Another Classmate Remembered

I learned yesterday that another of my high school classmates passed away a couple of years ago – no details, other than the fact that he was buried in Confederate Cemetery in Alvin, Texas. I don’t know how he died, but I hope he had a better life than I can envision for him.

Lewis Newell was born in 1942 at Houma, Louisiana, though he and his family moved to Texas when he was very young. He contracted poliomyelitis at the age of eight months, and never walked without the aid of braces and crutches. Because he was born in Louisiana, his family was able to take advantage of a level of state assistance that was not then available to Texans; the State of Louisiana picked up the tab for almost all of his medical care, his wheelchairs, braces, etc.

Lewis looked like a gargoyle. To be honest, he would have been ugly as sin even if he wasn’t a cripple, but he was a good guy who somehow managed to retain his sense of humor. He was fun to be around. The one (probably the only) advantage to his looks was that Lewis could buy anything at any liquor store or Seven-Eleven and nobody ever asked for i-d.

From the years of using his arms to propel himself through the world – on bad days he was not above running over people who got in his way in the halls – Lewis could out arm-wrestle anyone on the planet; the local jocks soon learned not to even try. We did pick up some spending money racing Lewis on his crutches against football players with sprained ankles, who were trying crutches for the first time. Even if they should have known better, their ego wouldn’t let them believe that a four-foot-tall gnome could beat them at anything. As a result, Monday after a football game was usually a lucrative day.

In 1961, in Hitchcock, Texas, I witnessed Lewis’s involvement in what might have been a minor miracle.

Lewis was in his wheel chair that night; too drunk to drive but certainly too drunk to walk. It didn’t take much; he had an extremely low tolerance for alcohol. We had been to a party and were headed down the street when Lewis put on a spontaneous burst of speed. He was still accelerating about a half block ahead of us when he and his chair suddenly veered off to the right into a deep drainage ditch.

A huge dog had been barking viciously at us from behind a front-yard fence. I’m not sure when I noticed, but the dog, which looked like a cross between a Doberman and Grizzly Bear, only had three legs; his right rear leg had been amputated. The monster dog jumped the fence and went right into the ditch after Lewis.

We were already running toward the scene of the accident - I thought Lewis might drown – but now I was afraid he was going to get mauled, killed, maybe eaten…

When we got to the ditch, we found Lewis drenched but unharmed, and considerably more sober. The huge dog was in the water, the back of Lewis’s shirt in his teeth, holding his head above the water.

After we got Lewis and his chair out of the ditch, I asked him if the dog scared him as much as it did me.

“Naw,” he said, “we cripples understand each other.”