Title: ‘ I’m Freaking Harry Bucky Lew’
Date July 5, 2206
By: Docter Dunkenstein
We were both 11 years old, about ready to conquer our different middle school basketball programs. Kevin was from the big city, South Bend, Indiana and I was from a small town called Garrett. In preparation for our great plans to take over middle school basketball, we had both convinced our parents to send us to summer basketball camp, a five night adventure filled with famous basketball coaches and older basketball stars. We were both part of the youngest group of campers at the Hoosier Basketball Camp. We had never met before being assigned roommates at the camp. I was excited and quite nervous during the start of camp, I hadn’t spent any night away from family, and basketball was slowly taking on a more important position in my daily activities and my state of mind. I had begun playing at Saint Joe grade school in the fifth grade. My planned adventure basketball program takeover was going to be in the seventh grade of ‘public middle school’ .
Somehow, I convinced my parents to let me transfer from the Catholic school to the middle school. I recruited my father to convince my mother to support the transfer, she wasn’t easily convinced, it required strategy and patients to obtain her approval My father told me he was on board but I should let him do the convincing of my mother. she had to approve
It had something to do with surviving one entire year of the Nun, Sister Clarie Marie ‘The Claw’ of St. Joe, and her being scheduled to be my repeat teacher again in 7th grade. Andy, my lifetime side kick basketball teammate, and his crew on ‘hot wheel banana bikes‘ also played a part in my effort to transfer.
I liked winning in everything to do with basketball. Each day, the camp had an afternoon skills contest after lunch. They presented red ribbons to those campers who placed first in the individual contest. I want to have those red ribbons on Friday at the camp’s closing awards ceremony.
Later in life, my paternal grandmother used to tell stories about my over competitive nature in my early childhood. In a teasing moment, she would bring up how angry I would become as a child if I lost at anything. The stories she usually told end with me throwing a childish fit, tossing the cards on the table, , or knocking over the board game off the table, if I lost. I was born a sore looser. Winning even 7th grade basketball camp full court games was important to me. I had no idea how my very first basketball camp roommate felt about winning or losing these life or death camp basketball games. I soon found out.
They camp instructors would spend Sunday nights assigning all campers to a team which would play at least two competitive , keep score, refereed games per day. Ribbons were also handed out to the best teams of the week. They not only assigned Kevin as my roommate, we were teammates. There were only enough kids our age at camp to make a few full teams so it wasn’t unusual that they would keep two of the youngest campers of the total 250 attendees together.
My plans to accumulate the most possible team championship red ribbons hit a quick bump in the road. On Monday morning, the first full day of camp, another camp team beat us in the morning session of games.
I wasn’t too worried, plenty of games remained on the schedule. However. when I returned to the dorm room after the game, Kevin, my roommate, was having a full blown childish fit, tossing things off the table, swearing – saying words an 11 year old child doesn’t repeat — he was livid about something I wasn’t aware of as I finally chilled out a little.
I asked what was wrong. and Kevin just said as he continued in a fit of anger, “I’m Bucky Lew, I’m freaking, (but he actually used the real word, the one that rhymes with truck), … he kept repeating, “I’m Bucky Lew, … I’m Bucky Lew, and Bucky Lew doesn’t loose basketball games to a bunch of chumps. Those guys are chumps” He had missed the winning last second basket. He was angry we lost the first camp basketball camp and missing the shot didn’t set well with him after the game.
I didn’t respond much, but I said, “I thought your name was Kevin’? He laughed, “it is Kevin. you big goof ball, … … I am talking about the great Harry Bucky Lew, the first black professional basketball player. Don’t you know anything about basketball”?
I just shook my head in a lack of understanding. Kevin said, I am going to be a professional basketball player just like Harry Bucky Lew, (Harry ‘Bucky Lew’ Haskell, the first ever black basketball player in 1989), … … you understand, man. Bucky doesn’t get beat by a bunch of chumps. Kevin was surprised I hadn’t heard of this guy, Bucky Lew. But I absolutely 100% shared his attitude about winning, … and more importantly, I very much liked his response to losing.
Kevin Bradford was black. He hated to lose basketball games. So did I, red ribbons don’t go to losers. We didn’t lose another game for the rest of that week. We both had a stack of red ribbons on Friday. He was my first basketball friend of a shared passion.
Kevin ‘Bucky Lew’ Bradford and I remained camp roommates and good friends for years, well into our last year of high school we spent time together , on and off the basketball court. I had lots of relatives in South Bend and I always arranged time with Kevin during my visits to south Bend. , We maintain contact through letters and phone calls until we departed our separate ways to college, some contact was maintained after college.
Every year we would arrange to attend camp together on the same week. Often we would arrange pool parties or movies during rare school year time visits. I had him visit me in my home town Garrett on one occasion. Garret did not have any black students in the school system.
When Kevin visited Garrett, it was like in the film, ‘Lethal Weapon II’, with Joe Pesci … … in the car …. when he tells Mel Gibson and Danny Glover about, the ”He’s Black Scene’ … in the South African Embassy when Glover enters to immigrate to South Africa, and the embassy personnel go into shock, saying, But but but he’s black.
When my friends in Garrett first met my summer time camp partner. They were in complete shock, they would say, but … “He’s black”! I would say back to them in response, “yea, he’s not only black, he’s Bucky Lew. He’s Bucky freakin’ Lew, can you dig it? Kevin would laugh.
Kevin never became a professional basketball player, like ‘Bucky Lew’, he did start on a top rated state team at South Bend John Adams High School as a Senior. His big basketball dreams ended soon after high school. However he developed other new big dreams.
He followed in the footsteps of his father into the field of medicine and became a Doctor of Surgery in Chicago.
