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LEWIS WHITE, 82

Lewis White, a developer and owner of retail and office projects in the Kansas City, Mo., metropolitan area, died Sept. 24. He was 82. White was a founding partner of Copaken, White & Blitt, Leawood, Kan., which built the 1.25 million-square-foot Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, now a suburb south of Kansas City. The company also owns the 765,000-square-foot Eastland Mall, Bloomington, Ill., and the 790,000-square-foot Hickory Point Mall, Forsyth, Ill. In the 1950s White and his partners bought about 2,000 acres of farmland in Leawood and Overland Park, which they converted into some of the highest-profile office space in the area, now home to Sprint Corp. and other large companies.

“They had seen there was an interstate going in there and looked at some directions the city could go in,” said White’s son, Gerald, director of retail asset enhancement at the company and a former ICSC trustee. Gerald White described spending much of his childhood in the car with his father, surveying farmland. Founding partner Paul Copaken recalled of Lewis White, “He was a person who had an idea and was able to hone in on that idea like a laser beam, fixing on what he wanted to do.”