Brookville shows spirit honoring Larry Lewis

Larry Lewis is no stranger to Brookville’s Friday night lights. His Web site, http://www.bhsbees.com has helped illuminate the trials and triumphs of Brookville High School for more than 13 years. 

Yet for all his contributions, Lewis has always been a background figure. It took Lewis’ current battle with cancer to spur school staff to organize last month’s “Larry Lewis night” at a Brookville home football game.

Pulled out onto the field for a tribute, Lewis stood for the first time, at the very the center of the Brookville glow. “It wasn’t even one percent of what the community really feels toward him,” former Brookville athletic director John Vasvary said of the recognition. “It’s an emotional thing to know that he is suffering.”

Once just an ordinary high school parent, Lewis has helped grow and nurture the broader Brookville High school community, including, but not limited to Brookville athletics. More than 5,000 visitors open bhsbees.com each day. The site is ad-free and Lewis has always done the work and paid for the site himself.

“I’m okay to let him do it, because I saw how much he enjoyed it,” said his wife, Susan Lewis, who likes to sit near him in the living room while he is working on the computer.

Lewis attended Brookville High School as a teenager in the late ’60s, in addition to all three of his brothers and his wife. When his daughter, Jennifer, entered high school she became a xylophone player for the school band and the Lewis became a devoted band parent.

“The football team looked like it would go to state and the band was racking up trophies, filling the case, but there wasn’t much on TV, there wasn’t much in the news.” Lewis said. “That’s when I thought, ‘Hey, I could do something.’”

Lewis began the site in 1996. At first it focused on info about the band and sports teams, but as word spread about the site, more and more people started e-mailing him information, from school administrators to teachers, students and community members.

Vasvary remembers seeing the difference the site made in terms of getting out the word about weather cancellations and postponements for football games.

“The school went from getting God knows how many phone calls to — I don’t want to say nothing, but fairly close to that,” Vasvary said. “It’s phenomenal what this man could do.”

Carol Stone, who teaches horticulture at the school, formed a link with Lewis, who made sure that her news about the Future Farmers of America and Bible clubs made it to the Web.

“He poured time into it,” said Stone. “He was really the plug between the school and the community.” 

Then, in May of last year, Lewis was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s b-Cell lymphoma. Doctors told him it was the most aggressive, least treatable form of the disease, and that even if they put him in remission, the cancer likely would come back.

Over the course of the summer, Lewis went through treatment, meanwhile corresponding with Karen Canfield, who was developing an official Campbell County Schools site for Brookville High School, as part of a county-wide initiative. The site will contain some of the things previously only on bhsbees.com, but other topics, like alumni news and memories of former Bees who have died, will remain as specialties of Lewis’ site.

Now, even though Lewis is relieved to hand over much of the responsibility for Brookville news to Canfield, he still takes his laptop with him to his current treatments at the hospital, in order to occasionally update the Web site.

“When you get 5,000 hits a day, its kind of hard to hit the switch and tell those 5,000 people they can’t see this stuff anymore,” Lewis said.

Yet for all those people who visited and benefited from the site, many, like Canfield, had never glimpsed more than a picture of Lewis until the football game. That’s when the man behind the Web site came out from the bleachers, to stand in front of the community he had helped to build.

“When I saw him I was like,  ‘Wow, there he is!’” Canfield said. “It was a very special night.”