A Billion-Dollar Empire: The Trailblazing Path of Reginald Lewis
Few know about Reginald F. Lewis, one of America’s most iconic business leaders and innovative thinkers. In 1987 while in his mid-forties, Lewis reached the pinnacle of his success by skillfully executing the groundbreaking leveraged buyout of the global food conglomerate Beatrice Foods.
As the CEO of this billion-dollar enterprise, Lewis without the benefit of legacy connections or inherited wealth witnessed a meteoric rise in his fortunes. Arguably one of the richest Black American’s in the world at the time, he had the distinction of being listed on Forbes 400 list of America’s wealthiest individuals.
In recent years, I had the opportunity to build an acquaintance with Lewis’ college classmate and close friend Lin Hart. Hart is the author of Reginald F. Lewis Before TLC Beatrice: The Young Man Before The Billion-Dollar Empire a book offering an inner look at the formative years of Lewis’ life and his historic climb to success.
It weaves a fascinating narrative of the early bond that Lewis and Hart built in Baltimore, Maryland before matriculating on to become roommates at Virginia State University. Part memoir, part self-help book, it provides a lens into Lewis’ uncommon life before his passing in 1993.
In this exclusive interview, Hart shares some of his early experiences with Lewis along with some foundational wisdom for those aspiring for greatness.
Offer us some context in terms of your early friendship with Reginald Lewis?
Many people know the story of Baltimore and West Baltimore in particular because the series “The Wire” has either made us famous or demonized the neighborhood. This is where we first met. Reginald lived in East Baltimore until, I’m guessing about, 1955 or 1956 or so when his family moved to West Baltimore. That was around the time my family moved there as well.
How did you first become aware of him?
I’d see him frequently walking past my house. We were young kids, about 12 or 13 years old, and only lived about three or four blocks away from each other. I noticed that he always had quite a purposeful walk about him, never stopping or slowing down in my neighborhood.
Did you ever find out where he headed on these walks?
His grandmother lived in another part of town so he’d walk through my neighborhood and past my house to get there. It seemed like he was always making trips back and forth on foot to her home about a mile away.
What led you and Reginald to become acquainted?
I first reached out to him one day to see if he would be interested in playing with the baseball team in my neighborhood. But he wasn’t keen on doing that. Nevertheless, we became close friends and high school buddies. Despite attending different schools, we played sports against each other, and that brought our lives together.
So he turned you down?
When I asked him, Reginald said to me something I’ve quoted a number of times. He remarked: “I’m playing with a team already. I play with the older guys.” My first thought was, “that’s kind of smug. I really don’t know how good you are but you’re letting me know that you only play with the older guys.” That comment really stuck with me over the years.
Can you talk about your decision to write the book?
Honestly, it wasn’t something I’d set out to do. But his mom and his wife asked me to do it after his passing. They recognized that Reginald and I were friends long before he had achieved his business success and wealth and they knew that I was quite honest with them in terms of what I thought about Reg. They wanted someone to write a book that would provide an honest portrayal. So it became a story I felt open to sharing with people.
There are a few books out there about Reginald’s life, including one he himself wrote entitled “Why Should White Guys Have All The Fun.” So what makes your book unique?
The book I write explores a lot of what happened during the ten-year period 1956–1966. I cover the progression of Reginald as a neighborhood friend who demonstrated rather extraordinary qualities while being a very ordinary guy.
It appears that your deep friendship provided you with a rare insight into his life.
No doubt. One of the things that happens in a city like Baltimore, particularly when it involves a high school athletic career where you’re excelling is that this sort of common bond develops between athletes who are competitive and who are well known in the city. That certainly was the case with us.
Can you elaborate a bit more on this friendship?
Sure. Athletics was a big part of this as I was playing for a high school in West Baltimore and Reginald was still attending Dunbar High School in East Baltimore. So throughout those high school years, we would see each other in the neighborhood. But then there was this common bond that brought us together on the athletic field as well.
So what was he like as a football player?
A common misconception about Reginald is that he was a sports superstar in high school. I constantly have to remind people that while he was a very good athlete, he wasn’t necessarily a superstar. Certainly, he was competitive and made the most of what he had. And he was an outstanding quarterback who had high expectations when we joined the Virginia State team. But football didn’t materialize for him the way he or I had thought it would.
Walk us through the two of you playing football at Virginia State?
Keep in mind that this is 1961. I had been looked at and certainly recruited by a number of large white schools. But I later discovered that two of the schools had already reached their limit or quota for the number of black players they could accept. So I was quite comfortable going to an HBCU. I was recruited by Virginia State College in those days ( now known as Virginia State University). But I had no idea that Reginald was also going there.
That must have been interesting for the two of you to suddenly discover that you’re going to be attending the same college?
