Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?

by Reginald Lewis

  “He was always on time, he was always doing something to improve himself in whatever he did. He was one of the persons who come along rarely. I realized that he was different back then, but I didn’t expect him to go as far as he did.”

  Brown, who also taught math at Dunbar and retired from coaching baseball in 1991, knew Lewis longer than any of the teenager’s other instructors, because Brown’s daughter had been a classmate of Lewis’s at St. Francis Xavier. Even though Lewis set exacting standards for himself and for his teammates, he could be tolerant of others when they made errors.

  “He felt that if a guy pulled a boner, the guy felt bad enough as it was, so you didn’t have to ride him. He would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, you did your best.’ He’d try to find a nice way of getting on the kid’s back without insulting the kid,” Brown remembers.

  Lewis fielded his shortstop position well. He displayed little emotion, even if calls went against him, and could hit for power. Tiger Davis remembers him studying pitchers and says Lewis would maul fastballs. Curveballs were another matter—they represented a mystery he never did unravel.

  “In basketball, he was basically a bench-warmer, a last-minute substitute when a Dunbar victory appeared assured,” says teammate Red Scott. They were both guards at a school often ranked the top prep basketball school in the nation. A number of Dunbar players have gone on to play in the National Basketball Association.

  Even in a limited role, however, the Lewis drive was on display. “He was a ball hawk, I can tell you that,” Scott says of Lewis’s court style. “He wanted the ball ALL the time. Not to pass it—to shoot it. And he really didn’t have a good shot, but every time you’d look up he was calling for the ball.”

  “TRYING TO CONQUER THE WORLD, KID?”

  While sports was a big part of Lewis’s world in high school, so was work. Perhaps emulating his stepfather, who was moonlighting as a cab driver, working full-time in the post office job, taking classes at Morgan, and playing on the football team, Lewis took on an exceptionally heavy workload for someone in high school.

  While in high school, I had jobs in my junior and senior years. During the week, I worked in a drugstore from six o’clock until ten o’clock following sports practice, which lasted from three o’clock until five o’clock. Then, maybe I’d have a late date from ten-thirty to midnight, and would be home by one o’clock. I would get about four hours of sleep, maybe an hour of study, a quick look at the sports and business pages and then I’d make a mad dash for school, which was across town.

  At 16, I made a big decision. Instead of playing baseball during the summer six days a week, I took a full-time job at a country club where my grandfather worked as a captain. The pay was $50 a week—no tips permitted—but if you picked the right members to give that little extra effort to, they would find a way to “take care of you.”

  I learned a lot working there, both from the staff and the members. From the staff, the virtues of being a real pro. My grandfather, Captain Sam, took tremendous pride in his work and other waiters really respected him a lot. People who were really good did not have to take a lot of “shit.” Not taking a lot of shit was the goal of every employee there.

  The only sure way to avoid the bull from the bosses was to know your stuff and mind your own business. The more conscientious staff members always watched their drinking—alcoholism was a real problem. As an athlete, this was never even a slight temptation for me. I never smoked until my sophomore year of college.

  From the members of the club, I learned that talk is cheap. I knew that already from my mother’s family, the Coopers, but here among so-called rich people it became really clear. A lot of the club members talked a good game, but I could tell they were not on top of their game. It showed in how they treated the staff.

  One incident I remember in particular was when a quite nice lady had a special party and I busted my gut to make the service great—not only my own, but that of other workers, too. I was 17 at the time. After the party, she pulled me aside when everyone had left. She did the talking and it went something like this: “Reggie, you know your skin is dark, so you have to work harder. One day, I am sure you’ll make a good living.” One part of her message was fine, but her style was patronizing. The other part of what she said implied inferiority. She then gave me $2.

  I thanked her with a nod and probably a quick look that unsettled her a little but was in no way threatening. Almost immediately, I felt sort of an athletic surge go through my body, but remained controlled and thought to myself, “You poor soul, you don’t know who stands before you. A good living! I plan to, and I will have more money than you will ever have, and I’ll have the good sense to recognize superior performance and not embarrass myself by giving only a $2 tip.”

