Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (4 page)

“He was trained not to argue with people; he turned them over to me,” she says. Carolyn Fugett still recalls how she shamed late payers into making good. “This is a job for him; it’s not a recreation. It’s a job. It’s just like your job. When payday comes, don’t you want your paycheck? That’s the way it is for him. When he collects on Saturday and he figures out his paper bill, he should have a profit. He must show a profit every Saturday, so there will be an incentive for him to add on more papers, and that’s why I’m asking you to pay on time.”

If those early lessons in no-nonsense negotiating failed to sink in, Carolyn had yet another one in store for her son. She delivered it after Lewis attended summer camp, leaving the paper route in his mother’s dependable hands.

While her son was gone, she diligently delivered the
Afro
on Tuesdays and Fridays, the days it came out—while pushing Jean Jr. in his baby carriage. A neighbor with a small child joined in and she and Carolyn pushed their carriages together while delivering newspapers around the sweltering streets of West Baltimore.

After a few weeks, Lewis’s summer camp ended. He came home eagerly anticipating a windfall from his paper route. “You want to settle up?” he asked.

“What are we going to settle up?” his mother replied.

“The money!” Lewis replied.

His mother reminded him that she had done all the work while he was away and therefore the money was hers. “But that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. I’m gonna get me a lawyer. I’m gonna sue you!” her son told her.

Jean Fugett intervened and suggested that his wife give their son his paper route profits. She complied, but Lewis’s lesson wasn’t over yet.

“Now let me tell you something. It’s good to start the way you’re going to finish. Now you didn’t explain to me that this was the procedure—we just agreed that I would sell the papers. So I believe I should keep the money, because I did the job. Is that right or wrong?” Carolyn Fugett told her son.

Lewis replied, “You’re right.”

“Set your terms up front,” Carolyn told him.

Having successfully grown the
Afro
paper route, Lewis moved on to a new challenge. He began to deliver the
Baltimore News American,
which was more profitable but also more demanding, because it came out daily instead of two days a week. He sold the
Afro-American
route to his friend, Dan Henson.

“I was probably his first leveraged buyout,” says Henson, who later went on to become a successful real estate developer and the housing commissioner for Baltimore. “If I remember correctly, $30 was the price. Of course $30 was like a million dollars to me at that time, and to him. Thirty dollars was probably a fair price; it just turned out to be more than I should have paid. I think $2.50 was what I was supposed to pay him every week. No interest. There were some weeks that I couldn’t pay. He got mad and we’d yell at each other. He’d make it clear that a deal was a deal and that we shook hands on it. And we’d have to fight,” Henson recalls.

Lewis, who was bigger than his friend, always got the better of those contests. “Reggie was pretty good and he was quick with his fists. He hit me in the stomach one time and I thought I would never recover. I could beat most of the kids in the neighborhood, but nobody messed
with Reggie. Not unless you were crazy. And keep in mind, there’s a real difference between a guy who can handle himself and you don’t mess with him and a guy who’s a bully. Reggie was not a bully,” Henson says.

As the oldest child, Lewis liked to assume a certain mantle of authority around the Fugett household, acting at times like a surrogate parent. This, however, did not always sit well with his younger brothers and sisters.

Joseph Fugett remembers that when Lewis was asked to babysit, he would order his siblings upstairs to their rooms, then watch television by himself. Occasionally he would summon one of the detainees to fetch him a steak submarine sandwich, potato chips, and a milkshake from the neighborhood deli. Lewis’s instructions were precise: the bread was to be grilled, not toasted; the mayonnaise was to be spread on only one side of the sandwich; the milkshake was to be made from strawberry syrup not sauce; and don’t forget the potato chips!

Joseph and his sisters would get back at Lewis by occasionally stealing the chocolate chip cookies Lewis hoarded in a special place and counted as he ate.

“Reginald was treated very special,” Carolyn Fugett agrees. “When I married Jean, Reggie had his own room. Regardless of how many children came, he didn’t have to share his room. He had his own room and his own things and the rule of the house was that they didn’t bother his things.”

In the ninth grade, I had to go to public school. I knew the choice of a high school was important and that I could not leave it to my mother alone. So I asked around. Actually going through the school selection process was probably the first independent research I ever did. I couldn’t get into the Catholic high schools, because my test scores apparently were not strong enough. It was just as well.

On this matter, mother and son’s recollections diverge. That he wasn’t accepted into Catholic schools they agree. But Carolyn’s rationale was different. “It was rare in his day for a Catholic high school to
take a person of color in,” his mother says. “We’re talking about, uh, I wouldn’t say racism, because I don’t like to use that word. Because sometimes ignorance is more prevalent than racism, you know? I find that people are very frightened of the unknown. They don’t know what to expect from Negroes, black folks, or whomever. So in that fear, they move to isolate them. And I think that’s what I was facing as a parent with Reginald coming up, trying to get him into the best high school that he wanted to go to. He had to face rejection at an early age.”

Carolyn Fugett put the best possible face on the situation, and told her son it was the Catholic school’s loss. Still, the episode pained her. “It was very difficult to really put it in words, because you were trying to teach them the love of God and bring them up in Catholic surroundings. But see, man’s way is not God’s way and I told him that there will come a day that he can work toward those things. It was a no-win situation—we didn’t labor over it.”

Jean Fugett, who had come to the same conclusion, says he saw the teenager who had once been an altar boy drift away from the Catholic Church after being turned away from Catholic schools.

Lewis had a choice of at least three public high schools in West Baltimore that had black student populations. He chose Dunbar, an East Baltimore school named after African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. High school brought with it an exciting new phase in Lewis’s life.

       
Lewis’s “Demon Work Ethic”: The High School Years

It’s been said that your high school years tend to be some of the best of your life, and that you will never again be as free of commitments and worries.

