Longtime Osceola Mayor Dickie Kennemore was 78 years old when he died late Saturday, but just a week before he fell ill with COVID-19 he was healthy and sturdy, State Sen. Dave Wallace of Leachville said Monday morning.
“I would have guessed from just looking at him that he’d have lived another 10 years or more,” Wallace told Arkansas Business, recalling Kennemore as a “kind, gracious man who loved his city and worked hard for its betterment.”
Kennemore, who led the city for 28 years before being unseated by Sally L. Wilson in 2018, had been fighting the virus since early November, according to KAIT-TV, Channel 8, in Jonesboro.
“That’s what’s so scary about this virus,” said Wallace, who knew and worked with Kennemore for decades.
“He was a strong mayor in economic development, and he’ll be remembered as instrumental in bringing in Big River Steel,” Wallace said, the Mississippi County steel manufacturing project that remains to this date the state’s largest economic development enterprise.
Big River’s manufacturing site on Arkansas Hwy 198 in Osceola was a $1.7 billion vision when the company broke ground in 2014. Since, it has expanded and now employs about 520 people earning some of the state’s best wages for skilled labor.
A 2019 article in Forbes magazine called Big River “America’s cleanest and fastest-growing steelmaker and noted that the average production worker earned $129,000 in 2018. The company’s 1,100-acre site along the Mississippi River assumed a $2.33 billion enterprise value in recent weeks after completing its Phase II-A expansion, and U.S. Steel bought a 49.9% stake in the privately held company last year for $700 million and plans to buy it outright in 2023.
Kennemore was an early leader for the project, a godsend to largely rural Mississippi County. He saw Big River’s production method, making steel from melting scrap metal in an electric furnace, as a good counterpart to traditional ways of making steel from iron ore in coal-fired blast furnaces. Another Mississippi County steelmaker, Nucor Corp. of Charlotte, North Carolina, also employs the scrap process.
Wallace said that while Big River will stand as a testament to the former mayor’s knack for development, he helped “many other businesses, large and small,” thrive in Osceola, a city of about 7,000 people.
Social media posts by Kennemore’s family said he had developed pneumonia among other symptoms, and recalled him as a doting grandfather and lifetime regular at local high school games and events.
“He’ll be greatly missed,” Wallace said.
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