  In fact, my grandfather asked me what her tip was. I didn’t answer and he said something like, “You’re right, son, keep it to yourself. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter—you did a helluva job. If she tipped you at all, it’s an accomplishment because word is she never tips and her status with the club is a little shaky. Always remember, your skill is what’s important. Get that and build on it and sooner or later you’ll have a big payday—count on it.”

  It came fast. I had a big party of businessmen that had cocktails, dinner, and then played poker. I stayed late and did a real number. I was the last person on the staff to leave—members with families left sooner. In fact, even the parking attendants had taken off. When I saw that, I raced to the lot and started bringing up the cars one after another. Guys were slapping all kinds of money in my hand and saying thanks. Finally, at about 3 A.M., the man who threw the party and who had told me to go home about three times that evening—and who was cold sober unlike the others—took me by the arm.

  He looked me right in the eye and said, “Holy shit, kid, what are you trying to do, conquer the world?” There was a little moment that passed between the two of us as we looked each other in the eye, then he gave this little knowing smile, slapped a C note in my hand and said, “Helluva job, son.” I knew he was right. I made about $500 that night, about 10 times my weekly salary.

  My last year at the club ended when I was 18. The manager was disappointed that I didn’t work there through college, but I decided I could make more money in a union job at a brewery. But from time to time I would work at the club during weekends until my sophomore year of college.

  SETTING HIGH GOALS

  The Suburban Club, a private Jewish club in Baltimore County just a stone’s throw from the city line, led to one of the few enduring friendships of Lewis’s life. Ellis Goodman, a working-class white kid from West Baltimore, was the same age as Lewis and also in need of spending money. The ambitious teenagers used to talk about their hopes and dreams for the future.

  Goodman, who worked in the food supply room in the basement, had his sights set on becoming a U.S. senator. Lewis told Goodman, “I know that what I’d like to be is the richest black man in America.” Nearly thirty years later, Goodman—by then a successful lawyer and real estate developer—and his wife Marcie met Lewis at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, one of Lewis’s favorite haunts.

  “He said to Marcie, ‘You know, Ellis wanted to be a United States senator.’ And we laughed and she said, ‘What did you want to be?’ He said, ‘Well, I wanted to be the richest black man in America.’ And we laughed, because that was in his thought process. He really was one of the consummate goal setters,” Goodman recalls.

  Back in their Suburban Club days, Goodman watched Lewis realize goals on a smaller scale. “He succeeded in getting what was a plum job,” Goodman recalls. “And the plum was to be a waiter assigned to the women’s cardroom. The reason that was a plum was because it put you in a position of being able to receive tips, whereas you didn’t receive tips as a regular busboy or waiter in the dining room.”

  In the women’s cardroom, there were no heavy trays to lug around. The most strenuous duty was having to carry coffee, tea, and sandwiches to the
tables of women playing canasta.

  “He knew how to take care of those women, and it was clearly an older, almost elderly group who were the card players at the Suburban Club. He had a sense of remembering their names—if somebody would pass by, invariably he knew their name and always addressed people by their names.”

  Goodman followed the stock market as a teenager and used to seek out a chef who was a stock market buff. Lewis sat in on many of those conversations, and would ask Goodman to explain things after the chef left the room. One topic never broached during Goodman’s and Lewis’s wide-ranging discussions was race. “It just never came up,” says Goodman.

  “He was really a mature fellow in high school,” says William Smith, a member of Lewis’s class voted least likely to succeed who later went on to become a dentist and Army colonel. “Reggie knew how to read a stock market sheet. I didn’t even know what a stock market sheet was.”

  With his busy schedule, Lewis had become something of a phantom at home. “He was never there,” Tony Fugett says. “He would always come in late, like after practice, because he played sports and he would always leave real early. So it wasn’t like he was at the house a lot.”

