at the chicken plant where I was mistaken to be mentally handicap for three weeks.
