![]() ![]() Lew switched teams for the 1903-04 season, going to rival Haverhill. “Lew’s work was cheered repeatedly by the audience,” wrote the Lowell Sun in March. Lew was “quick as a flash and in all his tackles was clean and effective,” in a late January 1903 game against the Burkes. These kinds of performances soon became well known before long he was considered a star and began making headlines often. “If pushed a hard the little fellow would have scored several more.” ![]() “The colored boy, Bucky Lew, had his eye with him and sent the ball flying into the cage seven times,” the Lowell Sun reported. He was exceptional playing the left back position-later called left guard and eventually just point guard-with the Pawtucketville Athletic Club in a 51-9 victory over New England League rival Manchester in front of 1,400 fans in late December 1902 during his first pro season. Nevertheless, Lew became the darling of fans and the local press through his exceptional skills on the court. (Photo courtesy of Merrimack Valley Magazine) Harry “Bucky” Lew of Lowell, Mass., an early basketball pioneer, is believed to have become the first African American professional player when he joined the New England League in 1902. “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 they give this little Negro from around the corner a chance to play.”įranklin Dorman, whose book Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts extensively chronicles the Lew family, seems to clarify things by noting that Lew, after playing for Pawtucketville, “later moved to the Haverhill team, but the league folded in 1906.” However, there is still a problem because the New England League Association seems to have folded after the 1904-05 season. “I can almost see the faces of those Marlboro players when I got into the game,” Lew reminisced about his very first game. Furthermore, Lew himself describes where he played, in his only known documented interview, in the Springfield Union, in 1958. The New England League folded after two years, and several of its teams including Haverhill and Lowell were absorbed into the new New England Basketball Association (which also contained a Newbury port team). The confusion is in the fact that the New England League had a Haverhill team, a Pawtucketville A.C. Getting back to basketball, there seems to be mix-ups in the way Lew’s hoops career has been documented, since varying accounts place Lew on the Newbury-Haverhill team, the Pawtucketville Athletic Club team, and the Lowell team during his time in the New England League. His fascinating family background included music he was trained as a classical violinist and was a direct descendent of Barzillai Lew, a black fifer and drummer who played the fife at the Battle of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution. A long line of musicians and entertainers followed in the Lew family, and the patriarch Barzillai became so well known historically that Duke Ellington honored him with a piano composition, Barzillai Lew, recorded in 1943 on the Hurricane record label. (Image courtesy of the Lowell Sun.)īut he was interesting beyond basketball Lew was also an accomplished cyclist, once called “the Major Taylor of this city,” by the Lowell Sun, in reference to the world champion African American wheelman. So she’s got a little Black Widow attachment to her.Harry “Bucky” Lew. But Glen Mazzara pointed out that if you look at Carol, a lot of the guys that have connected with her have not done very well. And we do that when we’re smitten - we don’t always tell the truth. And she has not offered that to Axel, by the way. Keep in mind, Axel has very little awareness of Carol and Daryl’s relationship at this point. And it harkens to the idea that maybe they were doing something in the tower. And in these days of Walker World, human touch cannot be underrated. Certainly he’s taken with her and there’s just a moment where she hands him the gun and it’s almost where they touch. ![]() So when he’s able to do that with Carol, it supports the idea of whoa, there could be something a little passionate between the two of them. He’s been trying since day 1 to put his best foot forward. That’s a big part of his makeup - the need for connection. TEMPLE: I think that was definitely in place. ![]()
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