I think this kinda goes without saying, but this is my better half.
I always say this to people but I say it without bias without assumption but with confidence, with fact and now with proof. She is incredible at what she does. But it’s not her knowledge that sets her apart. I think anyone that has ever met her takes away just how smart, how her capacity for every intricacy of what I have only the most basic of an idea is an incredibly difficult and nuanced area of the law is just far beyond even other seasoned attorneys. It’s not her attention to details. It goes without saying anyone who’s seen her plan a party knows how she will pick apart every single last detail fair into the night to make sure everything is perfection and I know that’s how she approaches her job. To me what sets her apart is her compassion. She takes every case every house as seriously as if it was her own. It doesn’t matter if it’s a first time home buyer buying a starter home for 300,000 or a multi million dollar property, to her it’s a person who’s making the decision of their lifetime and she treats that case with the divinity that it deserves. It’s so easy to dismiss the little fish for the big fish, we’re all humans. But she is different. She knows how complex this all is and will work with people who (and again I LIVE with her) are as dumb as I am with this stuff, into the night to make sure they are as comfortable as possible so they know all they can when they embark their next journey into homeownerhip. And that is such a rare quality. But she has it and she has it in spades. And THAT is what makes me most proud of her and why she so deserves this.
Tony Kemp retired today. Unless you were into baseball there’s a good chance you may have never heard of him. He never hit 60 home runs. He didn’t have a 3 ERA then go and hit .320 and was the face of the entire country. He didn’t win an MVP or a Cy.
But he won a World Series. He played 9 solid years for three teams. Almost as importantly he’s got a bobblehead (I think he share’s it with Jose Altuve).
But what I know best about Tony Kemp is that whenever he’d come into the clubhouse, whether it was as an A, or an Astro or an Oriole, I looked FORWARD to seeing Tony Kemp. Because Tony Kemp is just an awesome guy. We’d talk about our man caves. We’d talk about random crap. He’d give me a big smile, a man hug, and we’d go on our day. I have a personalized ball he signed for me that is worth as much to me as any of my superstar balls because the inscription has heart.
I can #humblebrag that I’ve seen so many ballplayers that when the super duper stars came in they never fazed me. I never got “excited” when the Yankees came to town so that I could see Aaron Judge (even though he’s also a super nice guy), or the Angels with Mike Trout or so on. But it was the teams with the Tony Kemps. The guys who would shoot the crap with you about stuff you talked about a whole year before like you just got off the phone yesterday.
That’s what being a visiting clubbie was really all about. It wasn’t so much about the game itself. By the time I joined the visiting clubhouse I was such a veteran that me and games were just ships passing in the night by that point. To me It was about the relationships.
I’m not talking about the friendships I’ve developed with my fellow clubbies. The relationships I had with THOSE guys are on a different plane of existence and deserve not a post but an entire novel. That’s something else. That will be written about a different day. That’s a different level of love.
But the relationship I had with so many players, the Tony Kemps, was something that really just kept me going. Kept me going through the rain delays, the 4 hour games, the endless grind of the August heat and the April cold.
Thank you Tony Kemp. Not just for your 9 years of service. But thank you for making an old clubbie excited to come to the ball park, even if for just a series or so.
But I wanted to eulogize a dear friend, and I’m James Joycing this which is always a bad combo….just blame my stream of concious.
Pitching the idea of a series of articles featuring the people behind the scenes of the Boston Red Sox to the Red Sox Magazine was only an excuse. I honestly had zero idea the path I wanted to do with it. I had zero idea who persons two three or four were going to be. I had zero idea if there was even GOING to be a person two three or four. But i had a one HUNDRED percent idea there was going to be a person one.
I was extremely lucky and fortunate to have worked with Dean Lewis so I wrote “Dean Lewis: Clubhouse Extraordinaire” for the sixth edition of the 2011 Red Sox Magazine almost as a love letter to him. Dean was the quite possibly the most unique person I ever met. No one one did things quite like Dean. I don’t think there’s a way to explain it. Not a way to say it, to write it, to sing it, to act it, to play charades, to mime it…to ummm…skywrite it?. To explain Dean was to live Dean. To be with him every day, from 7 AM to 7 PM in Florida or from Noon to 1 AM and sometimes well beyond that deep into the night unpacking the Red Sox coming in from some far off destination.
But to be with Dean was to know you were kinda with a part of REAL Red Sox history, He was there from honestly almost the time I was born in that clubhouse. He was there the day Yaz ran around the stadium shaking hands on the day he retired, he was at Shea Stadium in ’86. One of his main jobs was to muddy up the baseballs. So that means he muddied up the balls that were involved in multiple no hitters, multiple playoffs, 4 world Series wins, and some of the biggest moments in not just Red Sox history but baseball history. He has personally had a personal effect on multiple baseballs that reside prematernity in the baseball hall of fame.
But Dean to me is way beyond rubbing up baseballs and being part of baseball lore. To me he is the guy that I walked to the bullpen with after the 2007 World Series in Colorado, just him and I. And I’ll never forget, we both had on hats and shirts, but for some reason he grabbed what was clearly a women’s championship hat. But he didn’t care, and forever enshrined in one of my absolute favorite pictures ever there in a group shot of all of us is him with this white, women’s cut hat detailed with a pink and purple world series logo, just loving life. That was Dean. He never gave a crap about anything like wearing a women’s hat, he just wanted to be a Red Sox clubbie, celebrate the wins and to be part of the group. And trust me he was not just part of the group, he was ESSENTIAL to the group.
I loved Dean. I loved walking around with him before Spring Training going to all the offices and looking for stuff to have to send to the trucks, both of us bemoaning to each other how much we were dreading the next two months. I loved how much he always complained about the umps, even though I KNOW he secretly loved taking care of the umps room. That room was his little kingdom. He was in charge of that place. No one could tell him what to do there. He told you what to do there.
I loved Dean. I loved how we would live together in spring training, sharing a car. When it was time to leave for the day, there would be no nonsense, no lingering. He would be OUT the door, and I would have to run to catch up with him. But he never complained, never cared about me taking the car, never asked for anything. He was just Dean.
I loved Dean. “I’m easy”. That was his motto. He never wanted to bother anyone. I think I saw him get angry once. And that’s because I accidentally broke a beer that I gave him. He never got to up never got to down. Never panicked. He was so even keeled. Never broke a sweat. It was just so many years of experience. He had seen everything. There were always three ways of doing things. The right way, the wrong way and the Fen-way, and he knew that.
I loved Dean. If he was anything, he was loyal. He LOVED us. He might not have expressed it, because Dean didn’t really “do” expression like that. But I know he did. He loved Coyne, He loved Luke, He loved Murph, He loved Cundy, He loved me, he loved Pookie and he especially loved Joe Cochran with who just had such a special relationship that cannot be explained in words but it also shows the kind of boss is that could keep our group together.
I loved Dean, because he was just Dean.
We lost Dean Lewis last week. My heart is broken, my head still swirls and I still haven’t been able to figure out how to really deal with that loss and how that loss happened. It’s been so surreal that I’m still not sure it’s happened. In my mind, Dean is still here somewhere, but he isn’t…
One of my proudest memories is the day Kevin Youkilis put the article “Dean Lewis: Clubhouse Extraordinaire” cut out from the magazine, and taped it up on his locker, so that every reporter, every visitor, every teammate could see it. And it stayed there for the entirety of the season. I was so proud for myself, but I was as proud for Dean.
Youk was making the statement. “This is Dean Lewis, this guy is a bad ass mofo, he is our clubbie, he is our teammate”
He is, was and will always be Dean Lewis: Extraordinaire
