Other than Lewis, just one other senior at school had a car and he was the son of a well-to-do doctor. What made Lewis’s acquisition even more remarkable was that his car wasn’t some utilitarian appliance. In keeping with his well-developed sense of style and taste, Lewis’s car was a sports car, and an imported one at that.
For some of his classmates, Lewis’s cream-colored English convertible confirmed suspicions that he was really a bourgeois, superior West Baltimorean after all. “He brought an air about him from West Baltimore,” classmate Richard McCoy remembers. “When you come from West Baltimore to East Baltimore, East Baltimoreans expect a certain kind of individual to exist over here. Reggie was, ah—his presentation as far as demeanor was concerned was a little too classy. He came to Dunbar with a demeanor that was, ‘I’m a little better than you folks, anyway.’ He had a car—who else had a car? He dressed immaculately and in expensive clothing. Half of us didn’t have shoes to go to our proms with.”
“Even so, no one harbored animosity toward Lewis, at least not outwardly,” McCoy says. He speculates that the Hillman got a lot of mileage on it as far as the ladies were concerned.
“Reggie was a ladies man, or tried to be in class, but outside of class I don’t know if he really was one or not,” says Ralph Williams, another classmate. “He was always talking to some woman. Reggie did have the gift of gab and he would always be striking up conversations with them. I don’t know if he was trying to get dates or trying to have that reputation of being someone who could talk to the ladies. But he never did anything out of place and was always a gentleman, that’s one thing I can say. He was not one to do anything in front of anyone to make himself look bad or say anything to a lady out of place.”
There’s little doubt that Lewis cut a dashing figure in his motorized chariot, which broke down frequently. So what if it was nine years old? It was every bit as effective as a Ferrari when it came to attracting women.
Schoolmate Paulette Bacote-McAlily had some dates with Lewis. “Reggie and I went out a couple of times,” she says. “He was fresh, he was forward, meaning that during the 1950s and 1960s you just didn’t come right out and say, ‘Come and go out with me, I have a car.’ You’d woo the girls a little bit, but not Reggie. He was straightforward.”
She says Lewis would drive to his house on Mosher Street, where they would stop and see his parents. Then they would get a hamburger and a milkshake at Mardel’s, a West Side hangout popular with black kids, and he would take her home.
Lewis’s nemesis at school was Bertram Hill, the class clown. Because he had skipped a grade before attending Dunbar, Hill was the youngest and smallest member of Lewis’s class. Highly intelligent and born on April Fool’s day in 1944, Hill was an incorrigible practical joker who’d harass and tease the bigger, more mature Lewis all the time, like an irritating gnat buzzing around a bull elephant.
Hill forever secured his place in Class of ’61 lore with a prank he pulled on Lewis in their history and social sciences class. Lewis was running late that day and was the last to arrive.
“Reggie was always so serious,” says Hill, now a strapping 6-foot-4, 240-pound giant with a booming laugh. “Man, he was always so serious. I said, ‘Well,’ I’m gonna get a rise out of him.’ So I put a little thumbtack in his chair. We had the kind of desk that held you in, okay? The desk and chair combination. Reggie hits this thumbtack—‘Owwwwwwwwooooohhhh!’ And when he hit the desk, the desk knocked him back down on the thumbtack and he hit it again. He got mad at me, he wanted to fight me that day. I can remember it just as if it happened yesterday. I laughed until I cried. It was just so comical the way he did that, because Reggie was very proper and very reserved and for him to lose his cool with a yell was something. I got put out of class for a while, because everyone turned around and pointed at me. They saw Reggie take a swipe at me and hit me upside the head—he grazed me. That’s one of the few times that Reggie lost his cool, as a matter of fact, and that’s because he was embarrassed. He laughed about it later.”
