Lewis Thomas

For more information on Lewis Thomas, visit Britannica.com.

administrator

Personal Information

Born Thomas Lewis, in 1939, in Chadbourn, NC; son of Martha Lewis, a cotton picker, and Gaston Lewis, a sawmill worker; married to Lucille; children: Jason, Patrick, Tisha.
Education: American University, BS, 1975; Sacred Hour Ministerial School of Discipleship, Certificate in Ministry, 1984.
Memberships: Leadership Washington; Fraternal Order of Police.

Career

Washington D.C. Police Department, officer, 1965-86; Hope Village Community Treatment Center, vocational counselor, 1986-87; Lutheran Social Services, senior family counselor, 1987-89; For Love of Children, family and child services coordinator, 1989-93; Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. Boys and Girls Club, early intervention program coordinator, 1992-95; The Fishing School, founder, director, chairman of the board of directors, 1990-.

Life's Work

"If you give a man a fish, you'll feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will feed himself for a lifetime." This familiar creed stands as the cornerstone of Thomas Lewis's commitment to the youth of Washington, D.C.

Lewis was born in Chadbourn, North Carolina, the sixth of 15 children, and moved to Elizabethtown, North Carolina as a young child. His mother, Martha, picked cotton, and his father, Gaston, worked in a sawmill. Lewis dropped out of school after tenth grade and, like most of his siblings, left home. He found work as a migrant farm laborer picking fruits and vegetables in Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and Florida. In 1959 Lewis moved to New York, was drafted into the U.S. Army, and stationed in France. While in the Army, he earned a high-school-equivalency degree.

After being discharged from the Army, Lewis worked as a postal clerk for one year before joining the Washington, D.C. police force in December of 1965. He remained in contact with his family, often providing them with emotional and financial assistance. As his brother Ed Lewis recalls in an interview with People Magazine, "Tom was always, always the guy to make sure the family stood together."

Upon joining the Washington D.C. police force, Lewis served as a beat officer and patrolled the streets of the nation's capital during the riots which occurred following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. As a police officer, Lewis was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, he was sworn to uphold the law and serve as a representative of the police force, a force which routinely discriminated against African Americans. However, Lewis also understood the anger of African Americans and their thirst for justice. Lewis described in a television interview for Black and Blue how he was tormented by the idea of arresting the rioters, knowing the depth of their hopelessness and despair. He remarked that he often struggled to control his own outrage and anger.

After three years on the force, Lewis was transferred to the community relations department. For the next 18 years, Lewis regularly visited classrooms throughout the D.C. public school system to counsel students and to teach good citizenship, drug abstinence, and safety. His dedication and commitment to children embodied the essence of the "Officer Friendly" program, and he was often called by this nickname. Lewis was frequently overwhelmed when he visited classrooms and witnessed the poverty and desperation exhibited by the students. As he related to People Magazine in 1996, "I never saw so many filthy, dirty children coming to school in the morning. I stepped out of many classrooms with tears in my eyes." He was also greatly moved by the number of children who asked him to be their "daddy" and who often fought amongst themselves for his attention. Lewis decided to retire from the police force and made a personal vow to God that he would devote the rest of his life to helping children in need.

During his years with the Washington D.C. police department, Lewis's personal life flourished. He married his wife, Lucille, and together they had three children, Jason, Patrick, and Tisha. In 1975, he earned a bachelor of science degree in administration of justice from American University and became a licensed social worker. He organized a gospel music group, the Capitol Community Singers, in 1974 and has written and recorded five albums with the group. A religiously devout man, Lewis completed three years of study at the Sacred Hour School of Discipleship in Glen Arden, Maryland and was ordained a minister in 1984. He served as the assistant to the pastor at Goodwill Baptist Church in Washington until 1997 and since then has served as the staff minister in the interdenominational HIS Church.

On February 14, 1986, Tom Lewis retired from the Washington D.C. police force. From 1986 to 1987 he worked as a vocational counselor at Hope Village Community Treatment Center, the largest halfway house in Washington D.C., helping newly released prisoners to re-enter society. From 1987 to 1993 he worked for two nonprofit agencies, Lutheran Social Services and For Love of Children, first as a family counselor and then as a family and child services coordinator.

