A Legacy of Empowerment For Byron Lewis B’53, the quintessential LIU success story began on the edge of failure There isn’t much Byron Lewis ‘53 needs to say these days as the CEO Emeritus of UniWorld Group. “They don’t need any advice from me!” said Lewis, who retired from the nation’s oldest multicultural advertising agency in 2012, 43 years after its founding. Instead, Lewis can look on with pride as the company he built, closes in on its 50th anniversary in 2019, celebrating five decades of working with clients like Burger King, Mars, and Colgate-Palmolive. And yet, the roots of 12
LIU MAGAZINE | 2016 YEAR IN REVIEW
Lewis’s success can be found in a close encounter with failure, not long after he began his LIU studies in the summer of 1950. Lewis enrolled at LIU Brooklyn as a journalism major, with a first-year courseload that also included classes in Speech Theater, English, and History. A full-time job as a busboy and kitchen inventory steward at Gertz department store in Queens didn’t make life any easier. “I almost flunked out because of lateness,” Lewis recalled. And yet, when Dr. Elliot Seiden, chairman of LIU Brooklyn’s Speech department and founder of the University’s first speech clinic, gave Lewis an opportunity to make up for missed class time, it helped lay the groundwork for his later success.