Suave, sophisticated Lewis usually never stooped to juvenile tomfoolery. But Hill’s attack couldn’t go unanswered. During lunch one day, a famished Hill took out his lunch bag. He was all set to dig into the meat sandwich he’d prepared the night before, but “someone” had removed the meat from the sandwich and replaced it with liberal amounts of ketchup and mustard.
“Being poor and not having a lot of money at the time, I used to have to pack my lunch. And that’s all I had for lunch that day, ketchup and mustard. Reggie did it. He told me later, about two weeks later, because Reggie was quiet. And he was just so cool. I never expected that he was the one that did it, because he very seldom played practical jokes on people,” Hill says.
While Hill and Lewis were polar opposites in terms of their personalities, Hill was one of the few classmates that Lewis allowed to see behind his teenage facade. “He and I had a certain simpatico. I read him and I read some of his frustrations and some of his pains. And he liked me because I read it and didn’t disclose it. He liked me because I would do things to make him laugh and he knew I picked on him to bring some joy and levity and get him away from so much seriousness. One day I said, ‘You know what? You don’t even have to worry about lying to these people about girls and stuff that you may have and may not have. I know better—you’re working too hard first of all, so when do you have time for them, after midnight? You can’t stay out late, ‘cause your mother will kick your behind! Now when are you going to have time for all these chicks?’
“Reggie really didn’t have time to entertain. Reggie was always working or doing school activities or something like that. He missed a lot of his childhood that way, to me. I guess despite my pranks, I was a sensitive kind of soul, too. And I saw sometimes sadness in his eyes,” Hill says.
“Reggie was always focused on what he had to do. Like I said, he was very reserved and, to me, even a little troubled. Reggie had like a burning desire and it’s something that I appreciated later on in my adult life. Because when you look at things from adolescence, you don’t really appreciate or understand things like perseverance, dedication, and purpose. Reggie always had goals, unbeknownst to many of us at the time,” Hill says.
For Reginald Lewis, the time eventually came to leave Dunbar and move on to the next challenge. A mysterious new venue—college—beckoned. Lewis was now a big fish in a small pond. How would he perform in a college setting? He would find out soon enough. It was the spring of 1961 and high school graduation was just around the corner.
After receiving their diplomas, the Class of ’61 scattered, as graduating classes typically do. Practically everyone in Dunbar’s advanced academic course went to college. In those days, black students had a much smaller scholastic universe to pick from than today.
Much of the Class of ’61 wound up at Morgan State or Coppin State colleges—both of which are black Baltimore schools,—or at Salisbury State on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Bowie State, Howard University, 45 miles to the south in Washington, D.C., or Hampton Institute in Virginia. For black students to attend white colleges, particularly prestigious ones like Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, was exceedingly rare.
The hours spent on the football field paid off for Lewis by helping him overcome his mediocre grades. Lewis got a football scholarship to Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia. Lewis had no way of knowing that his plans to be a football star would be derailed at Virginia State, putting him on a path to greater glory and accomplishment than he ever could have conceived of at Dunbar.
3
* * *
“I’m Going to Be a Millionaire”: Lewis at Virginia State
Established in 1883 and situated close to the banks of the Appomattox River, Virginia State is the country’s oldest publicly funded black university. Once known as the Virginia Normal & Industrial Institute, the school’s rolling, tree-dotted campus sits atop a former plantation in Ettrick, Virginia, just outside Petersburg.
The cap
ital of the Confederacy—Richmond—is about 18 miles to the north. Back in 1883, most of Ettrick’s residents were poor white laborers who toiled at water-powered mills that fed one of five rail lines converging on the Petersburg area. News that a black college had been set up in the middle of town triggered tremendous resentment among the locals, many of whom had little or no formal education. In addition, many residents were still smoldering from having lost the bloody, divisive Civil War that was ostensibly fought over slavery 18 years earlier.
Residual animosity toward Virginia State students was still percolating 78 years later when Reginald Lewis started attending college. Chesterfield Avenue, which runs past Virginia State’s campus, served as a demarcation line of sorts. Students seeking to avoid trouble prudently skirted the residential areas on the other side of Chesterfield.
