Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?

by Reginald Lewis

  Carolyn’s simple gesture earned Reginald the unwavering support of an uncle, cum older brother, who would fight for Reginald at the drop of a hat, support that would come in handy on the rough-and-tumble streets of East Baltimore. James was one of eight Cooper siblings, all older than Reginald, who played with, pampered, and nurtured the boy. He was also doted on by his grandparents and was the youngest child on his block, making young Reginald the unrivaled center of the universe not just at 1022 Dallas Street, but for the entire 1000 block. And of course, he was his parents’s only child.

  Reginald Lewis developed a strong sense of self-worth early on, in addition to an expectation that he would be catered to and get his way.

  Clinton Lee Lewis, then 25, was a diminutive man with a café au lait complexion, wavy black hair, and high cheekbones. He held several jobs in succession, first as a civilian technician for the Army Signal Corps and later as the proprietor of a series of small businesses, including a radio repair shop and a restaurant. Shortly after the marriage, he left to join the Navy.

  Lewis seldom mentioned his father, even to close friends. Business associates who made it their business to study Reginald Lewis drew blanks when it came to his father. No one knew for sure if he was dead or alive.

  Lynwood Hart, a college roommate of Lewis’s, recalls that, “Reggie saw his father as somebody who didn’t have much of a dream. I don’t know that he had a lot of respect, though I think he had a certain caring for his father. It was clear to me in the conversations we had about his dad that he thought his dad was an underachiever. One day after stopping by his father’s restaurant in Baltimore, I said, ‘You never talk about your father.’ He said, ‘Naw man—I don’t know. He could do so much more with his life.’”

  Clinton never remarried, and he passed away in 1983, living long enough to glimpse his son’s success as a Wall Street lawyer.

  Carolyn Cooper Lewis was a light-skinned beauty with expressive brown eyes. Just 17 at the time of Reginald’s birth, she was to be a major influence in her son’s life. Both as a child and later as a successful businessman, Lewis always exhibited a fierce protectiveness toward her. His aunt, Elaine Cole, noted that, “He loved and adored his mother. In his eyes, she could do no wrong.”

  Lewis was still a young boy when his mother left Clinton Lewis and moved into her parents’s home on Dallas Street. The move into the Cooper household was a seminal experience for Lewis.

  My mother left my father when I was 5 and arrived at grandma’s house in the middle of the night with me under her arm. Everybody got out of bed. Grandmom and Grandpop, Aunts Charlotte, Beverly, Jean, and Elaine, Uncles James and Donald. Uncle Sam was away in college. Aunt Doris was married and Uncle Robert was in the Air Force. After my grandfather exploded about more mouths to feed, Grandmom asked one of my aunts to take me up to bed. As I went upstairs, I heard my mother say that we would not be a burden, we’d pay our way. That stuck.

  It was a lesson that Reginald Lewis would carry with him all his life. Carolyn Lewis looks back on her decision to leave her husband, saying, “My husband and I never had bad feelings. But there are some people you just can’t live with. He was into being the head of the entire Lewis clan and at that point, I could not see me fitting into that mold. It gave me no sense of my own identity.”

  Lewis remembers that “My mom was about 22, and I rarely saw her in the mornings because she was working two jobs—a waitress, and at night a clerk at a department store.”

  “I wanted for nothing,” he later wrote.

  Lewis’s grandfather, Sam Cooper, held several jobs as well. At one point, he was a waiter at one of Baltimore’s fanciest hotels, the Belvedere. At the same time, he waited on tables at the Suburban Club, a Jewish country club in suburban Baltimore, while also working private parties at posh homes.

  Sam Cooper was an orderly man who liked everything to be just so at home and at work, a trait he passed on to his grandson. When he came home, the Cooper household had to be neat and clean or there would be hell to pay because Sam had a terrible temper. He never had trouble finding work, which was a good thing because he quit several jobs in fits of pique. His hair-trigger temper apparently had an effect on his grandson, whose own outbursts became legendary.

