A Real Rogue

Robert Lewis, 36, a sometime Western Union messenger, liked to hang around the only grocery store in Walnut, Calif, (pop. 929) and bend Co-Owner Leonard Harvey's ear. "I'm proud to say I got nothing against the Negro," Lewis would boast. "Why, I served with them in the Army for eight years, eleven months and 23 days." Grocer Harvey listened sympathetically; after all, he and the rest of Walnut knew that Lewis was the Negro's champion, and had thereby got himself on somebody's hate list.

Lewis' troubles began last December, after the Walnut town fathers refused his demand that they build a road to his one-acre lot on a bungalow-filled slope grandly misnamed Castle Hill. His wife Eva threatened to retaliate by selling the property to Negroes.

A Blazing Shotgun. Two days later, a fire nearly destroyed the Lewises' small home, forced them to move to nearby Pomona. After they returned in May, they reported a series of thefts. Next, the Lewises insisted, they were plagued by a shotgun blast that tore into their house while they were eating; by carloads of white teen-agers who roared by, jeering "nigger lover"; by young white hoodlums accosting their six children, even to the point of shoving the youngest daughter, on her tricycle, down Castle Hill toward traffic.

All this, the Lewises claimed, was be cause they had offered their property for sale to Negroes. But local cops had their doubts. For one thing, Walnut had no history whatever of racial discord. For another, evidence indicated that the fire in the Lewis home had not been caused by outsiders. For still another thing, the police had only the Lewises' say-so that all those other incidents had ever really happened.

Bubbling Tar. Maybe they hadn't. As it turned out last week, Robert Lewis was the worst, or maybe merely the zaniest, rogue who had yet tried to turn the surging U.S. civil rights movement to his own purposes. He had somehow figured that by complaining of persecution for his championship of Negroes, he might yet coerce Walnut into building that road to his property on Castle Hill. When the cops began throwing his complaints into their "crank" file, he came up with a real nifty.

Lewis persuaded a friend, one Kathy Harwell, 26, a divorcee and the mother of two, to stay in his house and play the part of the tarred-and-feathered "victim" of segregationist hoodlums. And so, one night last week, Robert and Eva Lewis stripped Kathy Harwell to the waist (she insisted on keeping on her bra), sopped her in tar, sprinkled on the feathers, and bound her arms. They then headed for the county sheriff's office to report another minor incident--and to give themselves an alibi. To make things even more realistic, another young female friend of the Lewises set what was supposed to be a small fire at the rear of the Lewis house.

The way Kathy Harwell had heard it, no real harm would be done to anyone --least of all to her. But things went rather awry. The blaze did not engulf the house--but it certainly raised the temperature, causing the tar that encased Kathy's body to bubble. By the time firemen finally got there, Kathy had suffered bad burns over much of her body. Taken to a hospital, she told all about Robert and Eva Lewis, but insisted: "They didn't plan on me catching fire." She even managed an agonized quip: "I feel like a well-done hot dog." At week's end doctors were battling to save her life.

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