#ThingsRFLtaughtMe post 2 of 4 --The Building

Leslie Lewis (she/her)
Feb 7, 2022
2 min read

Updated: Jan 17

When I was a freshman in college, my father came to campus to visit me, and took me out to dinner at one of the restaurants he had frequented when he had been a student at Harvard Law School, back in the ‘60s, the Wursthaus.

Over dinner of Weiner schnitzel, Dad told me that he was thinking of making a major donation to the school, and that they were offering to name a building after him in response. He asked me what I thought.

“Umm…sounds good to me?” (What other response was an 18 year old capable of?!)

“No, Leslie,” he chided me playfully, “What you should be asking is: what will the upkeep of this building be, down the road? If I’m not around, you will be the first people they come to, to ask for money, when the building needs maintenance...”

Hmmmm. Good point…

I think this was my dad’s way of showing off to his teenage daughter, who was hard to impress, at that time.

What I learned—just like in the last story, was to push my thinking farther, to try to go past the obvious answer. And also—my dad was pretty cool.

This image is from the article in the New York Times when the donation was announced—July 1992. I look a little crazed… It was all so overwhelming and unfamiliar. He had just made me a director of his company as well, and I felt very inadequate.

But I like the expression on his face as he looks at me in this photo. I liked when he tried to teach me something new.