As we contemplated the drama of Damar Hamlin’s arrested heartbeat and subsequent revival last week, I thought of my great uncle Rob Lewin, who died of heart failure on the football field in 1903. A tall, large-limbed country boy, slightly spoiled and confident of his charms, Rob took a circuitous but fateful route to that football field.  

During the long hot summer of 1901, Rob Lewin spent time exercising the charm that bewitched his younger sister Marguerite on his distant cousin Alice, who was visiting the Upper Connecticut River Valley with her family to escape the heat in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where she lived.[1] After Alice missed her monthly period, somehow the mothers got Rob to marry Alice in her parlor in Pawtucket in late autumn.

Strangely, Rob’s father Curt died the day after the small wedding ceremony.  Doctors autopsied Curt Lewin’s body, as reported in a local newspaper:

“[Lewin’s] condition has been something of a mystery to his physicians and he himself left a request that a post mortem examination be had that humanity might possibly be benefited. It was held by Drs. Brewster and Richmond, and the result showed the cause of death to have been enlargement of the heart, a blood clot being the cause of instantaneous death. The heart weighed 48 ounces, being two and one half times the weight of the normal human heart.”

Meanwhile, Alice grew sicker and sicker.  Her lack of menses was attributed to tuberculosis (and Rob presumably cleared).  She died several months later in the same house in Pawtucket where she had married, of kidney failure and lung infection, not t.b., according to the death certificate. 

Chastened by his experience, Rob raced through a few courses at Fairmont College in Wichita, where his aunt was dean of women, and set out to attend medical school.  After his father’s death and expenditure of his inheritance on Alice’s care, money was very short in the Lewin household.  And Rob needed money: in the summer of 1902 he asked Maud Richardson to marry him. She was a former secretary to Winston Churchill the novelist (who lived in Plainfield). Maude was then working as a stenographer near her home in Concord, Massachusetts.

Rob stumbled on a solution to his financial problems during his second year at Baltimore Medical School [Johns Hopkins]. He found out that men who made the varsity football team did not have to pay tuition ($95). Learning of the scholarship, he reported to his mother that he “immediately went out for practice.”

Rob did make the team, and thereby earned the tuition to attend medical school.

On October 1, 1903, Flora Clough wrote to her nephew to praise him: “I am so glad you have left off [smoking]. My dear boy I believe there are good times in the future for you.”  On October 18, Lucy Lewin scolded her son in a letter, “Say, are you aware of the fact that you do not write me as often as you ought?”

Less than a week later, Rob played on the varsity team against Annapolis. When the coach sent him back onto the field at the end of halftime, he said, “Just a minute, please,” and collapsed. He died immediately, from heart failure.  (The death certificate calls it “heart syncope.”)

Lucy learned of her loss by telegraph, according to family legend. We know that Rob’s body was brought to Lucy’s home for the funeral and internment, and that eight delegates attended from Baltimore Medical College.  Far away in Damoh, India, Aunt Kate Clough Rambo filed yet another newspaper clipping in her little red diary:

“The body of Robert Eric Lewin, who died suddenly last week, on the foot-ball field at Annapolis, Md., was brought to his mother’s home here, Thursday night, and funeral services were held Sunday afternoon, Rev. G. C. Trow officiating, assisted by Rev. Mr. Adams of Meriden. The funeral was largely attended, among those present being a delegation of eight, representing the different departments and classes and the football association of the Baltimore medical college, of which the deceased was a second year classman.”

Today, we can celebrate with other Americans that Damar Hamlin received excellent and swift medical care that helped him to survive a horrific medical event.  At the same time we can worry about all the other football injuries to remarkable professional athletes that go unremarked.  And, I think I can honestly report that no Lewin, Quimby, Auerbach, Heath, Hanin, Schmiedel, Ogilvy, Douskey, or other male or female connection of Great Uncle Rob has ever joined a football team since his tragic death. 

---

[1] Alice’s grandmother was “Aunt Sue Gilfillan,” sister of Lucy Lewin’s mother.