Lim Poon Lee, Postmaster, on Samuel Lewis—May 20, 1976
Mr. LEE: I became Postmaster in San Francisco in January, 1966 and shortly thereafter I began to receive some correspondence from a Mr. Sam Lewis.
At the time when I received the letters from Mr. Lewis, I did not pay very much attention to them for the simple reason that he would send several copies and I would get a carbon copy; or I would get an original copy and then he would send several copies to somebody else. But later, as the letters began to start coming in, my curiosity was being aroused, in the sense that there was a real insight and thought in those letters. So I began to reading them and began to realize that there was some depth and thought, and also a philosophical and religious background in the writer. I myself have a certain amount of background in religion as well, and have studied philosophy, both Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy; so Sam attracted my attention, and when he called for an appointment, naturally I wanted to meet such an interesting individual. These meetings that I had with Sam turned out to be a time of the most fruitful experiences from the standpoint of intellectual and from the standpoint of philosophical, and even from the standpoint of religious discussion.
Back in the early days of 1966 and 1967 I was setting up the administration of the San Francisco Post Office. My predecessor had left a "bankrupt" office; not bankrupt in the financial sense, but bankrupt in the sense of higher management; because at the time of Mr. Fixa’s retirement I had 31-35 high level managers and directors, so I had to rebuild a new organization here in the San Francisco Post Office, and that takes some doing! So therefore at the time I was very busy and didn't want to bother with other things that didn't have a direct relation to the postal affair. But in Mr. Lewis I found a rare individual in the sense that I could just, let's say, lock myself out to the outside world, for half an hour or an hour, where we would talk on problems that had absolutely nothing to do with the Post Office, that were intellectually stimulating as well as philosophically inspiring; and also one with a religious connotation.
And as I got to know Mr. Lewis better, I felt that he was a man of profound thought, rare insight, and also that he felt that he had a mission in this world to do something before his time was up—on this particular planet anyway; and he talked about his trips, or contemplated trips to Geneva, and to Asia, and also to various points; and he would seek out intellectuals as well as philosophers as well as religious leaders, and come back and tell me who he had met—names I have forgotten that didn't register at the time—so we would carry on our discourse at the time. Let me say this: at the beginning, with my conversations with Mr. Lewis, it was just a flight from reality for me—that I would just like to escape from administrative duties and also from postal problems, but as time went along we developed a unity, in the sense that there was a brotherhood between the two of us; that we were more or less searching for the same goals, such as World Peace, economic justice, inter-racial harmony, and things that are not earthly that we would spend half an hour or an hour to discuss, and we developed into a real good friendship. The impression that we both had the same Chinese teacher, I think, came from our discussion of Taoism. Taoism, as you people realize, is a philosophy from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tze, in my mind anyway Lao Tze was greater than Confucius; so we went and discussed Taoism and what is the Tao, or the Way, or the virtue, or the path, in which one should seek in finding earthly solutions. So Mr. Lewis and I would spend quite a few discussions on Lao, or the Tao, and how we could probably look for some solution to the World's problems. Another thing that is interesting with my friendship with Mr. Lewis was that he seemed to have a very high admiration for Congressman Philip Burton. At that time Congressman Philip Burton was just a young freshman Congressman, but somehow he—I don't know whether he met him personally or not—I did not know him, but he had written to him and I'm sure that Congressman Burton had answered him, and that he admired and policy and the philosophy and the politics of Congressman Burton, and so that will again be another discussion.
Of course I owe a great deal to Congressman Burton for my position and for the political leadership he has given in the Chinese community as well as the San Francisco community in which I am living. So we would discuss what were some of the proposals that we could make to Congressman Burton, even though we realized that it would not be formulated in a Congressional legislation—but he, a Congressman needs some ideas, and Mr. Lewis was a very potential contributor as far as ideas are concerned, and I'm sure that Congressman Burton has responded to Mr. Lewis in his dealings with him.
