Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (8 page)

A crisis was brewing in Lewis’s life, one that no amount of exhortation would change. His football performance wasn’t up to par and teammates were beginning to whisper that his scholarship might be in jeopardy. Hurting physically, Lewis would either have to ignore the pain and elevate his level of play or drop football altogether. It would be a painful decision either way.

Homecoming week and its festivities are one of the highlights of campus life. One of the primary attractions—if not the main event—is the weekend football game. Reginald Lewis’s family drove from Baltimore to cheer him on in the big game.

“I remember at homecoming questioning why he wasn’t playing,” says Tony Fugett. After the game, Fugett asked his father why Lewis rode the bench the entire game.

“Why didn’t he play, why didn’t he play?” the disappointed eight-year-old asked. “My father gave me some kind of smart-ass answer. He kind of snapped at me. Obviously, he didn’t like the fact that Reggie wasn’t playing.”

Needless to say, Lewis was unhappy. The episode further deflated his psyche and eroded his self-esteem. He could see his football scholarship going down the drain. Demoralized and depressed, he placed a
telephone call to someone who’d been there for him in the past—Uncle James. “When he went to Virginia State, his shoulder was hurt, but his feelings were hurt worse than his shoulder,” James Cooper remembers.

“I was first-string at Dunbar and I’m third-string here. I’m quitting,” Lewis told him.

“Are you quitting school or are you quitting the team?” Cooper asked.

“They can keep their fucking money, I’ll go academic.”

“You’re right, quit the team, ’cause you went there for an education,” Cooper recalls telling him.

Lewis began taking stock of his situation. With his collegiate athletic career and financial ticket to Virginia State beginning to crumble, he sought out his roommate for some heart-to-heart conversations.

“I remember when Reggie realized that he wasn’t going to be a star on the football team,” Lynwood Hart says. The two were sitting in the room when Lewis blurted out, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to do very much with this football thing, because I’m having too much trouble with my shoulder.”

“What the heck would you like to do if not play football?” Hart asked.

“You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to own my own business,” Lewis answered.

Hart was incredulous. “You gotta be crazy—nobody does that,” he told Lewis.

“You know, I’d like to pursue my law degree, but I’d really like to have my own business,” Lewis said.

Lewis also called his mother. “Mom, I’m gonna leave the sports alone. But I’m gonna be the best academic student that I can be,” he told her.

Lewis’s mother promised to find tuition money somehow if her son lost his athletic scholarship.

With the clarity of hindsight, Lewis might never have become a successful financier had it not been for his shoulder injury.

For their part, Lewis’s friends, Lynwood Hart and Al Banks, went on to become Trojan football standouts. Both say that Lewis never displayed any envy over their success. “Reggie would say after a game, ‘Hey man, you really did well. You played a great game.’ I can’t ever
remember him showing any signs of jealousy about it,” Hart says. “That, to me, was a surprise if you want to know the truth.”

Despite his initial agony, Lewis managed to divorce himself from his football playing days with his self-confidence intact. He had other challenges to take on and, seemingly, never looked back.

“He said one day, he was going to be a millionaire,” classmate Edith Morton Smith says. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to marry a millionaire.’ He accomplished his dream—I didn’t,” laughs Smith, now an assistant registrar at Virginia State. “He was a serious college student. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a dweeb. He had himself a good time at parties.”

I quit football after my freshman year and decided to get serious about my studies. The college years were wild. I crammed a lot of living into those four years. After a rotten freshman year, I really started to study. I got straight A’s in economics and always went beyond the course. I starting reading the
New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
every day. But I had fun, too.

Lewis did have academic difficulties in his first semester. He received an incomplete grade in an orientation course where students were merely required to attend class. Al Banks says Lewis wouldn’t go to the course, which baffles him to this day.

Lewis hit a snag in his second semester, too. Ironically, the man who one day would complete complex business transactions worth millions of dollars didn’t master basic math and received a failing grade.

However, starting in his sophomore year, Lewis’s grades improved markedly although math continued to be his nemesis. He failed it again during his junior year before finally scraping by with a D. Classmate Alan Colon, who would become Lewis’s senior-year roommate, suggested that Lewis do every other math problem in the textbook as a way to bring up his math proficiency. Lewis followed the advice.

Years later Lewis established a $5,000 award for Virginia State seniors graduating with the highest cumulative average in math from their sophomore year on.

Despite his struggles with math, Lewis continued his habit of juggling employment and schoolwork.

I worked throughout college, first as the night manager of a bowling alley from 1
A.M
. to 8
A.M
. This didn’t last more than a semester and a half.

My next job was great. I traveled to elementary schools and high schools throughout the state of Virginia as a salesman for a photographic service. I could make $500 a week on commissions, which was big money in 1963. I had an unbelievable sales record, with about 60 percent of my calls resulting in sales.

I learned some great lessons. The key was to make lots of calls and build on each successful sale. Some principal who I’d sold would call his friend in another county and the next sales call was a layup. I set my college schedule so that I would have no classes on Tuesday. I would leave Monday night for the territory, stay at a Holiday Inn—get up around 5
A.M
., make calls and set goals for the day. I would make my first visit by 7
A.M
. I would try to see one principal at 7
A.M
., another around noon, then three more in the afternoon and one in the evening and leave before it was too dark. This was not easy because these were rural schools not close to each other. I also wanted to start back somewhat early since the South was not a place where a black man wanted to get stopped or stuck once the sun went down. Fortunately, I never had a problem and, at night especially, I always kept well within the speed limit with my sports car.

