THAT’S BUSINESS

Fields of dreams - building steel mills and molding boys

— When I left Blytheville in 1976 after three years as a reporter for the Courier News I carried with me a picture.

It was a mental image of the town close by Interstate 55, the lifeline to my hometown of Memphis an hour away.

A flat place, Blytheville and Mississippi County. Good for growing cotton and soybeans and serving planes at the U.S. Air Force base.

From time to time, I open the mental file and, like a greeting card, the streets, houses and buildings pop up in low profile.

I left Blytheville for a job with the Pine Bluff Commercial when it was fine paper owned and run by the Freeman brothers. I was in that no-place-forsingles town for a mercifully short 14 months.

Then I took a job with the Arkansas Gazette, met the girl whom I would marry and we started our family.

After nearly 10 years at the Gazette, we moved to Atlanta, where I worked at The Journal-Constitution for three exhilarating and ultimately unfulfilling years.

Eventually, we moved back to Little Rock after making a journey around the South in search of the perfect newspaper job.

As Charles Portis put it in his novel The Dog of the South: “A lot of people leave Arkansasand most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

We returnees know the feeling. We’re back this time for more than a decade.

On my return, imagine my astonishment to learn that Mississippi County had become a steel center.

I couldn’t picture it. Still can’t, though I know it’s true.

And now it may well become home to a third steel mill.

Mike Beebe, our governor, says the east Arkansas community is already the secondlargest U.S. steel center behind Pittsburgh.

Nope. Still can’t wrap my imagination around that.

My memory takes me back to 1973. That was the improbable year that the undersized, overachieving Blytheville High School football team went 10-0 during the regular season.

It took luck, grit and Larry Wright to make that happen.

I was hired by the paper to be a news reporter, but for the first year I had to serve as sports editor. I was initially disappointed and began to wonder if I shouldn’t quit and followthrough on my plan for graduate school at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

But then I didn’t know about the Chickasaws’ dream season that was to come.

Wright was a study, a piece of work. He was driven and a hell of a coach. He molded, like a steelmaker, those boys into a team.

John Ed Regenold, a farmer who lives in Armorel (a bedroom community to metropolitan Blytheville), recalled Coach Wright last week when I did some research on that thirdsteel mill.

Regenold’s son, Ed, was a stalwart defensive back for the Chicks.

Of Wright, Ed’s father said: “Those boys would go to hell and back for him right now.”

Leadership. That’s what they call it.

The man who is leading the charge to make the steel mill happen reminds me a bit of the ole ball coach.

John Correnti evidently has that quality. People follow a leader, sometimes literally. A critic of the Big River Steel chief executive officer notes that some families whose breadwinners worked at the mills in Mississippi County moved to Mississippi after Correnti opened a plant there on his own. (See Correnti profile article on Page 1A.)

Regenold, who had closed his “country store” at his Armorel Planting Co., rented it to Correnti when the steel magnate arrived in 1985 to oversee the building of the first mill. Correnti used it as a base of operations during the construction phase. (Bonus fact: Armorel stands for Arkansas, Missouri and Robert E. Lee.)

Regenold sold Correnti the property where the steel man built a house for himself and his family. They’re Regenold’s next-door neighbors, in a spread-out rural sense.

Back in ’73, the Chicks’ luck ran out in the first round of the state playoffs against the powerful Texarkana Razorbacks, who would win the state championship and had a future University of Texas running back named Graylan Wyatt, who played as a Longhorn with Earl Campbell.

Correnti is hoping his luck holds. “We’re in the red zone - and, hey, I’ll be honest with you, we’re probably on the five-yard line. Let’s hope nobody fumbles.” If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or e-mail him at

[email protected]

Business, Pages 61 on 02/03/2013

Upcoming Events