And then one more thing that particularly interested me with Mr. Lewis was that he was nearby—he lived here in the 200 block, I think, of Clementina St, and he was just a stone's throw from the Post Office at Seventh and Mission, and I left instructions with my secretary that whenever Mr. Lewis comes, no appointment was necessary, and if I was not in a conference, and if I was just busy preparing or writing or dictating, I would stop and we would have a talk. And I feel that my talking with him was intellectually stimulating and was also inspiring and let's say that in my mind Mr. Lewis is a Prophet before his time: He had ideas which long after his passing from this particular planet are going to live, that the talks that we had I couldn't recall—pinpoint them accurately, but I would say that the politicians ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, or even more in the next quarter century, will be talking about some of the ideas that Mr. Lewis had profoundly discussed. But although I may say that I enjoyed his friendship and I enjoyed his intellectual discussions, I kind of exploited him a little bit in that I used some of his ideas in my administration of the San Francisco Post Office because I have one of the best equal employment opportunity programs for minorities of any Federal agency, not only in San Francisco, but in Western United States, because I was a believer in human justice and also in equal employment opportunity and affirmative action—I exploited our friendship a little bit, that Mr. Lewis was very inspiring to me in this particular affair.
SABIRA: I suspect he would have been complimented by that rather than exploited.
Mr. LEE: At the time when we talked about these things, it wasn't very popular; you see, right now everybody talks about minority rights and women's liberation and women's rights, but in those days, let's say 8-10 years ago, people were—the Civil Rights Act was passed under the President Johnson administration in 1964, and then I came in two years after that. That was a bill, a piece of legislation, but nobody wanted to implement it because like the Supreme Court decision on desegregation of schools—we're still having problems today enforcing, and in Louisville—in those days, back ten years ago, why we were talking about it and about busing and some of those related problems of work—we had the Great White Brotherhood—and inter-racial harmony is something that Mr. Lewis talked about way way before the thing was popular for politicians even to mention.
SABIRA: Yeah, he was a Prophet, and even as early as 1933 he had written a book called "The Book of Cosmic Prophecies" that was just a mind- blower. He talks about all these different things that are going to happen in the world—and they did!
Mr. LEE: I learned when I was an under-graduate at the University of the Pacific, that I had some religious training at the University of the Pacific and the University of Southern California, and also the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley—I learned that prophets are way ahead of their time, and they stone the prophets and then future generations build monuments to them; but they must suffer, like Amos was a Prophet, Jeremiah and Isaiah and Jesus, and all those people are Prophets, and Buddha, and the other Prophets of Eastern religions—it takes generations and centuries for people to realize that their prophecy was something that the World needed. I you people are doing a very good job in trying to get some of the writing of Mr. Lewis published. I feel deeply in my own mind that the moral decadence of the 60's in which Mr. Lewis was alive at the time has passed its high water-mark, and now we are beginning to come back to some sanity and some morality: And I think Mr. Lewis' writing will be a good guide to the future of America and to the future of the World, in the sense that we have to come back to moral standards and we have to come back to ethics, and we have to come back to the things that are enduring. I don't think Mr. Lewis went through Vietnam as deeply as some of us that are alive today—maybe he did, I don't know, but we have never discussed Vietnam, and certainly he would have never discussed Watergate. It certainly would be very interesting to have Mr. Lewis talk about Watergate now. The thing is, he was just a Prophet, a philosopher, ahead of his time, and in due time people like you who are trying to record his writing and his teaching for posterity are doing a real service to the country and to humanity.
SABIRA: When he used to come here, and he lived on Clementina, did you ever go to his apartment?
Mr. LEE: No, no I didn't, because I understand that he was quite an individualist in the sense that he liked to stay by himself, and also I think there was someone else who introduced me to him once upon a time—I forget his name—and we talked and he said that his place was full of books and papers and writing, like all typical philosopher's places, and therefore I didn't want to disturb the guy.