I would usually settle up the same night I arrived with the owner of the photographic service, who was always very fair with me and amazed at my success. He would pay me right away and ask if I wanted dinner or anything. He usually wanted to talk, but I would rush back to the dorm, work on my studies until the wee hours, catch a few hours of sleep and attend class. The owner offered me a partnership in his company when I was 20 years old and I gave his proposal a lot of thought. I figured I would really expand that business but the
owner had had a heart attack and told me he really did not want a big expansion to neighboring states or to hire more people or build more production capacity. So I passed this up—no regrets because my grades were really beginning to improve. I was getting mostly A’s and B’s.

Already ambitious when he arrived at Virginia State, Lewis was becoming incredibly focused. He was starting to write daily schedules that listed his itinerary for a given day, then would try not to deviate from it. On one schedule written on a piece of cardboard, he wrote, “To become a lawyer, one must work hard.”

“He always had a purpose,” Melvin Smith, another classmate, says. “Where other guys were taking courses to get out of school, Reggie had a master plan in mind. When other guys were reading comics, he was reading
The Wall Street Journal.
”

Lynwood Hart, Lewis’s roommate, saw how Lewis could stiffen his resolve and become unyielding and determined in the face of obstacles. One time, Hart and Lewis were headed back to school after a break. What began as a mundane journey from Baltimore to Petersburg evolved into an epic battle of man versus machine.

“I remember Reggie had a Hillman and I don’t even remember what year it was, but it was old. The thing was falling apart. The fuse in the thing kept blowing out and it just kept going dead on us,” Hart recounts.

Worried, he told Lewis, “Reggie, this thing is not going to make it, man.”

“Naw, naw, I’m telling you this thing will make it. We’ll make it, we’ll get there,” Lewis reassured him.

“All right, okay, let’s do it,” Hart agreed.

The two roommates left Baltimore about eleven o’clock in the morning to go back to Virginia State. They were hardly out of the city when Lewis’s prized automobile went dead.

“In those days, there wasn’t a lot between Virginia State and Baltimore—it was pretty desolate road until you got to Richmond,” Hart says.

He told Lewis, “You know, this thing has a long way to go and we might not make it and might be stranded out there.”

“No, we can do this thing, man. We can do this thing,” Lewis replied. The two stopped by an old car repair shop and somehow started the Hillman. Forty miles later, the car again went dead. Lewis and Hart had several fuses which they kept popping into the car to keep it going. But the car kept stopping and the two would have to get out and push it until they made it to the next repair shop.

After a while, Hart had had enough. “This is crazy, man!” he told himself. But Lewis was undeterred.

“He took this as a personal thing. He was going to get that car to Virginia State that night if we had to push it,” Hart says.

Each time the car died, the two would find a way to get it to a car repair shop. “You could feel the thing getting ready to die on us, and he would say, ‘Oh shit, not again,’” Hart says.

“The first couple of times it happened, my view was, get it to the next point, then we get a bus. My view after about the third time was, if he’s this committed, then I’m committed, too,” says Hart.

The Hillman and its two tired passengers limped into Virginia State late that night. They made it to a parking lot, but not their dorm. “We couldn’t get to the dorm—we got into a parking lot in the middle of campus and it stopped. And we stepped back and looked at it and said, ‘Shit, we made it.’ He literally made this a mission for the two of us, and I bought in. That was the first of a couple of times I can remember being influenced by this guy to go beyond where we were. I think it was that kind of tenacity on his part that made him special,” Hart marvels.

As at Dunbar, Lewis was one of a handful of students with an automobile—when the Hillman was running, that is. However, it was far more than a status symbol. Since football players roomed together and Lewis was no longer on the team, he and Hart couldn’t be roommates. Rather than get used to a new roommate, Lewis moved into a small off-campus apartment. Having a car was critical to supporting that arrangement.

But there’s no denying the Hillman’s utility extended beyond transportation. One of Lewis’s Dunbar classmates, William Smith, used to travel to Virginia State periodically to visit his friend. Smith distinctly remembers that while Lewis was off campus, the aspiring attorney was dating one of his teachers.

“He’d come through campus driving pretty fast and we’d say, ‘There goes Reggie!’” classmate Fredi Savage Eaton recalls. “When he came in the first year, you noticed him, you knew who he was. It was a small campus. He just had an air about him, I’ll put it that way. He had his own way of dressing. He was kind of preppy and in the South, we were not into the preppy look at all. He was always a person who was very observant. You could always feel that he was aware of everything that was going on. There are some people that I went to school with that I don’t remember. I remember Reggie, because he was always doing things that the rest of us weren’t. He had jobs off campus that I think a lot of people didn’t have.”

During Lewis’s senior year, his purity of purpose and focus became even greater with the demise of a dear companion. A crestfallen and “dramatic” Lewis telephoned home to report the Hillman was no more.

“That was his baby, that car, goodness gracious!” Carolyn Fugett says. “He called and said he’d had an accident and the first thing we said was, ‘How are you?’ Not how’s the car—how are you? He said, ‘I’m okay, but I think the car is beyond repair.’ The first thing my husband and I said was, ‘Do you want us to come down?’”

Lewis declined their offer. His prized possession was no more and the loss of the Hillman also made it difficult to hold on to his various jobs.

However, Lewis eventually replaced the Hillman with yet another English sports car—this time an Austin Healy.

Despite his heavy schedule, Lewis was aware there were other aspects to collegiate life.

I didn’t have a steady girlfriend and dated a lot of different women. I didn’t want to get too serious, because the idea of getting married right after school was not in my program. I really didn’t want the responsibility of a wife before I had a real stake in life.