In 1989, Lewis had a vision. He decided to convert a rental property that he had purchased in northeast Washington, D.C. into a family service center. Although he wasn't certain that his vision would come to pass, Lewis relied heavily upon his religious faith. As he stated in The Washington Informer, "Success begins with God and if you have everything you want and don't have a relationship with God, I don't think you're going to go far."

In March of 1990 Lewis opened The Fishing School, a school devoted to providing children with after-school educational, social, and religious training. Lewis's ambitious agenda focuses on teaching children and parents to "fish," to learn how to respect and care for others while also learning to respect and care for themselves. "We are fishing in the rivers of the mind," Lewis often comments. "I want to find out what it is that these children are fishing for and then teach them how they can get it." As the school's mission statement dictates, "The Fishing School endeavors to create and nurture the desire, will, and discipline required for inner-city children to develop into independent, productive members of our society."

Lewis recognizes that children entering The Fishing School bring many "stones" with them: stones of poverty, illiteracy, judgment, hopelessness, sin, pain, and complacency. During an interview on the CBS television show Window on America, Lewis poignantly expressed the hope that his children become stone rollers rather than rolling stones. "Our hope," he remarked, "is that once we begin rolling away stones of fear, selfishness, faithlessness, pride, domination, and misunderstanding, those in the neighborhood who are buried in the tomb of hopelessness will come forth. When they do, they'll use their many talents, skills, and ideas to free themselves from their social and economic bonds."

Lewis firmly believes that children are capable of assessing the direction of their life. Given the proper circumstances, moreover, they can be motivated to make all necessary changes. Most importantly, Lewis hopes to help children discover their own inner beauty and develop self-esteem.

Improving academic performance is one of The Fishing School's primary goals. To accomplish this goal, students are offered Bible study, tutoring, homework assistance, science and rocketry classes, computer classes, gospel choir, dance, drama, and arts and crafts. These disciplines all interact to form a dynamic after-school curriculum. In the rough Washington, D.C., neighborhood that is home to The Fishing School, Lewis has many other aims for his program. As Thomason remarked, "With his free, family-oriented programs, Lewis tries to keep the souls of youngsters from becoming as dilapidated as many of the buildings around them." As Oklahoma Representative J.C. Watts commented in his 1996 address to the Republican Party Convention, "Tom understands that what we build, nourish, and encourage the youth of America to be today is what our country will be 20 years from now."

Involvement by parents and guardians is critical to the success of The Fishing School program. A parent or guardian must accompany each student who applies for admission to the school. Adults are also asked to volunteer five hours each month in the school as compensation for the services which their children receive. Although the school lacks sufficient funding to offer an all-encompassing community program, the school is open to parents before 3:00 p.m. Staff members counsel parents, serve as mentors and tutors, and offer referral services to other community-based organizations. In the fall of 1998, the school will also begin to explore the possibility of providing GED courses. As they do with the children, Lewis and his staff work to motivate parents to succeed.

The Fishing School has been able to celebrate numerous success stories. Several Fishing School students have given poetry readings at Borders Books. One graduate performed at the Washington School of Ballet and another won an $8,000 creative-writing scholarship. Three students have received Free the Children Trust scholarships, one placed first in his school in the Stanford Nine Proficiency Test, and several have been accepted at the Duke Ellington School of Performing Arts in Washington. In 1996, the school boasted its first high school graduate.

In 1998, Lewis expanded The Fishing School concept into other needy areas of Washington, D.C. Plans were announced for the opening of a second Fishing School in September of 1998. Rita Davis, a mother of six grown children, contacted Lewis after viewing a television program about The Fishing School. She donated a two-story home which, after renovation, will become a community child care center. It is expected that this Fishing School will serve an additional 30 children with four paid staff members and several volunteers and consultants.

Despite the success of The Fishing School, Lewis struggles to secure consistent financial assistance. He receives occasional small grants from local foundations and from the United Black Fund, an agency of the United Way. For the first time, the school received some federal money in 1998 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As expenses continue to increase, Lewis must rely heavily on private donations. Families are asked to contribute $25.00 each so that children can attend The Fishing School's summer program. However, some families are unable to pay due to financial hardships. Lewis often talks about attending "Hope Meetings," gatherings where he hopes to meet people who will provide financial help. Since the school's inception, Lewis has never accepted a salary.

