David K. Lewis

Dear Readers,

We are in the season of Thanksgiving and I am feeling a profound sense of gratitude for having been David K. Lewis' wife for forty-three years. Dave died in the spring of 2013. He was the foundation of my life and I was in such sorrow that I could not submit his obituary. If it were published, somehow it seemed as if I were relegating him to oblivion. Over these past months I've been able to heal and I am taking this opportunity to share some thoughts on Dave's life with those of you who knew him. Please forgive me for the lapse in time. I am taking comfort in these words from Ecclesiastes suggesting that there is a time for everything:

a time to weep and a time to laugh

a time to be silent and a time to speak

And, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, this is my time to speak.

Dave was an entrepreneur before most people had learned to pronounce the word properly. His enormous energy, both physical and intellectual, was the driving force in his life. As a friend said of him, "Dave always had an opinion and it was always a different take and it was usually right."

Dave aimed high. He wanted to be the first Eagle Scout in his troop and was never satisfied with being second. He started college at Case Western Reserve where his brother, Jack, had graduated several years earlier. Engineering wasn't for Dave. One day he picked up his drawing board, handed it to the teacher, headed out of the classroom, and into the nearest US Army recruiting center. His mother feared that he would never amount to anything.

Like most recruits with IQs over 140, Dave was assigned to the US Army Signal Corps. It disappointed him in that he wanted to go to Germany to defend his country, not be stuck in an office. I realized how strongly he felt about defending his country when we visited the American Cemetery in Normandy. Patton became Dave's favorite movie and the only movie he ever saw more than once.

The GI Bill paved the way for college. Dave was admitted to Yale. His mother was relieved. While at Yale, he was the Advertising Manager for the Yale Record and managed Whitlock's Bookstore. Under his management, Whitlock's became a rival to Yale's COOP. During his junior year, Dave married Teri Toth and their daughter, Linda, was born in his senior year. Dave was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated with honors in 1953. The month he died, his class held its 60th Reunion.

It was no surprise that Dave was admitted to the Harvard Business School, a time he called the best years of his life. He was a Baker Scholar, the highest academic award at HBS. During the summers Dave had a Whiting milk route. It was the largest route in Massachusetts. The route covered so much territory that it became impossible for Dave to find anyone to substitute. And it was while he worked at Whiting that he learned to love lobsters. In the spring of 2015, Dave's HBS class will hold it's 60th reunion.

Dave's interest was pulled in the direction of mortgage banking and it became clear that he needed to have his own company where he was free to make the decisions. By this time, both David and George, his two sons, had joined the family. Dave started National First Corporation in 1963 and soon he had offices in 19 states. One of the states was California.

I met Dave in 1970 shortly after he had moved to Balboa and we were married on New Year's Eve. Dave's fondness for mortgage banking was already waning as he realized what the increased roles of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would eventually do to the housing market. As usual, Dave was ahead of his time; his prediction that a housing bubble would be created and then burst was absolutely accurate. Dave sold National First Corporation in 1972 to Sears, as he said; "for purple paper." At that time he was the largest Sears shareholder west of the Mississippi.

After the sale of National First, Dave needed a new experience both geographically and in business. He was drawn to Lake Tahoe and Incline Village for their beauty and taxes (or lack of them). Dave also wanted to travel. He had spent six months traveling around the world and living in Florence and wanted to show my sons, Chris and David, and me what he'd found. As most of you know, the dream ended with the Hotel Hafnia fire in 1973 in which both boys died.

We returned to Incline. Pulling our lives back together proved to be a task that would take a lifetime. A big step in healing was the birth of our son, John, on Christmas Eve of 1975.

While in Incline, the book Beat the Dealer was published. Dave's beautiful brain had a fabulous capacity for efficiently remembering and working with many different concepts at once. He loved cards; he could play poker; he was the Riverboat Gambler. Guys and Dolls was Dave. He could count cards and he counted cards at the casinos at Lake Tahoe until he was barred at Harrah's. Again, a man who was a step ahead of the others, Dave anticipated the Harvard students who outsmarted the casinos in the book Bringing Down the House.

When Incline seemed to be too transient for the proper rearing of our son, we moved to Montecito. Dave was interested in the availability of water far sooner than most of us. He was President of the Riven Rock Water Company. And, as a man to whom numbers sang, he started developing systems in order to trade futures. And some were quite successful. At one time he advertised on the local financial radio station that clients who engaged his services would take the gains and he would take the losses. Yes! It worked for the clients, but eventually it didn't work for Dave.

While numbers sang to him, his ear was also attuned to classical music. He had a beautiful voice and loved Frank Sinatra. In fact, he could identify the changes in Sinatra's voice as Sinatra aged.

His acuity in hearing could perceive accents and dialects. At times it was like living with Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. He loved listening to people and then shocking them by saying something like "Where in Pennsylvania did you grow up?" After checking into a hotel in Madrid, Dave came up to our room and said, "There's a lobby full of people who talk just like you do." I rushed downstairs.The Flying Jayhawks were checking in and I'm a Jayhawk.

Dave jogged in his 40's and 50's and then took up cycling. He and a friend used to cycle to Ventura every weekend. Here in the Valley he loved riding to Nojoqui Falls. He rode the challenging route of the Amgen Tour of California Time Trial. We have a steep hill leading up to our house. To the last day, Dave rode up the hill. He never put a foot down. He never walked his bike, either factually or metaphorically.

I remember Dave as handsome, brilliant, principled, athletic, quick-witted: a man who could suck the air out of a room. (And, as some have said, ornery.) The effects of Dave's illness have broken my heart. Still, I know that Dave lived a long and fabulous life. He said, "We lived as if we were 40 until we couldn't". We lived romantic lives both in the narrow sense of a tremendous love affair and in the broader sense of big peaks and valleys.

Anne