Roscoe C. Lewis III ’56 February 9, 1939 – December 12, 2015 by James Boyd White ’56
P F
ROM THE time he arrived at Groton, Roscoe
in memoriam
was surely one of the bestliked boys in our form, and for very good reasons: he was warm, cheer ful, mostly nonjudgmental, eager both in his sports—varsity teams in football and basketball—and in his studies. He was a thoughtful person, always ready with ideas—about the universe, about life, about the structure of our cities, about the best way to play defense in football, about mathematical puzzles. He was always kind. He was amusing. He seemed to have no natural limits—he was just one of the brightest and bestspirited people I knew. At Groton, he was one of my closest friends. We were study mates in our Sixth Form year, and then at Amherst we roomed together. He was like a brother to me. I like old things—old languages, old cities, old paintings. Roscoe paid attention to the now, to what is happening, what will happen. It is not surprising that he saw the importance of computing for the State Department before others did. He spent a year at MIT, brought what he learned there to the Foreign Service, and later won a major award for his contribution. He had a rare intelligence, at once com prehensive—he thought about everything—and analytic. In a full sense of the term, he was one of the most intelli gent people I knew. He also had heart, both in the sense of courage and in the sense of humanity. I never saw him say or do anything mean. He was simply present as the person he was, ready to respond with his goodwill and high intelli gence, subject as we all are to changes of mood and feeling, but never blaming others. After college, he worked briefly as a reporter for the Washington Post, then went into the Foreign Service where he was posted, among other places, to Guyana and Thai land. Somehow, despite all this, he found the time and energy to serve on Groton’s Board of Trustees.
56
Groton School Quarterly
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Spring 2016
He married Anne Ekstrom shortly after leaving college. They had a son, Daniel, but some years later they divorced. After some time Roscoe—by then called by his preference “Turk”—married Virginia, who had two children whom Roscoe made his own by adoption. At an appropriate moment, he retired from the Foreign Service, first to New Mexico, then at the end of his life to Florida, where his brother Buzz, also a Grotonian, was living. Roscoe died of complications from diabetes. I have not mentioned what for some people would be the first thing to say about Roscoe, which is that he was the first black student at Groton. The decision to admit him was disconcerting to some graduates of the school, one of whom wrote a disgraceful and hostile letter to all the Groton graduates, anonymously but on school stationery, pretending to inform the graduates that the school had made a deci sion to become 40 percent black. This was, of course, meant to produce a racist outrage, but it failed when Jack Crocker stood up firmly and without any doubt for what we had done. What was it like to be the first black student at Groton? I, of course, do not know. I never heard a formmate say a word against him on the grounds of his race (or anything else for that matter). So far as I could see, he was completely accepted, or, better, there was no question of his being accepted or not. But there may well have been things I missed, subtle or not so subtle. Close friends though we were, I have no real idea what it cost him to be at Groton, or what he left behind to come here. Actually, I do know a little about the last point for I came to know his parents, whom I want to remember here. Both were schoolteachers in Washington and remarkable people, warmhearted, full of laughter, enormously appeal ing, and courageous, to say the least. Just like their son.