Some years, the annual Citizens of the Year awarded presented by the Kinston-Lenoir County Chamber of Commerce recognizes a significant achievement in the past 12 months; in other years, it honors a long record of community service. The award given to Danny Rice on Thursday night did both.
Rice played the pivotal role in bringing to Kinston the $14 million Woodmen Community Center that opened last year, yet that singular achievement only capped decades of volunteer work aimed at improving this community and the lives of the people who live here.
His resumé of civic and fraternal activities would likely fill this page. He’s best known for his work through Woodmen of the World, Boys Scouts of America, the Lions Club and Lenoir County Friends of the Homeless; but over the years there have been many other affiliations, from his church to his political and professional life. More telling, though, is that for Rice, belonging isn’t the point. Doing is.
That effort and extremely high level of achievement have been recognized in numerous state and national awards — from the chamber’s, the Jaycees, Lions International, the East Carolina Council of the Boy Scouts, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and the state, from which he received the Governor’s Award for Excellence for Volunteer Service and the State Employee Award for Excellence in Public Service.
A national director of Woodmen of the World (WOW), Rice has served that fraternal group loyally since the 1970s and, in turn, has leveraged that organization’s programs and resources to benefit Kinston and Lenoir County. The skills as a social worker that led him to a long career at Caswell Center also became a hallmark of his work with Woodmen. Honored for his contributions the WOW Youth Program in 1978, he was named one of the organizations Top Teen Outstanding Youth Leaders in American in 1983. A local, regional, state and national officer in the organization, he is the recipient of the Mr. Woodmen (Fraternal Spirit) Award and has been named Fraternalist of the Year twice by the North Carolina Fraternal Congress.
His connection and influence with Woodmen of the World proved to be the key in bringing the Woodmen Community Center to Kinston and, in doing so, providing the people here with a state-of-the-art fitness and recreation facility. In a letter supporting Rice’s nomination for Citizen of the Year, Woodmen of the World President and CEO Larry King informed judges that Rice’s “input and influence on our Board are solely responsible for Woodmen choosing Kinston as a pilot program to build Woodmen’s first Community Center of this magnitude.”
Rice followed that achievement by soliciting millions in donations — much of it from Lions Industries for the Blind, with which he is affiliated — to build the largest water park in Eastern North Carolina as an added attraction at the community center. Together the complex will help burnish Kinston’s image both as a place to live and a place to visit; and Danny Rice gets most of the credit for that progress, though he would graciously decline it.
In accepting the Citizen of the Year award, Rice compared growing up in the small town of Bennettsville, S.C., with his adult life in Kinston. Considering Kinston’s small-town feel, there are similarities. There’s also a difference. In Bennettsville, Danny Rice learned from his family and from mentors in Scouts and elsewhere the value of involvement, of selflessness and of generosity. In Kinston, he’s teaching those lessons.
