Will come over from telephone industry this fall
Delano Lewis hired to lead NPROriginally published in Current, Aug. 23, 1998
By Steve BehrensNPR last week announced that its fifth president will be Delano E. Lewis, a super-active Washington civic figure, lawyer, former Peace Corps leader, widely touted "people person" and 54-year-old African-American, who is president and c.e.o. of the city's C&P Telephone Co.
Lewis told reporters Aug. 20 [1998] that he'll start work at NPR part-time in late September or early October and will go full-time when he finishes with the phone company's pending rate case.
NPR was not looking for a journalist or a technical or financial expert, but "someone who could bring all these things together," NPR Chairman Carl Matthusen said at the press conference.
"Del has exhibited the leadership qualities that we need to keep NPR the top public radio producer and distributor of news and cultural programming," Matthusen said in a release.
In response to questions, Lewis said he would lead all aspects of the company, including news, but will not "micromanage" and "will not be reading scripts." Lewis — an organizer and president of the Cultural Alliance of Washington — said cultural programming is just as important to him as news programming.
The well-connected Washingtonian has served as president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade and the antipoverty United Planning Organization, as chairman of the regional United Way campaign in 1991 and the Agnes & Eugene Meyer Foundation, and has been elected to many nonprofit and corporate boards.
Lewis also has run for D.C. City Council (unsuccessfully, in the mid-'70s) and was an early supporter of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. Clinton invited Lewis to join in the economic summit last year.
Lewis was one of two finalists interviewed by the NPR Board Aug. 9-11 at a conference center near Dulles Airport.
The two finalists emerged from 216 resumes assembled by the Boston headhunting firm Isaacson, Miller; from 31 considered by the board's Search Committee; and from nine interviewed by the Search Committee, according to Matthusen, who chaired the committee.
Also serving on the committee were board members Bill Kovach, Tom Livingston of WETA-FM in Washington, Dolores Wharton of the Fund for Corporate Initiatives, and a staff representative, Vice President Sidney Brown.
The committee paid special attention to NPR's equal opportunity objectives. Matthusen noted that 32 percent of the resumes reviewed by the committee and four of the nine interviewees were women or nonwhite.
After making it through the hiring process, Lewis said, "I never worked so hard for a pay cut in my life." NPR will pay him $148,400. "What attracted me is the people and the challenges in public radio."
He and Matthusen saw no conflict of interest in his remaining on the boards of the GEICO insurance company, Chase Manhattan Bank and Colgate-Palmolive, Lewis told reporters.
"Cared about the people"
Lewis gets a respectful send-off from union and municipal officials who in some cities would be his adversaries.
"I would rate his performance outstanding in terms of the way he has run the company and the way he has helped out the city," says Howard Davenport, chairman of the D.C. Public Service Commission. Davenport cites C&P's "lifeline" plan. which provides phone service for $1 to $3 a month for D.C. households with poverty-level incomes and dependent children.
In 1992, the commission found that fewer than 90 percent of D.C. households have phone service and asked C&P to help raise the penetration. "They responded superbly" by giving summer jobs to young people, canvassing residents door-to-door, Davenport said.
A leader of C&P's Washington employees union said she hates to see Lewis leave the company. "The work force really likes Del," said Joanne Bell, president of Communications Workers of America Local 2336.
Lewis is known for organizing a "road show" to many C&P work sites whenever he wants to motivate employees to join in a quality program, blood drive or efficiency campaign, Bell said. "Any big project that comes along, he takes it right to the employees."
"If you're in the audience where he's laying out the program, he can definitely turn a head," Bell added.
"He's one of the last of the [telephone executives] who really cared about the people," said Bell. She contrasted Lewis with executives of Bell Atlantic, the regional holding company that has owned C&P since the AT&T breakup.
"There's definitely a difference when Bell Atlantic took over the reins," the union president said. "They pretty much are not training people, they want to hire off the street, they're gutting the career-path programs."
She noted that the union now negotiates with the parent company rather than C&P, and has lost 29 percent of its D.C. employees and had two strikes since the AT&T divestiture a decade ago.
Across the country, positions like the one Lewis occupies at C&P are losing their clout. "Presidents of phone companies are not really what they once were," commented Steve Titch, news editor of Telephony magazine. "More and more the senior managements of the parent companies are consolidating operations and decision-making." US West and Bell South have centralized some or all of the functions of their phone companies, and Bell Atlantic "will do so sooner or later," Titch said. "Maybe [Lewis] is seeing some writing on the wall there."
Served in Peace Corps
Delano Lewis (the name is pronounced "DeeLAYno") joined C&P Telephone's Washington company in 1973 and worked his way up from public affairs manager to president in 1990.
In the '80s, C&P became the first U.S. phone company to act as construction contractor for a cable TV system (District Cablevision is separately owned and operated). To make the deal, Lewis said, he and colleagues had to convince not only the contenders for the cable franchise but also the phone company hierarchy, back "when we did not have a forward-looking view."
During his 20 years with C&P, Lewis was named man of the year by Washingtonian magazine, the local YMCA and the city's Board of Trade.
Before hiring on at the phone company, Lewis served as an attorney in the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as a Peace Corps director in Nigeria and Uganda in 1966-69, and as legislative assistant to Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.) and administrative assistant to nonvoting Rep. Walter Fauntroy (D-D.C.).
Raised in Kansas City, Kan., Lewis earned a bachelor's degree in history and political science at the University of Kansas and a law degree at Washburn University.
Lewis and his wife Gayle have four sons and five grandchildren, and live in suburban Potomac, Md.
At NPR, he succeeds Douglas Bennet, who took work as an assistant secretary of state in April. The earlier presidents were Donald Quayle, Lee Frischknecht and Frank Mankiewicz.
. To Current's home page . Later news: Lewis retires after nearly five years at head of NPR, 1998.
Web page posted Feb. 12, 2001
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