It was. I received a phone call from Reginald that summer before school was over. He says to me, “I found out that you’re going to Virginia State. My coach was just filling me in on that. Well, I’m going too.” So we had a long discussion about this and I’m thinking “isn’t this ironic” after all the years of us competitively going head to head in football.
From the sounds of things, you and Reginald appear to have been pretty competitive in your rivalry.
We were. As a matter of fact, there’s a story in the book about something we bantered back and forth about often. As the story goes, Dunbar High beat my high school in a game during my junior year. The following year Dunbar honestly wasn’t all that good. Yet, Reginald would always profess that his team was better than ours. And I would say, “no, that simply isn’t the case.”
So you’re headed off to college together. Where did things progress from there?
We got closer and Reginald’s started reaching out to me, which is something he didn’t do a lot of. One day he called me up and said, “Hey Hart, why don’t you and I get together and practice.” I immediately thought to myself, “I’ve known this guy for five or six years and sure we’ve been friends. But I never knew him to be the type of guy who would reach out like that.” So I said to him, “you should know that the quarterback from my high school is also being recruited at Virginia State. So there’s going to be some competition for you.” I told him, “I’m going to work out with my high school quarterback and I’d love to have you join us. But just know that we’re talking two quarterbacks going to the same school that are going to compete.” And he said, “Fine, that’s no problem. We’ll work out together.” So we did.
The two of you ended up becoming roommates. How did all of that come about?
The fact that we became roommates was the subject of some consternation for me. I’ve always said that Reginald maneuvered to make that happen because I was originally going to be roommates with my high school quarterback. But Reginald was always looking ahead. He was a planner and he was always trying to work the system for the next thing. So we ended up being roommates.
What was that experience like?
Reginald at his core was a very private guy. In fact, he actually didn’t want a roommate at all. And he certainly wanted no part of rooming with someone he did not know. But because he knew me, I became that guy. And it turned out to be quite the bonding experience.
How did the two of you get along?
I come from a family of five boys, having had four brothers. We got along like brothers do but there were times when we pushed back against each other. Reginald, on the other hand, was the oldest of the siblings in his house growing up. His mom had remarried and Reginald was her first. He lived with his half-siblings, half brothers, and sisters and they were younger than him. So because Reginald was used to having the lay of the land at home, things didn’t work out too well for us initially. We had to make a lot of adjustments.
I’m sure that made for some interesting interactions as roommates?
It did. I remember one day when Reginald and another friend had a copy of the Wall Street Journal that they were looking through in our dorm room. Having arrived back from my classes, I asked, “what are you guys reading?” Reginald who was habitually outspoken and could really be hard on others at times says, “We’re reading the Wall Street Journal and you don’t know anything about this. So you go ahead with whatever it is that you’re doing.” Taking that as an offense, I said, “so you don’t think I know anything about that”? He says, “no, you don’t know anything about this. You are not even taking business classes.”
HA! That must have been shocking.
Yes, but keep in mind that we were friends. It wasn’t a mean-spirited exchange. We were just a couple of guys messing with each other. And I said, “Reginald uh, I know about the Wall Street Journal,” when the fact of the matter was, I really didn’t. So at that point, I made up my mind that I was going to find out about the Wall Street Journal. Not only that, I decided to find out about a lot of stuff cause I was not this dumb kid. I was just lazy.
So that exchange had a significant impact on you?
It did. I ended up changing my major the next year and became a business administration major. And that bonded the two of us even tighter. But let me say this, even though his comments about the Wall Street Journal were in some ways pivotal for me, I think his hardness could be a bit difficult at times. In fact, if you follow his career you’ll know that there are people who would definitely agree with me on that point.
But did he mellow out over time?
Yes, he did a bit. He definitely developed some humility when he got torpedoed on the football field and saw his athletic career crash. Yet he found that this one guy, namely me, who was having much success was still reaching out to him, still wanting him to be a buddy, still telling our friends about our relationship. These sorts of instances were like a crossing point that really bonded us for life.
What did others think of him at the time?
If you were to ask people who knew him back then, you’d get mixed reviews. Reginald had the type of personality that made it difficult for some people to handle. He was brutally honest, frank, and kind of had an ego, which at times you can appreciate considering what he achieved.
When did life really start to become more clear for him?
During his senior year at Virginia State, Reginald began talking about going to Harvard — and other schools: Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and some others. He finally settled in on Harvard and when the Rockefeller Foundation offered a summer program for young undergraduates from black historical colleges, Reginald got it in his head that he would somehow make himself eligible for this program even though he was just graduating.
Can you elaborate a bit more on this?
