ESCONDIDO, CALIF. — Alann Jack Lewis, 95, a playwright, poet, advertising executive and newspaperman, died of heart disease Oct. 26 in Southern California, where he had lived since 1996.
Lewis lived a rags-to-riches- to-rags life. Born in Lithuania, he immigrated with his parents as an infant to New York. Turned out of his home when he was in his teens, he spent a short time as a copy boy at the New York Journal American newspaper but, unable to make ends meet during the Depression, then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps.
A physically slight youth, he told his family he left the CCC because he was often forced into fistfights. He then rode the rails, was arrested in Georgia as a vagrant and spent 10 days on a chain gang. He worked in blizzards as a Nevada mine watchman, picked oranges with Okies and ran errands for a brothel.
He became a cub reporter in Boston and then returned to the road, selling press photo services. Just before World War II, he opened a photography studio in Washington and won a contract with the military to photograph enlistees without charge. He made money by getting the names and addresses of the soldiers’ families and selling them the men’s photos. That business turned him into a millionaire, his daughter said.
Lewis moved to New York in the 1960s to write and produce his first play, “A Corner of the Bed,” which was off-Broadway. After about five years, he moved to Annapolis and founded a weekly newspaper, the Annapolis Post. It folded after a few years, and he had moved to San Diego by the mid-1980s.
In the balmy weather there, Lewis wrote, published and produced six plays. He also penned short stories and children’s stories and held playwriting workshops from his home. He published his first book, a collection of poems, last year.
His wealth was gone, but he managed to scrape together enough cash to live.