SABIRA: I think that might have been Dr. Tillinghast, who came by—one of our teachers, and he said that he came to talk to you onetime while Sam was still alive; he had nothing particular to say about it, but I think I know who you mean.
Mr. LEE: I don't recall the name, but then there was also some graduate student at the University of Calif. who was working on some doctor's degree or something, who was also a friend of Sam Lewis—and then of course Sam mentioned him to me and he dropped by—
SABIRA: So you never went out with him socially or to the restaurant or anything of that sort?
Mr. LEE: No, no, I wish I had, but socially we did not do much. I think the sessions we had together, as I said, had been very stimulating to me personally, and I feel it is very good that you are making an effort to preserve it.
SABIRA: What was he like when you first met him, as far as physically?
Mr. LEE: Not very impressive, because like all philosophers he did not, let's say this—he never came in a Brooks Brothers suit, that's for sure, and he would come half-shaved, but his eyes, even to this very day, very sharp and very penetrating, and so before a few minutes were over why we were deep in thought and philosophical discussion. You know, surprisingly, he was quite alert to neighborhood problems; in other words, he would have been a real help now. You see, in 1965 we changed the immigration law, where a lot of immigrants came from Asia and from the Philippines, and right in the district where he was living there was a large group of Pilipino people now that came over from the Philippine Islands—he would have been very, very much at home with those people, because I would say he's a humanitarian from the very beginning. He was interested in people, he was interested in people's problems, and he was interested in people's suffering; and he, like myself, he just couldn't stand injustice: This used to freak him out, and sometimes we would discuss what were some of the social and economic problems that the city was being very neglectful about, and then of course I told him what was happening in Chinatown. The Chinese people always have the impression that they were rich and that they could always take care of their own, but Chinatown is a slum, and this year the poverty of Chinatown is a sheer problem. And those are the things that Sam and I discussed, and it's closer to home to me, you see.
SABIRA: He saw the perfection in people; he didn't see that they were black or Chinese or whatever they were. You know he was totally interested in humanity as people; and this was his life's work. He spent more than fifty years with these ideas that nobody would recognize. It wasn't really until the first recognition he had was in the Orient in 1956, and then in 1961, and then after that in Geneva, but he wasn't recognized in the United States until he received a vision to go to work with the young people—that was around 1966, about the time when you met him.
Mr. LEE: Yeah, the old prophetic saying is that a Prophet is without honor in his own country.
SABIRA: That was exactly true for him.
Mr. LEE: When you read that book that was written by Prof. Lim, you will see the note that the stones were even being thrown at me, you see, I'm arriving at the end of my career as far as the Post office and as far as an active political career is concerned. For thirty years I've been more active in the political front than Sam was, and he was more active in the philosophical and in the religious fronts, you see, and I borrowed a lot of his ideas, because he reminded me of a professor that I had in the University of the Pacific back in the 30's. Now in the 30's we had a depression too, and this Professor, he's still alive today—Professor Paul E. Schlipp, he's a German professor, and he was a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of the Pacific. At that time we only had 600 members in the student body, so it was called the College of the Pacific, and he stimulated me when I was a young man, and I think Sam Lewis doesn't have the academic degrees that Prof. Schlipp has, see, but he has some of his ideas, because, back in the 30's when you talked about pacifism and World peace, you were not only going to be stoned, you were going to be hanged! And that was during the regime of President Hoover, and outside of Gerald Ford, I don't think anybody is more reactionary than Herbert Hoover was. I was brought up in that kind of an atmosphere, and I had the stimulation of Professor Schlipp which brought me a very close affinity to Sam Lewis, because Sam Lewis reminded me of my old teacher, and he tackled those problems with a great deal of vim and vigor and courage and stamina.
I hope you people will be able to continue this project, and I'm sure that Sam will make his contribution to this world whether people recognize him or not. He is, let's say, one of the early Prophets!
SABIRA: Thank you.