College campuses tend to be insular communities and Virginia State was no exception. The growing civil rights movement barely registered a blip on the radar screen of student consciousness. That would change somewhat before Lewis graduated, though.
Lewis stepped onto this stage in the fall of 1961. “He wanted to leave home and go out of town. We were in an atmosphere where you had to be extraordinarily accomplished for a white school to give you anything. So, Virginia State made him an offer,” his mother, Carolyn, recalls.
Except for his stint at summer camp when his mother delivered his newspapers for him, Lewis had never really been away from Baltimore for any extended period of time. Parting was difficult for mother and son.
“I won’t say I cried. I’m not a crying person, really. It was tough, it was tough because you were sending your best friend. He served so many positions in my life. We always disagreed but we were never disagreeable, because we were so much alike. His views and my views sometimes didn’t intersect very well, but on the basic things we never had a problem,” Carolyn Fugett says.
When his goodbyes to friends and family had been said, Lewis crammed his belongings into his tiny sports car and headed south down Interstate 95.
“HE COULD BE A VERY DIFFICULT PERSON”
Before coming to college, Lewis had had a room to himself. That wouldn’t be the case at Virginia State, because freshmen were required to stay on campus and have a freshman roommate.
“He had a hard time with roommates,” Lewis’s mother recalls. “He had his own way of doing things and they had their way. Eventually, he moved off campus and got his own place. See, he was an exacting person and everybody didn’t like him.”
Lewis’s first roommate was Lynwood Hart, a homeboy who lived about four blocks from Lewis in Baltimore and played football with opposing Edmondson High School. They knew each other well enough to have developed a nodding acquaintance, although Hart today vividly remembers knocking quarterback Lewis out of a high school football match.
That Lewis and Hart wound up being Virginia State roommates may seem an unlikely coincidence. But as Hart recounts it, their being roommates resulted from Lewis’s gift for controlling situations and using that skill to his advantage.
Virginia State had a policy of pairing football players in dormitory rooms. Lewis, Hart, and the rest of the team were lined up so the coaches could decide which players would room together. A coach stood in front counting off “One and two, you’re roommates, one and two, you’re roommates.”
Lewis saw how the sequence was unfolding in terms of which boys ahead of him were getting the same room. He then moved up a few places, positioning himself in a way that he and Hart would become roommates. “Reggie denies this happened, but he did it—I saw it,” Hart says.
“Reggie was the kind of guy that was always thinking ahead of everybody else. And that caused him a lot of problems with people. There’s people who if they are honest will tell you that Reggie was not the easiest person in the world to deal with. He was always ahead of most people relative to what he thought about life and what he was planning to do. He realized it was kind of good to have a receiver as a roommate,” Hart recalls.
Lewis and Hart grew very close during their time at Virginia State, but only after Hart got beyond his roommate’s prickly persona. Even though they were both black kids from the same neighborhood and fellow athletes and graduates of Baltimore City public schools, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar in temperament and personality.
Hart found out for himself that Lewis could be difficult to live with. “Reggie sometimes could make you very angry. He had a way of talking about things that if you didn’t know him, you would view as a personal put down. But it was more of a kind of shock treatment,” Hart recalls.
Lewis was self-assured, articulate, and dogmatic when expressing his views. Whenever he and Hart debated some issue—which was often—Hart’s logic would come under vigorous attack, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see the shortcoming of that philosophy, of that belief that you’re holding? Don’t you think you need to rethink that?” Lewis would insist.
There were many times, Hart recalls, when he wanted to tell Lewis in exasperation, “Who the hell are you?” However, Hart adds, “But it was never an exchange on an emotional level, where we got into great disputes and stuff. He was constantly shocking you into thinking about things in a way that kids coming from where we came from didn’t normally think.
