How do you eat an elephant?
Imagine you are mayor of a small Southern town. You wake up one morning worried about garbage being picked up and a couple of dogs running loose on main street. By the time you go to bed, you wonder if your town will
cease to exist.
That was an actually day for Smithville Mayor Gregg Kennedy. On At 3:47 p.m. on April 27, a monster EF-5 tornado thrashed its way down main street, killing 14 and injuring many more. Businesses and homes were equally devastated. School children were displaced. The Post Office even thought about leaving. Some even questioned whether the town SHOULD be rebuilt.
They were the worst of times.
But while the tornado could destroy the physical town of Smithville, it couldn’t touch its spirit.
Today, Smithville thrives. That speaks volumes about the grit of the people who live there. They had a chance to restart from scratch. And they did. And the leadership ability of Mayor Kennedy.
I’ve interviewed Mayor Kennedy a couple of times on the radio and had the honor of seeing him in person last night. He’s a member of a rare fraternity — the EF-5 club. It’s a club that no mayor wants to be a member of. But he has gotten to be friends with the mayors of Greensburg, Kansas, Joplin, Missouri and (even though it “only” had an EF-4) Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They swapped ideas, stories and support. Mayor Kennedy and I spoke for a few minutes last night. He was sun-baked because he had been helping Mayor Will Hill of Louisville, Mississippi. If anyone could advice a mayor whose town suffered a devastating tornado, it would be Mayor Kennedy.
“We got a lot of help from others,” Mayor Kennedy told me. “It just seems right for us to give back.” Paying it forward. Now that’s a very Mississippi thing to do.
Not sure if Mayor Kennedy is a hero or a saint. But I do know he’s a guy who woke up one day with his town gone and had to figure out how to bring it back. And he did. He figured out how to eat an elephant — He ate it one bite at a time.