Although his job as executive director of The Fishing School presents many challenges, Lewis remains a man of faith who is passionately committed to success. As he remarked on the CBS television show Window on America, "The Lord is pleased, and that's my job. This helps me to live out my calling. When I am finished at The Fishing School, I will go home to the Lord to rest."

Awards

Washingtonian of the Year, 1997; One and Only Nine Award, 1995; Jefferson Award, Institute for Public Service, 1995; Public Service Award, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, 1997; Community Service Award, Seventh Day Adventist Church, 1996, 1997.

Further Reading

Periodicals

• Channel 32 Magazine, April 1994, p. 3.
• Necessary, Winter 1996, pp. 6-7, 15.
• People, September 30, 1996, pp. 59-60.
• TwentyFIRST, March 1997, p. 24.
• Washingtonian, January 1997, p. 79.
• Washington Informer, May 9-15, 1996, pp. 8-9.
• Washington Post, May 12, 1994, p. DC2.
• World Magazine, 1996.

• American Family, NET Television, 1996.
• Black and Blue, Washington, D.C. Channel 8.
• "The Fleecing Of America," NBC Television News, March 6, 1998.
• Promotional Materials, The Fishing School.
• Washington, D.C. Channel 4, February 1998.
• Window on America, CBS Television.

— Lisa S. Weitzman

Quotes:

"It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on."

"Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath."

"The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection."

"We are built to make mistakes, coded for error."

"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."

"Statistically, the probability of any of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in contented dazzlement of surprise."

See more famous quotes by Lewis Thomas

Lewis Thomas
Born	November 25, 1913 Flushing, New York
Died	December 3, 1993
Alma mater	Princeton University, Harvard Medical School

Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.

Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.

He was invited to write regular essays in the New England Journal of Medicine, and won a National Book Award for the 1974 collection of those essays, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. He also won a Christopher Award for this book. Two other collections of essays (from NEJM and other sources) are The Medusa and the Snail and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. His autobiography, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher is a record of a century of medicine and the changes which occurred in it. He also published a book on etymology entitled Et Cetera, Et Cetera, poems, and numerous scientific papers.

Many of his essays discuss relationships among ideas or concepts using etymology as a starting point. Others concern the cultural implications of scientific discoveries and the growing awareness of ecology. In his essay on Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Thomas addresses the anxieties produced by the development of nuclear weapons.^[1] Thomas is often quoted, given his notably eclectic interests and superlative prose style.

The Lewis Thomas Prize is awarded annually by The Rockefeller University to a scientist for artistic achievement.

Contents 1 Parallels to Gaia Theory 2 On Probability and Possibility 3 Books 4 External links

Parallels to Gaia Theory

In the book The Lives of a Cell, Thomas makes an observation very similar to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis:

I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.

On Probability and Possibility

In 1974, Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell that the function of humans is communication.

"We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion."

Thirty-some years later, with the developments in communication such as the Internet and all its derivatives (newsgroups, email, websites), the import of these words takes on a whole new meaning.

"Or perhaps we are only at the beginning of learning to use the system, with almost all our evolution as a species still ahead of us. Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind...are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.

The mechanism is there [n.b.: in the human brain], and there is no doubt that it is already capable of functioning...

We are simultaneously participants and bystanders, which is a puzzling role to play. As participants, we have no choice in the matter; this is what we do as a species."

Books

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lewis Thomas

• The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-43442-6, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-004743-3
• The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1979, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-46568-2, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024319-4
• Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, 1983, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-70390-7, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024328-3
• The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, 1983, Viking: ISBN 0-670-79533-X, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024327-5
• Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher, 1990. Little Brown & Co ISBN 0-316-84099-8, Welcome Rain, 2000 ISBN 1-56649-166-5
• The Fragile Species, 1992, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-19420-1, Simon & Schuster, 1996 paperback: ISBN 0-684-84302-1

External links

1. ^ Lewis Thomas: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 275: Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose, 2003. Succinct review of Thomas' life and of the books listed above. Retrieved 2008-11-08.

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