Lem Billings - Early Years

Early Years

Billings was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 15, 1916, the third child of Frederic Tremaine Billings (1873-1933) and Romaine LeMoyne (1882-1970). His father was a prominent physician and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. His mother was a Mayflower descendant and had ancestors who were prominent abolitionists linked to the underground railroad and negro education. The Billings family was Episcopalian and Republican.

Billings, a 16-year-old third-year student, and Kennedy, a 15-year old second-year student, met at Choate, an elite preparatory school, in the fall of 1933. Billings as a teenager was 6' 2", weighed 175 pounds, and was the strongest member of the Choate crew team. They became fast friends, drawn to each other by their mutual distaste for their school. From Billings' first visit with the Kennedy family for Christmas in Palm Beach in 1933, he joined them for holidays, participated in family events, and was treated like a member of the family. The Depression had hurt the Billings family financially, and Lem Billings was at Choate on scholarship. Billings repeated his senior year so that he and Kennedy could graduate from Choate together in 1935. They spent a semester together at Princeton University until Kennedy withdrew for medical reasons. While attending college, they frequently spent weekends together in New York City.

Billings and Kennedy took a summer trip through Europe in the summer of 1937. Between Munich and Nuremberg, they bought a dachshund they named Offie, after State Department official Carmel Offie who helped host them in Paris, but had to give him up because of Kennedy's allergies.

In 1939, Billings graduated from Princeton where he majored in art and architecture and wrote his senior thesis on Tintoretto.

In 1941, Billings failed medical tests required by the military. In 1942, supported by a recommendation from Joseph Kennedy, Sr., his friend's father, who called him "my second son," he won admission to the American Ambulance Field Service, where his poor eyesight was not a disqualification. He saw action in North Africa in 1942-43. In 1944 he received a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve and served in the South Pacific until being discharged in 1946.

After working on Kennedy's successful campaign for Congress in 1946, Billings toured 7 Latin American countries with Robert F. Kennedy.

From 1946 to 1948, Billings attended Harvard Business School and earned an MBA. He later had several jobs, including selling Coca-Cola dispensers to drugstores and working at a General Shoe store. As Vice President at the Emerson Drug Company in Baltimore, he was responsible for inventing the 1950s fad drink Fizzies by adding a fruit flavor to disguise the sodium citrate taste. In 1958, he moved to the Manhattan advertising firm Lennen & Newell as an advertising executive.

On September 12, 1953, Billings was an usher at the wedding of Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. In 1956 he was an usher at the wedding of Kennedy's sister Jean.

In 1960, on leave from his job, he worked on Kennedy's presidential campaign. He managed the campaign in the Third Congressional District in the Wisconsin primary and then served as general troubleshooter and coordinator of television in the West Virginia primary.