When people talk about Jimmy Lew, one of the original owners of Lew’s Market in Logan Heights, one thing keeps coming up.
“(He was) very kind and very giving,” said René Bejarno, one of his former neighbors.
“He was just a real kind person,” said Delia Bejrano, René’s wife.
“Good, kind-hearted people,” José Briceño said.
Lew died on Aug. 15, but residents still fondly remember his generosity and what he did for many families who lived in the working-class neighborhood.
In a neighborhood where there’s a lack of big grocery stores, residents depended on that small market for everyday goods.
His son, James Lew Jr., described his dad as a well-intentioned people-pleaser who often extended credit.
“People saw it as like a community bank, they called it,” James said. “I recall having mental flashes of his little notebooks where he would have running tabs with people, the annotations, what was paid off, what was written off.”
“(He) gave us whatever we needed. Put it on the book,” Briceño said. “My parents came in later and pay them off.”
James Lew’s grandparents opened Lew’s Market in the 1970s at the corner of 33rd Street and Imperial Avenue. At the time, they were the only Chinese family in the neighborhood.
“It was mostly Mexican and a Black neighborhood,” René Bejarano said. He and his wife used to live behind the market.
“We moved there in like 1974,” he said.
Bejarano remembers the family keeping to themselves. They lived upstairs in the apartment above the market.
The news of Jimmy’s death came as a shock to the Bejaranos.
“I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that he passed away because I had heard about Philip,” Delia Bejarano said. “But Jimmy …”
Phillip was Jimmy’s brother. The two ran the store together. Phillip died before Jimmy.
“I used to see (Jimmy) every day and it just seemed like he would live a long, long time,” René Bejarano said. “I just don’t think, you know, I think he was probably 76, 77. He just looked a lot healthier.”
And the one thing René remembers most about Jimmy was that his generosity extended to animals too.
“He would get a big bone with some meat on it and give it to my dog,” Bejarano said. “And my dog would go down the — because we lived right behind Lew’s market in the alley, and he would just go down the alley with his big bone in his mouth, walking slowly and all the dogs that go crazy.”
James Lew says his father was generous, almost to a fault.
“My own cousins tell me about kind of like the private embarrassment that they would have when my aunts would send them to the store with a handwritten note asking for assistance and the things that they need,” James said. “And to him it was no, no big deal.”
One of those cousins is José Briceño. He still lives in the neighborhood.
“Him and Philipe, they both had a little book in their little pocket,” Briceño said. “You know, we’ll walk in there and be like, ‘Oh, we need this, we need that.’ And he’d be like, ‘OK, you got money?’ ‘No, we don’t.’ ‘Well, I’m gonna put it on your dad’s credit; what’s the last name.’”
Briceño said that generosity helped a lot of families in the neighborhood.
“It did help us out sometimes,” he said. “Maybe we didn’t have it at the time, I don’t know, I was too young to even know what I mean. What was money like that? But I just know that (if) we walked in there, they’d help us out. They gave us whatever we needed.”
The Lews sold the market in 2017. But it still bears their name. And the younger generation of the family still lives in the apartment upstairs.
James says the outpouring of support reminds him how much he needs to live up to his father’s name.
“There’s a certain existential pressure that comes with that,” he said. “And then also, you know, having been given his name, being born a junior. So it was very much this expectation that, ‘Oh, one day you were going to be exactly where your father is at.’”
The market still stands.
While Jimmy Lew is gone, the memories live on through the people in the neighborhood who will never forget his charitable heart.
