A Charmed Life : For Bob and Beverly Lewis, It’s a Silver Colt That Helps Them Celebrate a Golden Anniversary

Just back from Monmouth Park in New Jersey, where their champion filly, Serena’s Song, had been honored the day before, Bob and Beverly Lewis were sitting next to the paddock at Hollywood Park, autographing Kentucky Derby photos of Silver Charm. The line, which had begun forming 30 minutes before the hour-long session began, stretched almost the length of the big paddock.

Half an hour past the end of the scheduled signing time, the Lewises were showing no signs of writer’s cramp. They were even personalizing many of the signatures, addressing them to whomever the fans requested.

One of the last to get an autographed picture was John Quinlan, from Laguna Niguel. On one of his shoulders was his 9-month-old daughter.

“Her name is Serena,” Quinlan said.

The Lewises, who had been smiling for 90 minutes, brightened even more and started cooing to the girl.

“She’s named after your filly,” Quinlan said. “And she’s just as tenacious. My whole family was just infatuated with Serena’s Song.”

Quinlan and his daughter left after a few minutes, and so, finally, did the Lewises. By a Hollywood Park estimate, they had signed 1,300 photos. This was a week after the Preakness, the second jewel in the Triple Crown, which also was won by Silver Charm.

If the silver-gray colt wins his next race, Saturday’s Belmont Stakes in New York, he will become the 12th horse to sweep the series. And it numbs the mind to think how many autographs the Lewises will agree to sign after that. They may have to turn over some of these duties to the horse.

Silver Charm, after all, has done everything else, and no owners of a good horse have ever made such a run with such relish. The Lewises of Newport Beach, the beer baron and his wife, came to racing ownership late and have made up for lost time.

“Why do all the stiffs in racing get all the luck?” asked the late John Esposito, the philosopher who ran a bar across the street from Belmont Park.

Well, wherever you are, John, here’s one exception. The Lewises were known as gracious, giving people long before Silver Charm came into their lives, and the enormous success of their horse hasn’t corrupted their style. It has only enabled them to build on it.

“You know how it is in racing,” said Mike Mitchell, a Hollywood Park trainer who has never had horses with the Lewises. “People are always looking for holes in other people. But these people, they have no holes.”

It embarrasses Bob Lewis that people make a fuss about the many kind things he does. He sort of figures those things go with the territory.

At Pimlico the day before the Preakness, at an event called “the Alibi Breakfast,” emcee Jim McKay told several hundred people that the previous night, at a black-tie charity dinner, Lewis had donated $10,000 to the Johns Hopkins University Hospital Children’s Center. Lewis, 73, said he felt like crawling under his table. All he wanted to do at the breakfast was espouse the talents of Silver Charm. That’s the role he’s most comfortable with these days.

He is not a major bettor--it’s enough of an investment that seven years ago he and Beverly began spending millions on a stable that now consists of about 100 horses with seven trainers--but Bob Lewis bet $4,000 on Silver Charm’s nose at the Kentucky Derby. After collecting his $20,000, Lewis told Bob Baffert, Silver Charm’s trainer, that he wanted to give the money to the behind-the-scenes stablehands--such as the groom and the hotwalker--who work so closely with the horse.

“That’s fine,” Baffert said. “But do you mind if I spread it around, a little at a time? Otherwise, we might not see some of these guys for a few weeks.”

Normally, the Lewises play ball with the trainers who bring them promising horses to race, but with Baffert, 44, it was the other way around. Several years ago, the Lewises’ daughter, Nancy Francois, was a sorority sister of Baffert’s cousin, Melissa, at the University of Arizona. As a result of that contact, Bob Lewis stopped by Baffert’s barn one morning at Santa Anita, just to say hello.

Lewis felt comfortable talking with Baffert and said that if the trainer ever came across a horse or two, he might be interested. Less than two months later, Baffert sold Lewis on the potential of a young horse named Ebonair, who won the California Cup Juvenile for them in 1991.