  Sam Cooper would often bring home all kinds of delicious leftovers from work, including frogs’ legs, which the children hated, lobster newburg, Smithfield ham, turkey, marvelous desserts, and even champagne, which the children were allowed to have in small portions. Reginald Lewis retained a fondness for quality champagne all his life.

  Because of his work, Sam Cooper would not get home until long after the children had gone to bed. To make up for that, he would rise early to cook everyone a big breakfast of eggs, bacon, hot cakes, and hash-brown potatoes.

  He would set the table with linen tablecloth and napkins, flatware, and glassware and then he would serve the children as though they were guests in a fine restaurant and he was their waiter.

  Despite his initial grumbling, Sam Cooper adored his grandson. “The first time my mother and Carolyn walked in the house with that boy, tears came to daddy’s eyes and from that point on, Reggie was daddy’s baby,” says James, one of Cooper’s sons.

  In fact, James remembers his father taking Lewis to the Belvedere Hotel, and, with a white towel draped over his left arm, escorting him to a dining room table and serving him lunch, which in Reginald’s case usually consisted of a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

  Sue Cooper was a warm, loving, deeply spiritual individual who was also a no-nonsense taskmaster. In addition to raising eight children of her own and two of her sisters’s children, she cleaned other people’s houses.

  She made sure that each child had a job to do, with the youngest children doing the dusting and the older ones washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and helping with the ironing.

  Next door to the Cooper house was a vacant lot that over time became filled with trash and broken glass. Sue and the children cleaned it up and planted flowers of all kinds. She set aside an open space in the middle of the lot where she and the children could have picnics and play.

  Neither Sam nor Sue Cooper had gone beyond the eighth grade in school but, as one of their daughters put it, “Both had PhDs in common sense.” Lewis learned a great deal from his grandparents—how to conduct himself with people from different backgrounds and races, including white people. He noticed that when his grandparents talked to whites, they did so with head erect and gaze unwavering. Sam Cooper emphasized that his children and grandson should always be courteous in their dealings with whites, but never servile.

  “Be whatever the situation calls for and if you need to use them, use them. And after you’ve gotten what you want and where you want to go, then you proceed on,” one of Sam’s daughters, Lewis’s Aunt Charlotte, recalls her father saying.

  I feel very good about my base values, which I think is so important that we instill in our young people and children. On this note I think of my grandparents, even more than my mother. My mother was active, having a lot of other children and dealing with all that entails. But my grandparents, I think, had a wonderful facility for programming young people. And being able to convince you that you were someone special, that you had something to bring or something to contribute, too.

  I carried that with me a long way. It’s been extremely important to me.

  Thanks to the Cooper family, I never had a fear of white people. And I think my grandmother always emphasized, “Don’t be afraid of them. Be afraid of situations or be concerned in certain situations, but never fear any person—be they black or white.” And she never showed any fear in terms of dealing with whites. And that was important, because that wasn’t true with a lot of other people that I’ve known.

  Sam Cooper had little tolerance for racism. Shortly after Lewis was born, he thumbed his nose at the firmly entrenched Jim Crow policies of Baltimore by marching into a downtown department store to buy his new grandson a blanket. When h
e felt like it, he would also “dare” to watch movies in segregated theaters, his self-assurance and fair complexion overcoming any indecision on the part of the cashier who might not be sure if he was white or black.

  Despite some early childhood clashes with his grandfather, Reginald Lewis always looked up to Sam and Sue Cooper, who he always referred to as Grandpop and Grandmom. On his periodic visits to Baltimore, he would invariably make it a point to visit them. Years later, he would confide to friends that one of his proudest moments was when, as a successful tycoon, he was able to take his grandfather to lunch at the elegant Harvard Club in New York. Lewis truly valued the years he lived with the Coopers.

  I behaved and had a knack for being a real boy but one who also respected his elders. Everybody in the Cooper family worked and went to school. We were sort of a first family of the block. My grandmother always had a helping hand for others, whether the need was advice or food.

