Hal Lewis

Biography

Harold O. “Hal” Lewis (1931-2016) called his father, a professor of history, a “closet” railroad photographer. His father launched Hal into railroad photography in the late 1940s by giving him a camera when he was a high school junior. Lewis was a 1953 aeronautical engineering graduate of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a highly successful engineer for Boeing and Lockheed. He took railroad photographs for more than sixty years.

His biography sounds like that of the fairly common variety of railfan who is a professional engineer and who just happens to come from an academic background. The only wrinkle is that Hal Lewis is Black, a segment of the U.S. population underrepresented not only in academe but also among railfans and railroad photographers.

Lewis’s father, the senior Harold O. Lewis, taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s most distinguished historically Black colleges and universities. His father was recruited by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to work on top-secret German translation projects during World War II—another rare occurrence in the history of America’s Black community. When the younger Lewis asked his father about his World War II work, he was told “I can’t tell you.” When his own children asked him about his under-wraps Lockheed work, Lewis had to tell them, too, “I can’t tell you.”

Lewis came into his own as a railfan and photographer at Purdue. He made friends with New York Central engine crews who saw him taking pictures. “I began to get cab rides and I was soon taught to fire,” which he did rather than attend Purdue’s football and basketball games—although “I did go out for baseball.” He particularly liked photographing Nickel Plate and New York Central trains as they plied the one percent westward grade out of the Wabash River valley near Purdue. Hal’s “work” as a fireman was known to railroad officials, but they looked the other way. Such an arrangement would be unthinkable today.

While employed in Seattle by Boeing from 1953 to 1958, Lewis photographed steam operations over the border in western British Columbia—both the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific.  In 1958 an offer from Lockheed let Lewis and his wife and son escape “the long rainy winters in Seattle” and move to Sunnyvale, California, where they added a daughter to the family.

In southern California, Lewis liked photographing steam on the Southern Pacific, which was quickly phasing it out. But he particularly captured the narrow-gauge, lumber-hauling legend in the Sierra foothills, the West Side Lumber Company. He took railfan trips to South America, especially to Argentina and Brazil. And from time to time he returned to Canada for railfan vacations. After his 1989 retirement, he became very active in railfan organizations, including the Pacific Limited Group and the Central Coast Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society (NRHS). He was a central figure in planning the 1992 national convention for the NRHS.

Lewis had his work published in Classic Trains and Railfan & Railroad magazines. He also pursued his railroad interest in other avenues besides photography, making audio recordings of railroad sounds that he and a colleague sold through L&H Railsonics. He received the Gerald M. Best Senior Achievement Award from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society in 2013.

In 2011, Lewis donated more than two hundred of his black-and-white negatives to the Center, as well as several hundred color slides. Their importance to the history of steam operations in the U.S. and Canada is self-explanatory. Their importance to the social history of the railfan community cannot be overestimated.

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For more, see John Gruber’s profile of Lewis in Railroad Heritage no. 31, pages 14-21.