Serious beyond his years and determined to succeed, Reginald Lewis immersed himself totally into high school, where he excelled in football, baseball, and basketball. He also began to exhibit a demon work ethic, toiling after school to earn extra spending money.

Overcrowded and with less modern facilities than its white counterparts, Dunbar nevertheless had a good reputation academically. A large percentage of its students went on to college and those who could not make the grade were “pushed out,” in the words of Dr. Elzee Gladden, a former Dunbar principal.

The school had an all-black faculty that took pride in its profession. Dunbar teachers drummed into their students that in order to succeed, dedication and commitment to excellence were critical.

Dunbar also had a mystique about it in the 1950s that persists to this day because of its fabled athletic teams. It was a point of pride within the black community each time Dunbar walloped white high schools.

I chose Dunbar for its sports coach, the famous Bill “Sugar” Cain. Dunbar was great. The school was known for its great basketball team and for sports generally. What was not so well known was that the A course for each grade level was absolutely superb academically. I was accepted into the “in crowd” right away because of my ability in sports.

Athletics were a big part of Lewis’s life at Dunbar and football was his first love. He and an old friend, Red Scott, tried out for the school’s junior varsity football squad with Scott winning a starting guard position and Lewis becoming Dunbar’s starting quarterback. Under his guidance, the team had a winning season the 1957–58 school year, although it didn’t win a championship.

Lewis’s physique filled out in high school, where he stood about 5-foot-10, weighed roughly 170 pounds, and had a well-developed upper body to complement athletic, well-muscled legs. In addition to his deliberate manner and coolness under pressure, his greatest asset in football was a powerful right arm. He could pass with finesse if need be, but preferred to fling stinging line drives to his receivers and backs.

Lewis’s unrelenting drive and confidence made him a natural leader. In addition, he was good and he knew it.

In all modesty, I was a hell of a performer. I earned four varsity letters in baseball, three in football—where I was the starting quarterback from my sophomore year on, and two varsity letters in basketball. In football, I believed there were only two passers in Maryland worthy of mention—Johnny Unitas and me. I could put the ball on a dime from 40 yards. And when I played, I never doubted my ability and could look into the eyes of my teammates when the heat was really on and tell who could perform and who couldn’t.

I also learned that the voice and the eyes in the huddle could make a real difference. When you said, “Okay, we’re going in,” you had to mean it and you had to deliver. I generally had the reputation that I came to play and that I was serious about the game.

There was one contest in particular that Lewis would always treasure. State scholastic officials had just relaxed a prohibition against black high schools playing against white high schools in contact sports.
Dunbar was scheduled to go up against Polytechnic Institute, a white high school from the West Side.

Many of Dunbar’s players were pessimistic about the game, recalls Lewis’s teammate, Clarence “Tiger” Davis. They expected to lose, but were determined to at least keep the score close, lest they embarrass themselves and the black community.

But not Reginald Lewis. He viewed Poly as just another opponent and reprimanded his teammates for having defeatist attitudes. Before the big contest, he told Coach Cain, “Coach, I play to win.”

“Sometimes, Reggie would be so intense you’d think he was going to explode. He was so serious that when he smiled, he made everybody else laugh, you know what I mean?” Davis, now a Maryland state legislator recalls, laughing himself.

Lewis trained for the game with the same focus and preparation that he brought to everything in life. “He was a tremendous competitor, he was a take-charge type of guy,” his teammate Scott says. “You couldn’t joke at all in the huddle. He would say, ‘Hey, no talking. Shut up—shut up!’ We had a no-nonsense coach, Sugar Cain. And everybody in East Baltimore wanted us to win. It was serious to us, we wanted to win, we wanted to beat the predominantly white schools. We all practiced hard—we trained like we were Marines at Parris Island boot camp. The guys were really vicious in blocking, tackling, things like that. We had a tremendous team.”

The hard work paid off with a stirring victory that bolstered Lewis’s already considerable faith in himself. The local newspapers started calling him “Bullet Lewis.”

I experienced my greatest highs in football, especially going up against bigger schools with better equipment and generally better programs. I led Dunbar to victory against Poly, a large white school for boys that was famous for its football team. The newspaper headline “Dunbar Upsets Poly in Rough Contest” was heady, heady stuff for a 15-year-old sophomore in his first start of the season.

Lewis was a leader off the field as well. “I had a problem once, right?” Davis says. “I was a father at 16 and it was getting to me. Reggie knew it was getting to me one time when I got kicked out of a football game for unnecessary roughness. I was Reggie’s center and he didn’t like that at
all, because my job was to protect him. To be quite frank, I had suicide—everything—running through my head, right? Reggie was pissed off about it because he thought I was being weak and sentimental, I think.”

Lewis confronted Davis off the field and challenged him: “Are you going to lay down or get up? This isn’t the only time in life you’re going to have a problem, so you may as well be a man about it now.”

Putting his arms around Davis, Lewis said, “Hey Tiger, man, you’re too important to the team.”

“I really appreciated that and I’ll never forget him for that. There was a lot of love in that, too,” Davis recalls. “The reason you couldn’t be mad at him for the things that he said was: One, he was right and: Two, there was no question about his trying to motivate me and get me up.”

His teammates looked up to Lewis even though he was a tough taskmaster. On Mondays, he would have them run more laps than Coach Cain called for. Davis remembers Lewis exhorting the team, “Come on, let’s get that weekend out of us.”

Even the fact that he was from West Baltimore did not diminish the esteem in which Lewis was held. “We always thought that West Baltimoreans thought they were better than us,” says east sider Davis. “They always acted grandiose in the presence of East Baltimoreans. But Reggie was not like that.”