That's when Robbins showed up. Or returned, actually. Robbins grew
up in Tuscumbia and remembered it as a bustling little railroad
town where he and his wife of 50-plus years, Joyce Ann, had kindled
their romance over the Palace's ice cream. "I had been gone for
some time, doing my thing in business over in the next county,"
says Robbins, who, with his neatly coiffed gray hair, button-down
checkered shirt, and owlish, oversize glasses, has the look of a
storybook grandfather. "[When] I got to looking at it years later,
this town was drying up."
He decided to change that.
Now, Robbins saying he wanted to take action is different from just
about anyone else saying it. While he was away from Tuscumbia, he
built and ran National Floor Products, a company he sold in 1995
for about $120 million, and launched Robbins Property Development
to maintain a host of investment properties. Freshly retired and
looking for a challenge besides golf, Robbins decided to commit a
chunk of his fortune, and the personnel and expertise of his
development company, to reviving Tuscumbia.
"It's just a challenge, a personal challenge, for me and my wife to
bring the little old town that we felt was our town to some state
where it's not falling down," says Robbins, now sitting upstairs
from the Palace in the development company's headquarters, a
spacious brick building that was once a railroad hotel. "It's like
some of these guys who go and spend several million dollars to try
and fly over the
Atlantic Ocean in a balloon or something. It's
that kind of challenge."
Like most people, Robbins and his cohorts at the development
company had no experience at bringing a town back to life. And they
knew the town government wouldn't be able to help much, at least at
first: There were so few businesses in Tuscumbia, the town's sales
tax revenue was paltry. In fact, Tuscumbia couldn't even apply for
most development grants because the town didn't have enough cash to
match any federal funds they might win.