Since then, the Lewises have entrusted most of their horses to Wayne Lukas, who trained Serena’s Song and 1995 Preakness winner Timber Country, a horse the Lewises raced in a partnership. But it is Silver Charm, an $85,000 colt that Baffert landed in Florida, that has brought the couple to history’s threshold.

“Beverly and I have great rapport with Bob,” Bob Lewis said. “We like his style. He’s laid back and has an infectious humor. He has three sons and a young daughter, and he’s a great family man. He’s a credit to the University of Arizona [where Baffert earned a degree], and he’s a breath of fresh air to the industry.”

The late Buddy Jacobson, a leading New York trainer, used to say that the main thing about being successful with horses was just paying attention.

The Lewises do that. Bob checks the bills from his trainers as meticulously as he would the route reports that make his Pomona company the second-largest beer distributor in Southern California.

And Beverly can be counted on for the little things. Minutes after Silver Charm had won the Preakness, she noticed that the weather vane at Pimlico, which is traditionally painted with the winning horse’s stable colors, was missing one of the green-and-yellow stripes that jockey Gary Stevens wore.

Bob Lewis went directly to the painter, Lawrence Jones, politely told him of the error and offered him $30 to make the correction.

Jones, who has been painting the winners’ colors for 11 years, was chagrined.

“Mr. Lewis, it was my mistake,” he said sheepishly. “Thank you, but I can’t take your money for a mistake. I’m going to climb right up there and put that other stripe on.”

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Bob Lewis has not owned quality horses all that long, but he has been interested in racing all his life. He and his parents, who had moved to Glendale from Minneapolis, went to the opening of Santa Anita in 1934, when he was 10.

In 1946, Bob Lewis, fresh from a 3 1/2-year Army hitch, walked into a campus hangout at the University of Oregon, the College Side Inn, and noticed an attractive student named Beverly Deichler playing bridge with her sorority sisters.

“I’m going to meet that young lady,” he told his fraternity brothers.

Short and bookish-looking, Lewis was still a visible man about campus. He was on the cheerleading squad and one of his duties was driving the school mascot, a duck, to wherever the Oregon athletic teams played.

“You might say I was the custodian,” Lewis says now. “That duck and I went all over the place.”

Long before he began selling it in large quantities, Bob Lewis took Beverly out for a few beers on their first date.

“I guess I could have been accused of contributing to the delinquency,” he said, “because Beverly wasn’t quite 21.”

The statute of limitations is on Bob Lewis’ side, though. They married on Aug. 2, 1947.

When they were courting, they would hurry from classes to catch the horses at the Portland Meadows track and part of the honeymoon 50 years ago was a trip to Del Mar.

One of the Lewises’ three children, Jeff, is president and general manager of the Foothill Beverage Co., which his father started in 1956. In the beginning, the firm was a two-truck outfit. At the post-Preakness news conference, Lewis unashamedly held a Budweiser as he answered questions.

“Why not?” he said, brandishing the can. “This is the reason we’re here.”

Jerry Berger, a retired Western United States vice president for Anheuser-Busch, has known Bob Lewis since 1963.

“Bob’s recognized as a leader by his peers in the beer business,” Berger said. “He runs a state-of-the-art operation. And the way he handles people, well, Dale Carnegie could take lessons. A more humble man you’ll never find.”

Berger was part of the Lewises’ entourage at the Preakness, and on Wednesday he and more than 100 friends and relatives of the owners and Baffert will be flown to New York on a chartered jetliner.

In the early 1980s, Bob Lewis suffered a serious heart attack.

“He almost didn’t make it, and I think that changed Bob’s outlook on life,” Berger said. “I think he decided that whatever time he had left, he was going to enjoy it more and more.”

There’s no bigger way to enjoy horse racing than with a potential Triple Crown champion. Going from town to town with Silver Charm beats the heck out traveling around with a duck.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Final Jewel

Silver Charm goes for the Triple Crown

BELMONT STAKES

* WHEN: Saturday

* TIME: 2:30

* TV: Channel 7

* PROBABLE STARTERS: Silver Charm, Wild Rush, Touch Gold, Free House, Crypto Star, Irish Silence, Mr. Energizer and Hoxie.