Early Life, Education, and Career
Lewis was born in McKell near South Shore in Greenup County in far northeastern Kentucky. He graduated from McKell High School in 1964. He attended Morehead State University in Morehead in Rowan County from 1964 to 1967 and graduated from the University of Kentucky at Lexington in 1969 with a bachelor of arts degree in history and political science. Lewis returned to Morehead in 1980 to earn a master's degree in professional education in 1981.
At twenty-one, Lewis worked in the 1967 gubernatorial campaign of Louie B. Nunn of Glasgow. Nunn's victory got Lewis a state job for a time and encouragement to run in 1971 for the Kentucky House of Representatives in his native Greenup County. Though he lost the legislative race in a Democratic year in Kentucky, Lewis maintained an interest in GOP politics. In 1972, Lewis served briefly in the U.S. Navy, attending the Navy Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida; a kidney ailment resulted in a quick medical discharge .
Lewis worked in sales for several companies, including Ashland Oil, before teaching for five years at Watterson College in Louisville, Kentucky, having begun in 1980. (The school closed in the 1990s.) He also was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1980, having served as pastor for the historic White Mills Baptist Church, after attending the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. In 1985 Lewis opened a religious bookstore, Alpha and Omega Bookstore, in Elizabethtown. In the early 1980s, he was a pastor at Friendship Baptist Church, located outside Hodgenville.
Lewis has been married to Kayi Gambill Lewis since 1966. They live in Cecilia, near Elizabethtown, and have two children.
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