Jim Bryan

I was born in Paxton, Walton County, Florida, a mile or so from the Alabama line. As a boy I helped work the farm. At eighteen, I enlisted in the paratroopers, fought in Viet Nam and became a professional soldier. I advanced to Master Sergeant and First Sergeant. I have five years of university study. I retired, finished Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and started and owned a successful trucking company out in Arizona.

Rhonda and I live modestly in Laurel Hill, Florida, with our children.

Make that a former professional soldier – I intend to make my political career just as successful as my military and business careers. As a soldier or political candidate, I am passionately devoted to family, and to personal values of honesty, integrity, justice and love.

Brittany is a student at UWF. Nick is a student at Crestview High. Zachary, age 11, attends elementary school.

At age ten I was milking at a dairy with 200 cows a mile down the road from home. I milked from four to seven in the morning. The school bus picked me up at the dairy and dropped me off in the afternoon. I worked until dark and walked home. I got $1.25 per milking, twice a day. I couldn’t  get home between morning milking and school, and the teacher sometimes took me out and hosed off my feet. The smell was disruptive, she said.

 
At age 16 I was baptized in a Baptist church in Wichita Falls, Texas, where my uncle was Deacon and assistant Pastor. 
I  took it seriously then and I still do. I am a Christian. Jesus of Nazareth is my guide and my beacon. My life is guided by 
love and respect for all the people around me, friends and adversaries alike. I offer the two quotations below to give you an 
idea of how my faith affects my life.

“To be most effective, your life must be a sermon.” Albert Schweitzer, doctor in music, philosophy, theology and medicine.
 
With what shall I do homage to God on high? / He has told you, O man, what is good, 
             And what the Lord requires of you: 
Only to do justice and to love goodness, / And to walk modestly with your God;
             Then will your name achieve wisdom.      [The Bible, Micah 6:8-9]
 
I am a soldier, a businessman, and now a politician. I’m not and never will  be a theologian. This is the sum total of 
what I have to say on religion, mine or anyone else’s.
 

Following my Viet Nam duty, the Army sent me to the University of Georgia, the University of Maryland and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (which, I am proud to say, US News and World Report ranks number one in aeronautical and aerospace engineering), three years in all. I am grateful. Of course, the Army had its own system of very practical instruction, too. I tell my Army story on another page. Click on Army life.

I retired from the service in 1985. I continued in business, accounting and statistics at Embry-Riddle under the GI bill. In 1988, I  started the Tarheel Towing and Trucking Company from scratch and owned and managed the company for ten years. It’s still in business.

For the town of Prescott Valley, Arizona, where I lived, I helped  the Chamber of Commerce in planning and recruiting companies for an industrial park. Eventually, I sold the trucking company and moved to the Panhandle to be close to family.

I know practical farming. I know farmers and how to drive a tractor. I also know the markets for the products the tractor helps to raise, the potential for new markets, and how to make farming more productive and more environmentally friendly.

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