Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? (6 page)

“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.”

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.’”

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.