  The Coopers were also known as a tough family. If you fought one, you had to fight all, including the women. I remember several men getting their heads busted bloody for picking on one of the younger members of our clan. Sometimes injustices were done. Once when I was about 7, my best friend’s brother, who was about 14, knocked me around for no reason. I told my uncle, who rounded up a couple of his henchmen to search out the culprit. Unable to find him, they grabbed his brother—my best friend—and kicked his ass instead. I didn’t have a best friend for a few days, although I did speak out as he got slapped around. My uncles said the guilty brother would get the message. He did.

  Early on, Lewis displayed a talent for sports. He was extraordinarily competitive, and it was important to him to get on the playing field, even if most of the time he was much younger and smaller than the other players.

  Dallas Street also served as an athletic field, where all the boys played a brand of touch football that made tackle seem mild by comparison. We skinned our knees and elbows as a matter of course. For the big games, usually around the end of fall, we’d go to the park with makeshift helmets; some of us had them and some didn’t. There were also second-hand shoulder pads and assorted equipment that left you feeling unbalanced until the first hit. All my friends were about 12 or 13 and sometimes in those games I would not get to play a lot. The boys were afraid I might get hurt, meaning they would have to answer to my uncles and aunts or even disappoint my grandmother, Mrs. Cooper.

  On those occasions when the football in play happened to belong to Lewis and he was on the sidelines, the game was abruptly terminated. If neither team picked him, he would instantly snatch up his ball and leave, oblivious to the angry stares—and comments—of the other children.

  By the time he was seven, Lewis’s mother enrolled him in a nearby Catholic school.

  I went to St. Francis Xavier, a Catholic elementary school about five blocks from Dallas Street. A couple of my younger aunts went there before me and my youngest uncle tried, but was thrown out on his ear for being too advanced. The Oblate Sisters were the teachers, and they were rough. My mother, who had gone to public school, always bragged about her son going to “parochial school.”

  As I think back on it, the place left a lot to be desired, but the discipline was good and the sports programs, though ragtag, were pretty good. The nuns would slap you around at the drop of a hat, sometimes for nothing. I really hated this, and let a few know it early with terrible tantrums when I was in the right. So they generally left me alone, especially since the priests liked me a lot because of my grandmother’s work for the church and my sports ability. Science programs were virtually nonexistent at the school, but social studies were very strong. I was about a B or B+ student in later years, but did not feel real strong academically.

  St. Francis Xavier was located on Central Avenue in East Baltimore, inside an imposing four-story brick building surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. It had kindergarten through eighth grade. Before leaving for school, little Reginald Lewis would don a pair of blue pants, white shirt, blue tie, and thick-soled black-and-white leather shoes.

  The Oblate Sisters of Providence ran the school and are an Afrocentric order founded in Baltimore in 1829 by Elizabeth Lange, a Haitian immigrant who courageously educated African-American children in her own home during a time when enslaved blacks were forbidden to read and write. The Sisters wore black and white habits with silver crucifixes dangling from their necks. They practiced what has come to be known as “tough love.” Lewis’s aunt, Elaine, recalls that “if you did the wrong thing, you got cracked on the hands with a ruler. You didn’t fool around too much there—some of those nuns were pretty big.”

  The mischievous and strong-willed Lewis had several run-ins with the nuns. His lasting impression of Catholic schools was influenced by a put-down he received from a nun who told him that he would never amount to anything more than a carpenter. Years later, Lewis swore to his wife that their children would never set foot in a Catholic school.

  Meanwhile, because of his mother’s many jobs, Lewis wasn’t seeing much of her. His aunt Elaine would often babysit him until his mother came home. “I was supposed to watch over him and that was it. He used to get mad, though, when his mother wasn’t home. He used to say to himself, ‘Yeah, she’ll be home when the moon turns blue.’”

