HELLO, OCALA! Meet Your Neighbors: Jim and Nancy Collins

Jim and Nancy Collins pose for a photo at their home in the Del Webb’s Stone Creek subdivision in Ocala, Fla. on Thursday, April 3, 2025. The Collins’ were living in Texas and just recently moved to Ocala. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2025.

Jim Collins was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but grew up in Greenwood. He recently attended his 50th high school class reunion in Greenwood, where he had been quite athletic, having played on the school’s football, basketball and tennis teams. After graduating, he attended Clemson University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in industrial management.

In Greenville, Collins’ mother worked as an executive assistant at the Reliance Mechanical Group headquarters. In his final year at Clemson, he was assigned to write a paper about an industrial company, so he chose Reliance. As a result of that paper, he was hired by Reliance/Dodge as a sales trainee and was sent for training in Cleveland, Ohio, and elsewhere around the country.

Collins spent 14 years working in sales for Reliance, with his headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama. He was part of the United States Tennis Association team there, which won city and state division competitions and played in sectional USTA competitions.

Collins was married but later divorced. He has a daughter, Kristin, who lives in Birmingham and has four children, and a son, Brock, who lives in Auburn, Alabama, and has two children. Collins later met and married Nancy, a divorced mother of a son, James, who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has one child. Jim and Nancy have been married for 32 years.

After one of Jim’s biggest customers for Reliance hired him, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was tasked with selling large equipment to paper mills. He later was offered a job as a regional sales manager with Emerson Electric in Cincinnati, Ohio, covering an area from Michigan to Tennessee. Three years later, he was promoted to director of marketing. He stayed in that position about three years before he was promoted to vice president of sales. The promotion demanded that he and his family move to Ithaca, New York. His territory covered the United States, Canada and Mexico. He traveled in this position, including to work on a joint venture with a company in Rome, Italy.

After eight years in Ithaca, the company moved its headquarters back to Cincinnati. At this time, Collins had worked for the Emerson company for 15 years. He said the company re-structured, so he left and went to work with a private firm in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was executive vice president of sales. The KWS Manufacturing Company, which produced screw conveyors, tasked Collins with growing the company and, in 14 years, the size had tripled. The company was sold and Collins retired.

Nancy has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of West Florida. She was a systems analyst for Barnett Technology there. She earned her Master of Business Administration degree from Thomas Moore College in Crestview, Kentucky, and worked for Cincinnati Bell as a financial analyst. She retired when she was 45, she said, as it was her dream to do so.
She also is quite athletic and has a gymnasium set up in their home, where she works out. She has run triathlons and marathon races.

The two have snow skied in Vail, Colorado, and Lake Tahoe in Nevada. They went bungee jumping at Dollywood in Tennessee and both said it was a “scary” experience at the time but after the fact, they thought it was fun. Nancy said it was the most exciting experience of her life.

The couple has also enjoyed indoor sky diving in San Jose, California; parasailing in Acapulco, Mexico; and zip lining in Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

They moved into their home in Stone Creek last November and are still settling in. They like the quietness and amenities, and Jim loves to play golf. The two are looking forward to soon taking up the sport of pickleball.

One of the reasons they decided to live in Ocala, they said, is that it is the least likely place in Florida to get hit by hurricanes.