Because he wasn’t yet eligible for the Harvard program because he hadn’t graduated, he sort of forced himself into the picture by lobbying a lot of the administrators at Virginia State. So, he got on the list and was accepted to go to Harvard that summer and enter the program. That how his journey there started.
So he goes off to Harvard. Did you stay in close contact with him then?
Yes. I was one of very few that stayed close to him. When he did come back to Baltimore once for Christmas recess, he called me up and said, “I’ll be in town and I want to see you and Frances (my wife).” When he met us, I said to my wife “Francis, get the camera, I want you to take a picture of Reg and me.” I told him, “Reginald, I know you are going to be successful and I think you are going to be somebody.” This was in 1966. We took the picture which is now the one you see on the cover of the book.
Reginald Lewis and Lin Hart
After Harvard Business School, what transpired next for Reginald?
Reginald had worked with a number of prominent legal people and got this notion that he wanted to do his own deals. After working for 15 years with his own corporate law practice, he created the venture capital firm TLC Group L.P., a venture capital firm in 1983. His first major victory was a leveraged buyout that allowed him to later acquire the home sewing business McCall’s Patterns for $22.5 million. McCall’s had long had a reputation as a good company but was in a little bit of a financial free fall at the time. So he bought it.
Then a few years later he orchestrated the infamous Beatrice deal.
Yes. That was August of 1987. Reginald purchased the snack food, beverage, and grocery store conglomerate Beatrice International Foods from Beatrice Companies. That international leverage buyout — a 985 million dollar deal with 64 companies in 31 countries, made him a major global player. Renamed TLC Beatrice International, it was the largest Black-owned and managed business in the U.S. at that time.
So in your opinion what ultimately drove Reginald’s success in business and in life?
While he had some unique abilities, Reginald’s critical trait was a sustainable belief in the eventuality of his success. He never doubted for a minute that he was going to succeed. When Reginald said that he was going to do something you could kind of bet that he was going to make it happen. That sustainable belief is what he had. Whether it was running through a wall or whatever, somehow he was going to make it happen.
Was there anything else?
I think that Reginald understood that in order to be successful, and I’ve always believed this too, that it’s not always going to be about your genius. If he were still with us, he’d probably want to debate this point with me. But I believe it’s true. I was close enough to him in college to know that his academic record was less than stellar. But he had genius in a number of other ways, just not an academic genius.
Can you offer an example of this?
Reginald had the ability to understand what his weaknesses were and then find out how to get others around him to support him in those areas. For years, I knew about some of the intimate details that went into the TLC Beatrice deal. The number-crunching and the analytical ability that was required to put those numbers together the way that he did was significant. I knew that he was good at other things but that wasn’t one of them. But what Reginald knew was how to surround himself with people who had the skills to pull this off. He was a visionary who possessed the ability to motivate others and get people to believe in him.
Do you believe that was part of his DNA, his genetic makeup?
Yes, I believe he got that from his mother who is a fascinating lady, someone I’ve come to know well over the years. She’s in her nineties now. If you ever have the opportunity to talk to her for a minute you’d understand why her son was the way he was. She herself had an overabundance of confidence and is not bashful about telling you that. Neither was Reginald.
How do you believe the book you’ve written about Reginald has been generally received?
The book has been doing reasonably well over time. It came out in 2012 and continues to maintain a pretty good following. It will never run as hard and as fast as Reginald’s own book “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun,” which I’ve always known. But I intended it to offer a snapshot of his life, informed by the personal insight I had into his life that few ever had due to Reginald’s private nature.
Do you ever hear from any of your readers?
In fact, I have. In particular, it really pleases me to have the opportunity to talk to young people who have read it. I’ve, in fact, met a number of them.
There’s one guy I’ll mention in particular and he knows who he is. He reached out to me on Facebook. I immediately related to him because he came off the streets as I did. He was into rap and trying to do his rap business. And I thought to myself, “he sounds like a guy who is trying to do something.” As we continued to communicate over Facebook, I could sense that he was trying to get his life turned around and do something good. So I just stayed in contact with him. I complimented him and gave him a push every now and then.
How did that turn out?
Later I learned that he had moved to a different part of the U.S. with his beautiful family, a couple of young kids, and a really wonderful wife. And so I felt like I knew this guy. And each time I communicated with him it was about Reginald, what Reginald did and how it motivated him. I want to believe that these conversations had something to do with where he is today.
Any final thoughts?
Honestly, I have no intention of getting rich with this book. But I do love reaching a lot of young people who I think can share in his story. You’d be amazed at the number of people who tell me, “Hey, I don’t know anything about Reginald Lewis. I’ve never heard of him.” So I love being able to introduce people to my friend and maybe in some respects contribute to his legacy in a positive way. At the end of the day, this book is about my commitment to bringing to light his contribution as a groundbreaking business leader and person.