“Reggie, there’s no question that he could be a very difficult person. And he could be, uh, very hard on people if he felt that they weren’t giving 110 percent. If you said, here’s 100 percent of mankind, I think Reggie probably felt that maybe anywhere from 20 to 25 percent of those people needed to be kicked in the ass,” Hart remembers.
Also on a football scholarship, Hart came to Virginia State with the intention of majoring in general trade, then becoming an industrial arts teacher. However, his conversations with Lewis led him to change his major to business administration. He now directs international systems engineering for AT&T.
“A lot of thought processes were engaged after having a discussion with Reggie. I mean, he pissed you off, quite frankly. But if you took time to think about what he was really saying, you began to see some benefit, some value, and some substance. The shock treatment that I got as a steady diet as his roommate helped focus me,” Hart says today.
Lewis loved to deal in the currency of ideas. He was a well-informed, versatile conversationalist and a voracious reader.
“Reggie believed that you should spend some time trying to figure out what was going on around you,” Hart says. “I kind of felt like—‘Who cares?’ I mean, I can’t influence anything! Why is it important for me to read a newspaper, or try to figure out what this author was saying in this book? I mean, it’s a waste of time, because I was never going to use it.
“I think if there was stuff that annoyed me about him, he was always pressing those kinds of things. Like, ‘Hey, did you see what was in the (Washington) Post, or the Richmond Times Dispatch?’ Or, ‘Check this article out!’” Hart recalls.
Lewis even proselytized when it came to his tastes in music. “He had a tape recorder, a Webcor tape recorder. I’ll never forget that darn thing. And he would play music by MJQ (Modern Jazz Quartet), Ahmad Jamal, and other jazz greats. And I would say, ‘I want to hear some hip-hop.’ He would say, ‘Well you know, hey man, get your head together. Listen to something that’s got some value and some quality to it.’ Now I have an appreciation for music in a way that I didn’t have back then,” Hart says.
Even as a college freshman, Lewis refused to view race as an impediment or a handicap. Equally important, he wanted to bring others around to his point of view. One day Lewis was in the room reading and Hart, who had a habit of walking around their dormitory room pretending to be a radio DJ and newscaster, was puttering around reading an imaginary news script. Lewis looked up in bafflement. “Why do you do that?” he asked.
“Because one day I want to be a newscaster. That’s what I want to do,” Hart responded.
“Well, if you want to be a newscaster, why don’t you do it
?”
“They don’t have black newscasters around—there’s nobody doing this,” Hart replied in a tone that implied what he’d just said was common knowledge.
To Lewis’s way of thinking, Hart’s attitude was a harmful, self-defeating fallacy. Lewis’s grandparents had programmed and schooled him extensively in that regard: “No skill or vocation is the white man’s exclusive province.” And here in his dormitory room, without a white person in sight, Hart was already placing limits on his potential, based on his color. “Look dammit, if you want to do something, you can do it,” Lewis passionately informed Hart.
A couple of days later, around 2 o’clock in the morning, Hart was lying in bed when he heard a knock on the door. It was Lewis, with a young black man he’d met while working at a nearby bowling alley after classes. Lewis’s acquaintance was Max Robinson, who later joined ABC News as the country’s first full-time black anchorman on a national evening news program. At the time, Robinson was working for a radio station in Richmond.
Lewis walked over to his desk, pulled the chair out, placed it in front of Hart’s bed and offered Robinson a seat. “Now, talk to this guy about being in radio,” Lewis said. And that’s what they did, staying up all night engrossed in conversation.
Thirty-three years later, Hart still marvels at Lewis’s conviction and his willingness to act as a catalyst for another young black man’s dream. “Here’s a guy who’s saying to me, ‘Hey, you can do this,’” Hart says. “‘And not only can you do it, but I’m going to show you somebody who’s doing it.’ That was the kind of guy that Reggie was.”
Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? Page 5
