Reginald Lewis was living on Dallas Street, a narrow, unpaved little East Baltimore block more like an alley than an avenue, when he uttered the line that would turn into a book title.
He was 6 years old. His grandparents were bathing him that night in 1949, and worrying out loud about the future of a black child coming from no money, in a segregated city, in a nation that had barely begun to confront its racial problems.
"Well, maybe it'll be different for him," one of the grandparents said, and then looked down at Reggie and asked him wistfully, "Well, is it going to be any different for you?"
"Yeah," said Reggie, "cause why should white guys have all the fun?"
It's a line of precocious innocence, and it's made for a cute book title -- "Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? How Reginald Lewis Created A Billion-Dollar Empire" -- although, in case anybody cares, it sort of misses the whole point of Lewis' life, which ended when he was cut down a year ago, at age 50, by brain cancer.
His life was about work. It was about sloughing off all those racial barriers America had willfully created over the years and was beginning to cast aside when Lewis was coming of age. It was about dedicating yourself to achieving big, important goals so that, when Reginald Lewis died, he'd left behind the harsh times of his Baltimore youth to become the richest black businessman in the country, with a personal fortune estimated at $400 million and a business empire valued at about $1.6 billion.
He had his own jet. He had an $11.5 million co-op in Manhattan and a Paris apartment in King Louis XIV's historic Place du Palais Bourbon. For weekends, he had a $4 million mansion on Long Island. He had a wife and two daughters. And he had a life story that should be taken to heart by every kind growing up in tough circumstances who thinks the future has already been written.
Did somebody mention "fun?" When he was 5, Lewis' parents split. He and his mother moved in with her parents, while the mother worked days as a waitress and nights as a department store clerk. Reggie had an Afro-American paper route when he was 10. He built it from 10 customers to more than a hundred. When people were late paying, his mother went to their house and gave them hell.
The grandparents were this sort of people: Sam Cooper was a waiter at the Suburban Club. Sue Cooper cleaned other people's houses while raising eight of her own children and two of her sister's. There was a vacant lot next to their house which, over time, became filled with trash and broken glass. Sue and the kids cleaned it up and planted flowers, and neighborhood children picnicked and played there. Is that a metaphor for lives well spent, or what?
At Dunbar High, Lewis was a three-sport athlete but already smart enough to see beyond the playing field. When practices ended, he worked in a drugstore from 6 to 10 every night. He'd hit the books until one in the morning. He finished 118th out of 196 in his graduating class but got a football scholarship for college.
There, he was mature enough -- not academically brilliant, but wise enough -- to realize there was more to life than sports. He gave up his football scholarship, focused on the books, worked at a series of part-time jobs and found an opening Harvard Law School had created to bring more minority students into the fast lane.
Later, he paid the school back with a $3 million gift. It was then the largest individual gift in the school's history. A grateful Harvard then named its international law building after Lewis.
If all of this sounds like the stuff of dreams, it should. The question is: Do the kids with Reginald Lewis' background -- not just his skin color, but his tough circumstances -- understand that the dream arrives only with ferocious hard work?
Lewis left Harvard with a law degree and an instinct for the good life. Hooked on with a big Wall Street law firm. Left after two years. Started his own firm, began to mastermind some of the most spectacular corporate buyout deals in history. Gave millions to charity.
And left behind this book, co-authored with Blair S. Walker, that's an inspiration. It wasn't just fun Reginald Lewis was after, it was a life lived by whatever parameters he wished to choose. What he chose was a miracle that's open to anyone with his drive.