Although we were the same age, Kevin was smarter than I was, he taught me many things in our time together, First, he taught me that it does not matter what color your basketball teammates happen to be. Winning was important, not the skin color of your teammates.
My parents enforced this same principal, judge not people on their skin color, and judge them on their actions. Good and bad don’t prefer skin color, you shouldn’t;t either. We watched each other grow from fit throwing young children into young men in college. He was a great person, with a fantastic mind and a big heart that sought out winning and love.
I could never forget our first week together, and people never seem to understand why for our entire years of friendship, I called him ‘Bucky Lew’, and not his proper name Kevin. He knew exactly why I called him Bucky and not Kevin, and we kept it between ourselves.
Harry Haskell “Bucky” Lew
(January 4, 1884 – October 22, 1963)
Bucky Lew was an American basketball player, who is known as the first black professional basketball player.
Biography
Harry “Bucky” Lew was born in the Pawtucketville section of Dracut, Massachusetts (now the Pawtucketville section of Lowell, Massachusetts, annexed in 1874 the son of William and Isabell (Brown) Lew. Like generations of Lews, Bucky Lew was a talented musician and played a violin solo at his graduation from Pawtucketville Grammar School.In the late 1890s, he entered his father’s dry cleaning business in downtown Lowell. He had three daughters: Eleanor, Phyllis, and Frances.
Haskell Lew died of natural causes in October 1963 in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he ran his dry-cleaning business; while some sources mention suicide in relation to his name due to confusion with another Marine, Bucky Lew lived a long life and passed away peacefully.
Family history
A member of an African-American family with a long history in Massachusetts, his great-great-grandfather, Barzillai Lew, was a freeman who served in the American Revolution.Barzillai was a fifer and served with Captain John Ford at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775.Barzillai was imortalized in the Duke Ellington song “Barzillai Lou”.His great-great-aunt Lucy Lew and her husband Thomas Dalton were civil rights activists.The home of his grandparents, Adrastus and Elizabeth Lew, was a station on the Underground Railroad. His father, William Lew, was a delegate to the 1891 Equal Rights Convention in Boston, Massachusetts
Basketball career
In 1898, he joined the YMCA “young employed boys” basketball team. His team was state champion for the four years he played with them. In 1902, at the age of 18, he was recruited to join Lowell’s Pawtucketville Athletic Club “P.A.C.” of the New England Professional Basketball League.His teammates considered him one of the best double dribblers in the league, which was still legal. The team manager hesitated to put Lew in the game, but the local press put pressure on the team to play Lew. He got his first chance after a series of injuries to other players resulted in being allowed on court.
January 4, 1922 Lowell Sun covered the Lowell Textile Institute UMass Lowell River Hawks, Basketball Team season and the newly appointed coach Harry “Bucky” Lew.
Years later “Bucky” Lew was interviewed by Gerry Finn for the Springfield, Massachusetts Union on April 2, 1958 about that first game. “I can almost see the faces of those Marlborough players when I got into that game,” said Lew, who was seventy-four when the article was published. “Our Lowell team had been getting players from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and some of the local papers put the pressure on by demanding that they give this little Negro from around the corner a chance to play. Well, at first the team just ignored the publicity. But a series of injuries forced the manager to take me on for the Marlborough game. I made the sixth player that night and he said all I had to do was sit on the bench for my five bucks pay. There was no such thing as fouling out in those days so he figured he’d be safe all around.
“It just so happens that one of the Lowell players got himself injured and had to leave the game. At first this manager refused to put me in. He let them play us five on four but the fans got real mad and almost started a riot, screaming to let me play. That did it. I went in there and you know . . . all those things you read about Jackie Robinson, the abuse, the name-calling, extra effort to put him down . . . they’re all true. I got the same treatment and even worse. Basketball was a rough game then. I took the bumps, the elbows in the gut, knees here and everything else that went with it. But I gave it right back. It was rough but worth it. Once they knew I could take it, I had it made. Some of those same boys who gave the hardest licks turned out to be among my best friends in the years that followed.”
“The finest players in the country were in that league just before it disbanded and I always wound up playing our opponent’s best shooter,” Lew said. “I like to throw from outside but wasn’t much around the basket.”
“Of course, we had no backboards in those days and everything had to go in clean. Naturally, there was no rebounding and after a shot there was a brawl to get the ball. There were no out-of-bounds markers. We had a fence around the court with nets hanging from the ceilings. The ball was always in play and you were guarded from the moment you touched it. Hardly had time to breathe, let alone think about what you were going to do with the ball.”
The New England League changed its name to the New England Association and disbanded after the 1905 season. For the next twenty years, Lew barnstormed around New England with teams he organized, and in 1926 when he played his final game in St. John’s, Vermont, he was forty-two years old. That was 24 years before the Boston Celtics drafted Charles Chuck Cooper, the first African American for the NBA. In 1928, he moved and relocated his dry cleaning business to Massachusetts, Springfield, where he lived until he died in 1963.
“Bucky” Lew was a man of courage and perseverance. “He didn’t talk much about basketball,” his daughter told a reporter, “but sometimes, if things weren’t going so well for one of us, or if we were having difficult times, he’d talk about how things were for him back then. He used his athletic experience to teach us what life was about.”
Lew has never been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
His daughter, Phyllis Lew, had been trying to get her father included since the 1970s. Since 2016, Bucky Lew has been on the Basketball Hall of Fame, DIRECT-ELECT CATEGORY: Early African-American Pioneers Committee Nominations.
Hoosier Basketball Camp
Ten years Old
His Name: Kevin Bradford
He was 10
South Bend, Indiana
John Adams High School
Roomates
8 years of basketball camp friends.
Kevin was black!