  The brothers became extremely close later in life, but while Lewis was in high school they were “very, very distant. We just didn’t have a lot in common and we didn’t share much. He saw himself as a little man, . . . not a high school kid.”

  Lewis wasn’t home much, agrees his eldest brother, Jean Fugett, Jr. “What I remember about Reg was that he was always working. He would come home from school, athletic practice, or work and then spend the rest of the evening on his homework,” he says.

  “Back then, this puzzled me. I didn’t see the payoff for doing the homework at the time. Now, of course, I do,” says Fugett, who went on to graduate cum laude from Amherst and then proceeded to get a law degree from George Washington University while playing football for the Washington Redskins.

  “Reg was always focusing on the future. The next accomplishment. The next objective. It was as if he was always preparing himself for something,” Fugett adds.

  A schoolmate of Lewis’s, Robert Bell, now a judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals, recalls how Lewis worked one job after another. Bell worked with Lewis a few times—he vividly remembers one minimum-wage gig he took at Lewis’s urging that turned out to be “one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had.” During a college football game at Memorial Stadium, Lewis arranged for Bell to get a job filling soda cups while Lewis hawked them to the crowd. Bell apparently failed to sign the required paperwork, however, resulting in a day’s work with no pay.

  Another of Lewis’s money-making schemes had them pulling a float along a downtown boulevard in a Thanksgiving Day parade, labor for which Bell not only got paid but received a free box lunch.

  Although these endeavors were rare for Bell, they were commonplace for Lewis. His hectic schedule took its toll on his grades. He was ranked 118th out of 196 students when he graduated from Dunbar.

  Academically, I spent time on history and the social sciences, but never caught up on the sciences. To this day, I feel inadequate in biology and physics. I didn’t know where to start or even get help. I muddled through and hate to admit most of my lab experiments were copied word for word from other students. I would like to do physics over.

  Fatigue from playing three sports, holding down several jobs, and studying would sometimes overcome Lewis in the classroom. His classmates would catch him fast asleep behind his French book. “Reggie would be asleep big time,” William Smith, one of his classmates, recalls with a chuckle. “He’d appear to be looking down at the book, but he had this remarkable ability to get back into things if he was called upon, as if nothing had ever happened. He shucked and jived his way through a lot of classes.”

  “Reggie was not a brilliant student in high school,” Bell agrees. “He was a smart fella—everybody knew that. He was a much smarter person than his average or his grades reflected. He had all this stuff that he was doing and still managed to do reasonably well. I know he wasn’t in the top 10 percent of the class, but he was not anywhere near the bottom of the class, either. His intelligence was reflected after he left high school.”

  Despite his many commitments, Lewis still found time to run for vice president of the student council in his senior year. Taking a cue from Jean Fugett, Sr., he and his running mate, Robert Bell, followed the cardinal axiom of modern politics: Get your name before the public as early and as extensively as possible. The boys plastered “Bell & Lewis” posters throughout the halls of Dunbar before the school year started. An easy victory followed.

  At Dunbar, Lewis sailed through life with such equanimity, most of his schoolmates had the impression nothing could trigger his ire. He was a big man on campus, a bonafide sports triple threat. He never resorted to fisticuffs at school, where he was seen as mature beyond his years, “a man among kids,” as classmate Richard McCoy puts it. Lewis also had a rakish, womanizing reputation that he didn’t discourage.

  Lewis had taken to putting waves in his hair, which he parted slightly left of center. He possessed piercing black eyes and an attractive smile that he rarely displayed, perhaps because he was self-conscious about the gap between his front teeth, a lifelong concern.

  One amorous interlude got him into a perilous spot. He had to rely on a rescuer from days past, his uncle James, to extricate him. James Cooper, who was married and had a place of his own by then, received a tense telephone call from his nephew.

  “I got some problems,” Lewis told Cooper and asked him to meet him at an address in East Baltimore. Cooper took a friend named Billy and went over. He rapped on the front door and saw Lewis look out the window. “What’s the matter?” Cooper asked him.

