Uncle Dickie’s Bad Habits Catch Up With Him--at 105

If the body is a temple, Richard Lewis filled his daily with fat-laden, sugar-sweetened sin.

The New York man’s diet, relatives say, read like a list of substances to avoid: fatback, fried eggs, sacks of sugar and salt, all washed down with a pint of Thunderbird wine a day.

When Lewis passed away last month at the ripe age of 105, it was the end of a life that laughed in the face of cholesterol-conscious cardiologists and teetotalers.

“He smoked cigars, he drank wine, and, this is no joke, he’d consume 15 pounds of sugar a month. And fatbacks,” his grandniece, Sandra Williams, said. “He never wanted bacon. I’d take him bacon and he’d say: ‘I don’t want that lean meat.’ ”

In his efficiency apartment in Brooklyn, Lewis, a retired junk dealer from Buckingham County, Va., would fry the fatback, take out the meat, break two eggs into the sizzling fat, and when he sat down to eat, “he’d take a piece of bread and dip it into the grease,” Williams said.

That would be breakfast, which he would polish off with coffee thickened with a half-cup of sugar.

Williams, who did Lewis’ grocery shopping once a week, said that each month Lewis also would go through a half-pound of salt, three dozen eggs, countless Titan Philly cigars and as many pints of Thunderbird as his friends and relatives would bring him.

“He’d have enough cigars to last him until the next time I got there, but he wouldn’t have enough wine to last him,” Williams said.

“I’d bring him a pint and say: ‘Now Uncle Dickie, don’t drink this whole thing in one day.’ Then I’d come back a day later and it would be gone, and he’d say: ‘It’s all gone? Is that right? I must have spilled it.’ ”

Three years ago, when Lewis reached 102, Merion Dismel was hired to cook and clean for him three times a week. But for the first few months, he refused to let her in.

“He used to say: ‘What are you coming in here for? I can take care of myself.’ He wouldn’t let me in at first, but I kept coming, and seven months later he fell in love with me,” Dismel said.

Dismel would mix string beans and tomatoes in with his beef and pork and chicken. “It wasn’t too appetizing but that’s the way he wanted it,” Williams said. “He’d say it all got mixed up when you ate it anyway,” added Dismel.

“Uncle Dickie, he did what he wanted to do. He did exactly what he wanted to do,” said Williams, who believes that attitude was the secret to his long life.