  Carolyn Lewis was a working mother with a demanding schedule, but she always found time for her son and remained a major influence in his life. “I wanted him to look a certain way at all times. I was really hard on the poor child. When I came home from work, I always wanted him to look spiffy. The poor child used to get around three baths a day. My mother would bathe him and he would get his clothes changed. So when five o’clock came and I came home, he would greet me. He’d look really great. He wanted dungarees so bad and I said no, you just can’t have them. I think it was on his seventh or eighth birthday, my mother bought him a pair of jeans and he thought that was the greatest thing. I think my mother went up on a shrine when she bought him those jeans!”

  One time, Lewis lost several buttons from his shirt while horsing around with a friend. Frantically searching for a quick fix, he ran to the home of a neighbor. “Miss Isabelle,” Lewis implored, “Miss Isabelle, you’re gonna have to sew these buttons on before my mother gets home. My mother is not going to like this.” He was eventually rescued by his grandmother, who changed his shirt.

  Lewis revered his mother and he wouldn’t tolerate anyone bad-mouthing her. Dan Henson, a high school friend of Lewis’s, recalls one day when he was playing what’s known as “the dozens,” a timeless game of oneupmanship played in the black community where insults were hurled back and forth between verbal combatants.

  Lewis didn’t play the dozens. But one day as he was heading home, Henson goaded a friend of his into taunting Lewis about his mother. “I put him up to talking about Reggie’s mama, because I knew what was going to happen to him,” Henson recounts. At first, Lewis kept on walking and ignored the insults. So Henson whispered to his friend, “Come on man, he didn’t hear you. He didn’t hear you.”

  Henson’s friend obliged by shouting something like, “Your mama wears combat boots,” whereupon Lewis turned around and hit him in the throat. “The guy went down and started crying,” Henson recalls with a chuckle.

  Lewis generally lived a happy, relatively care-free existence in East Baltimore. He was the center of attention and never lacked for playmates, affection or life’s necessities. Best of all, he had no rivals for the woman he adored the most in life, his mother.

  A NEW FAMILY

  The last part of that equation was about to change dramatically reordering Reginald Lewis’s universe. His mother had met Jean Fugett, a young soldier based at the Edgewood Arsenal, an Army installation north of Baltimore. Two years later, in February 1951, they were married.

  His mother did her best to prepare Lewis. She had always told him, “Through thick and thin, it’s the two of us. You can depend on the Lord, yourself, and me.” She assured him that her marriage “
would not diminish my love, because there’s a certain love you have for a child and there’s a certain love you have for a husband. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. I was not asking him for instantaneous love for Butch (Jean Fugett’s nickname), but for respect. And in time, see what it brings. I said, ‘You’re gaining—you’re gaining your own room, you’re gaining the friendship of another person. You haven’t lost anything. You’ve gained a whole lot.’” Years later, Lewis would look back on the era when a new man entered his mother’s life.

  My mother remarried when I was about 9 and moved from Grandmom’s to West Baltimore. My stepfather, Jean S. Fugett, Sr., was a terrific man who worked two jobs and also went to college to finish his degree. He taught me that sometimes what appears to be a complicated problem can have a simple solution. After they were married, he could tell for about a month that I was very intense and uneasy around him. Finally, one day we were alone and he asked, “What’s the problem?” I said something like, “I don’t know what to call you!” He said, “That’s simple. Call me Butch, and don’t worry so much.” It was a terrific lesson and we got along great. There is no person I respect more than him.

  Fugett remembers Lewis as a typical youngster. “He’d be out in the street playing catch with his uncles or other guys his age or a little older. He always believed in playing with people older than himself. He thought he improved himself faster that way.”

  Originally from Westchester, Pa., Fugett felt at ease around Carolyn’s big clan. He left the Army after Carolyn told him that she was “not going to marry anybody who stays in the Army.” He began working at the post office at night and going to school at Morgan State College in Baltimore during the day.

  Carolyn Lewis made it clear that her son would always be a major priority in her life. “Butch knew that Reginald would be my main consideration, along with him, because there were certain things that were due to Reginald—there were certain things that I had placed on my drawing board before I met Butch. Reginald would have the best that I could afford: he would have a good education and he’d be able to go to college wherever he wanted to go. That’s what I had worked toward when I met Butch. He had no problem with that.”