  “I can’t come out. That guy over there is going to get me,” Lewis replied. Cooper finally convinced Lewis to come outside. At this point, a man about Cooper’s age walked over to them and said, “I’m gonna shoot him.”

  “For what?” Cooper replied.

  “Cause he was in there with my girl,” the man said as he pulled out a .22 pistol.

  Cooper himself had brought along a .25 automatic which he drew and placed against the man’s head. “If you gotta shoot, shoot me,” Cooper told him. Then, turning to his friend Billy and Lewis, he said, “Go get in the car and leave.”

  Neither Lewis nor Billy moved. Cooper and the man had their guns pointed at each other. “I told them to leave because I knew this fool wasn’t going to shoot. I said, ‘Leave!’ so they got in the car and drove up the street,” Cooper says.

  After a few tense seconds, the man finally told Cooper, “Man, I don’t want no trouble out of you.”

  “I don’t want no trouble out of you,” Cooper said. Both then put away their guns.

  “I walked up the street, they picked me up, we left, and that was the end of that. I think that’s the last time I came to Reggie’s rescue. I think the guy was really out to frighten him, more than to hurt him. I never did see the girl,” Cooper says.

  Even as a teenager, Lewis was very image-conscious, a trait that he kept through the years. At Dunbar, he wore tweed jackets, tapered pants, loafers, and thin, British neckties, in keeping with a fad known as the “collegiate” style. In one of his class photos, Lewis is decked out in a white shirt and tie and appears dressed for the boardroom rather than the classroom.

  “When Reggie came in and didn’t have a tie on, he looked kind of odd,” classmate Ralph Williams remembers. “I guess that was just an inkling of things to come.”

  At the other end of the fashion spectrum from the collegiates were the “slickers,” who favored big, floppy hats, pleated baggy trousers, and pointed-toe shoes. Lewis never chose to follow this style of dress.

  In keeping with a pledge he made not to be a financial burden on his family, Lewis clothed himself while at Dunbar. “Reginald was practical, he really saved his money,” Carolyn Fugett says. “He wanted this pair of shoes and
it just amazed me that the shoes were so expensive. And he said, ‘Mom, it’s my money and I think I can spend it anyway I want.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’ But when I look back on it now, that pair of leather shoes carried him from the 11th grade through law school. He was a master at planning.”

  A SPORTS CAR FOR LEWIS

  In the early 1960s, at a school filled with working-class black kids, it was unusual for anyone to have a car. Here again, Lewis was different, putting his hard-earned extra dollars to use.

  High school was a lot of fun. The girls were also great. I dated quite a few upper-class girls and in my senior year bought my own convertible—an English car, a Hillman.

  Lewis spotted the car as he was going home from school on the bus. He noticed that the roadster was parked in the same place every day. Finally, one day Lewis got off the bus, looked up the car’s owner and asked him if the car was for sale. “Anything is for sale if the price is right,” the owner said. Lewis negotiated a price of $600. There was one small problem though. Lewis couldn’t afford to pay both the $600 as well as the insurance payments.

  To get the Hillman, Lewis made a rare financial request of his parents. He would pay for the car if Jean Fugett, Sr. would handle the insurance for him. The arrangement strained the family budget, according to Carolyn Fugett. But Jean Fugett, impressed that Lewis had worked so hard and saved to buy a car, found ways to make the insurance payments. He accompanied Lewis to pick up the vehicle.

  “Reg was particular about who he let ride in it,” Fugett remembers. “He used to tell his friends, ‘If you didn’t walk with me, you’re not going to ride with me.’”

  Tony and Jean Fugett, Jr. were playing in front of 2802 Mosher Street when their big brother glided up behind the wheel of his beloved Hillman. The purchase caught them totally by surprise. “It was great, he kind of rolled around the corner with it,” Tony Fugett says. “We saw it and we said, ‘You know, we really would like to go for a ride.’ And he said, ‘Hey, no problem, you can go for a ride—as soon as you finish washing it.’”