Early Life, Education, and Career
Lewis was born in McKell near South Shore in Greenup County in far northeastern Kentucky. He graduated from McKell High School in 1964. He attended Morehead State University in Morehead in Rowan County from 1964 to 1967 and graduated from the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1969 with a bachelor of arts degree in history and political science. Lewis returned to Morehead in 1980 to earn a master's degree in professional education in 1981.
At twenty-one, Lewis worked in the 1967 gubernatorial campaign of Louie B. Nunn of Glasgow. Nunn's victory got Lewis a state job for a time and encouragement to run in 1971 for the Kentucky House of Representatives in his native Greenup County. Though he lost the legislative race in a Democratic year in Kentucky, Lewis maintained an interest in GOP politics. In 1972, Lewis served briefly in the U.S. Navy, attending the Navy Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida; a kidney ailment resulted in a quick medical discharge .
Lewis worked in sales for several companies, including Ashland Oil, before teaching for five years at Watterson College in Louisville, Kentucky, having begun in 1980. (The school closed in the 1990s.) He also was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1980, having served as pastor for the historic White Mills Baptist Church, after attending the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. In 1985 Lewis opened a religious bookstore, Alpha and Omega Bookstore, in Elizabethtown. In the early 1980s, he was a pastor at Friendship Baptist Church, located outside Hodgenville.
Lewis has been married to Kayi Gambill Lewis since 1966. They live in Cecilia, near Elizabethtown, and have two children.
Read more about this topic: Ron Lewis
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)