Family Party

After the monthly trustees' meeting last week, 350 officers, employees and guests of Manhattan's Union Dime Savings Bank gathered at the Hotel Pierre to celebrate a gala occasion. Union Dime was 100 years old, and over the years it had gone from piggy-bank size to the nation's 15th biggest mutual savings bank with deposits of $485 million. In a way too the party was in honor of a man. At 66, Union Dime's President John Wilbur Lewis had spent 48 years at the bank, helping it grow and growing with it until the onetime $2-a-week errand boy was a $50,000-a-year executive and one of the city's most respected bankers.

The temptation with Jack Lewis was to call him a banker's banker. He was that --careful, conscientious, orderly minded, a worker who went to Union Dime right after high school in West Orange, N.J. and trudged through the business from messenger to bookkeeper, from assistant head bookkeeper to assistant secretary, from assistant treasurer to treasurer to vice president to executive vice president and finally, in 1948, president. He dressed like a banker, in severe greys and blues, lived where the bankers live, out among the rolling lawns and towering oaks of Short Hills. He married, raised two children, and when his wife of 25 years died in 1945 married again.

Sell Service. But the "banker's banker" phrase did not really do Jack Lewis justice. He also had one of those sharp, searching minds that made him a rugged competitor in a business that only in the last decade or so has started to hustle. "We have nothing to sell except service," said Lewis. He was one of the first to install business machines to help tellers figure accounts rapidly, in 1956 ordered an all-electronic bookkeeping system. And when most banks limited the number of checks a depositor could issue without charge in any one month, Lewis' slogan was "checks without charge for household bills."

As deposits grew, Lewis helped his bank find better ways to put the money to use. Bankers give him much of the credit for a new New York State banking law passed in 1950 that enabled savings banks to invest part of their assets in stocks. He was the first president of New York's Institutional Investors Mutual Fund, an open-end stock fund for mutual savings banks that now has assets of $46 million. With it all, he was an easy man to work for: friendly, outgoing, a delegator of responsibility who enjoyed calling his staff "my family." Says one Union Dime executive: "I've never gone to any convention or dinner where the greeting wasn't 'How's Jack Lewis?' "

Master of Ceremonies. In recent months, the answer was "not too well." For four months last fall, Lewis was sick abed after a heart attack. He recovered and was working again, though on reduced schedule. His executives tried to talk him out of acting as master of ceremonies at the banquet last week, but Lewis would hear none of it. Sitting in the center of the dais in the Pierre's cocoa-and-gold grand ballroom, flanked by two old friends, Metropolitan Life Honorary Chairman Frederick H. Ecker, 91, and State Bank Superintendent G. Russell Clark, he ate heartily (soup, sole, roast beef, salad, fruit, three wines), listened to The Star-Spangled Banner, the invocation, a toast to the bank, to which he responded with a short speech. Then he settled back to listen to a group of songs before the main program of speeches.

At 9:45, just as the soprano was finishing Annie Laurie, someone noticed that Lewis was ashen and very still. Colleagues carried him in his chair to an anteroom, and there, not far away from his family on its gayest birthday, he died of a heart attack.

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