Sitting in his Kroc Greenville office, John Warner recalls an evening in 1998 when he was standing on the banks of the Yalu River, the border between China and North Korea.
“On the North Korean side, there’s people beating their clothes in the river. We’re only talking about a hundred yards,” he says. “On the radio, according to the translators I had, they were broadcasting how to make soup out of tree bark, but on the Chinese side of the river, there’s lights and cafés.”
A U.S. Air Force Academy graduate who flew C-130s over Laos and Vietnam, Warner sees his mission now as bridging community gaps here in Greenville. Now 73, the executive director of The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center-Greenville is expanding programs and partnerships, even through the COVID-19 pandemic.
New and planned initiatives include parenting workshops; a swim program; moms’ support group; blood drives; art camps; “Open Field Nights” on the 25-acre campus’s soccer field; health-and-wellness programs; and a drum-percussion program. Those don’t even include the Boys & Girls Club there.
“These new ventures that John and his team are introducing are opportunities that the Kroc can be of more service to our neighbors, and that was the purpose of the Kroc being built,” says Maj. Andrew Kelly, Salvation Army area commander for Greenville, Pickens and Oconee counties and senior Kroc officer.
Kelly hired Warner to run the 74,000-square-foot facility, which has a $5 million annual operating budget and more than 130 employees, after board member Bobby Austell ran into Warner on Kroc’s tennis courts a couple of years ago.
“It’s just amazing that it’s been possible,” the retired Liberty Corp. executive says. “On the flip side of that, you can imagine the need.”
That’s what drew Warner to the job — he wasn’t looking for one when he left the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities after nearly 10 years.
“I want to make sure that the programs that are here allow the various communities to mingle and work together, to participate in something constructive,” he says, noting sharing hand-on creative endeavors forms bonds across races, genders, creeds, sexual orientations, communities.
Brian Albers, vice chairman of the Salvation Army Advisory Board and a member of Kroc Greenville’s executive committee, says he’s been blown away — his words — with the programs’ roll-outs, especially during the pandemic.
“We’re blessed to have him,” Albers says. “He says he plans to retire at 75, but we hope to keep him as long as we can.”
Warner sees giving back as an obligation to the center and the city.
“You can take it from a guy who has lived all over the place: I’ve never seen a town or a city that had the sense of community that Greenville has,” he says. “There’s some identity here that people are proud of, and they want to make it better.”
