A legend in Yountville: Navy lacrosse and soccer star, a veteran fighter pilot, continues to fight
James “Jimmy” Lewis was riding bikes with his brother on Long Island when they passed Hofstra University and saw a lacrosse game in play. As curious, athletic boys, they wanted to try it. Neither had a lacrosse stick.
They went home and improvised with “broom handles and coat hangers and pillowcases,” Lewis said. “And that started it all off.”
Ultimately, Lewis became a national champion in two sports, lacrosse and soccer, at the U.S. Naval Academy. He went on to fly fighters off aircraft carriers and spent much of his Navy career as a test pilot. Today, the retired Navy captain who lives in Yountville is still being lauded, and now, as he faces a cancer diagnosis, he is still undaunted by the prospect of a new kind of challenge.
Sixty years after he graduated, last September former teammates and generations of Navy lacrosse players gathered at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland, to honor him. Lewis estimated about 100 people came to the celebration; the trip was a chance to see old friends as he returned to the academy.
Lewis was born in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island when he was 9. He played baseball and basketball because his parents worried that he might get hurt playing football. But they knew so little about lacrosse, it slipped past their objections, Lewis recalled.
Word of his lacrosse prowess reached the U.S. Naval Academy. Lewis was a senior in high school, playing point guard in a Long Island basketball championship game, when a coach showed up to scout him.
Lewis had a reason of his own for wanting to go to Annapolis. “I had this idea that I wanted to be a fighter pilot and fly off aircraft carriers,” he said.
As a first-year midshipman, or plebe, Lewis found another reason to play sports: he wanted a break from hazing, and athletes in training were spared. Lacrosse was a spring sport, however, so joined the plebe soccer team.
Lewis listened as the other players introduced themselves. Some had earned all-state honors or set scoring records. When it was his turn, he told the room he had never played soccer, but he was going to make the team, which he did.
He went on to play varsity as a sophomore and was starting at left wing by his junior year. In 1964, Navy went 15-0, beating Saint Louis 2-1 in the NCAA semifinals and Michigan State 1-0 for the championship. Lewis scored the only goal in the final with about 2 1/2 minutes left. It remains Navy’s only NCAA men’s soccer title.
In lacrosse, Lewis earned first team All-America honors in 1964, 1965 and 1966. Each year, he also won the Jack Turnbull Trophy as the country’s outstanding collegiate attackman. Navy won national titles in all three seasons and went 28-0 against college opponents during his college career.
Lewis still has the sword the Naval Academy Athletic Association gave him in 1966 for excellence in varsity sports. Roger Staubach, who played 11 seasons with the Dallas Cowboys, had received the same honor the year before.
In 2014, Lewis received the Tewaaraton Legends Award, which honors players from the years before this award, college lacrosse’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, was established. Lewis is recognized in the Navy Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Graduating from the academy, Lewis went into naval aviation. He trained at the Navy’s Top Gun fighter weapons school at Miramar in San Diego, deployed aboard aircraft carriers and was selected to attend the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base. After finishing this program, he went on to the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, where he tested aircraft performance after modifications, handled new payloads and checked whether new systems worked as intended.
Lewis recalled flying an F-14 during the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War when his mission was to escort helicopters out of the city. “That was not so much fun,” he said.
Flying from a carrier, he said, could be exhilarating, but how it felt depended in part on whether he could see the deck. “It’s fun during the day,” he said. “At night, it’s kind of like scary.”
He retired as a captain in 1996, and met his future wife, Carol Burrell, on a blind date in 1999 in Southern California.
Burrell, who grew up in Lodi, teases him that they might have passed each other by if they had met in their youth; she doubts she would have been drawn to the hotshot athlete at Annapolis. He, in turn, likes to remind her that, at the time, she was probably leading a cow around the fair in her 4-H uniform.
Ten years ago, when they were living part-time in California and part-time in Cabo, Mexico, they began looking for a place in closer to Burrell’s hometown and decided to explore Yountville. Burrell visited to see what was for sale and called the real estate agent on the drive back to say she wanted to make an offer for a property. “It’s like Carmel with wine grapes,” she told Lewis.
She had noticed something else she knew he would appreciate. Storefronts had water dishes out for dogs. The couple started with a weekend place, then moved to a home with a vineyard view. They have lived in Yountville full-time for about seven years and met many neighbors walking their dog, Smuckers, an engaging Bichon Frisé.
“You go, ‘Oh, hi, it’s Sammy,’” Burrell said. “And Sammy’s the dog.”
Lewis got to know local veterans playing golf at Vintner’s Golf Club. Burrell, who has a background in real estate and building, applied for a seat on the Yountville Zoning and Design Review Board. At the interview, she said other applicants seemed to know the Yountville Town Council members by name, but she barely knew anyone. The council chose her anyway.
On Sept. 8, the Jimmy Lewis ’66 Legacy Celebration held in Lewis’ honor at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, recognized his contributions to Navy lacrosse. Jeff Johnson, a 1979 Naval Academy graduate, presented Lewis with a Navy letter sweater bearing five stars that represented victories over Army in lacrosse and soccer.
Navy Men’s Lacrosse Head Coach Joe Amplo said at the event that Lewis is “arguably the most impactful lacrosse player that this sport will ever see,” adding that modern-day players can’t hold a candle to what he did as “one of one.”
When asked what college sports had in common with flying fighters, Lewis talked about the confidence it takes to commit to a play on the field or bring an aircraft down on a carrier deck.
His confidence continues as he faces his current battle against pancreatic cancer, traveling frequently to San Francisco for treatments at UCSF. That resolve is shared by his wife. “We’re fighting,” she said. “We’re fighting the good fight.”
“I can do that. I won’t be deterred,” he said, describing the attitude he brought to other endeavors. “I can succeed. I have to succeed.”
