Dixie May Award 2014
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Dixie May Award Recipient of The Children’s Cabinet Dixie May Philanthropy Award Keith L. Lee 2014 The Children's Cabinet founder Michael Dermody says Keith Lee is a man of “understated greatness.” He revealed himself the cold January morning after President Obama’s 2009 inauguration. “I’m walking up the street with him,” Dermody explains, “and I say, ‘Keith, when’s the first time you came to Washington?’ And he said, ‘You know when it was? It was in 1964. And the first time I came here, I had dinner at the White House with the President.’” Lee served as Associated Students of the University of Nevada President from 1964 to 1965, creating a student support group for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Reno election rally. The rally came and went, but Lee’s efforts earned him—and two- hundred other university student leaders —a dinner invitation. In their twenty-seven years together at The Cabinet, Lee had never told Dermody. “He said, ‘Well, I never thought about it,’” Dermody explains. “If I even saw the President, you’d be hearing about it already!” Lee’s silence speaks, not only because it’s humble: his worst habit is talking over others when ideas hit him. “I want to blurt it out,” Lee says. “Interrupt people. And I know that because my wife tells me all the time, ‘I’m not through talking.’” Yet when Lee does talk, it’s not about himself: it’s about Nevada’s kids’ needs and how to serve them. The theme permeated his Cabinet The Children’s Cabinet created the Dixie May Philanthropy Award in 2012 to honor Dixie May and others like her who demonstrate a tremendous spirit of community giving to care for children, ensuring their health, well-being, recreation and education.
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Transcript of Dixie May Award 2014
Dixie May AwardRecipient of The Children’s Cabinet Dixie May Philanthropy Award
Keith L. Lee 2014
The Children's Cabinet founder Michael Dermody says Keith Lee is a man of “understated greatness.” He revealed himself the cold January morning after President Obama’s 2009 inauguration.
“I’m walking up the street with him,” Dermody explains, “and I say, ‘Keith, when’s the first time you came to Washington?’ And he said, ‘You know when it was? It was in 1964. And the first time I came here, I had dinner at the White House with the President.’”
Lee served as Associated Students of the University of Nevada President from 1964 to 1965, creating a student support group for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Reno election rally. The rally came and went, but Lee’s efforts earned him—and two-hundred other university student leaders—a dinner invitation. In their twenty-seven years together at The Cabinet, Lee had never told Dermody.
“He said, ‘Well, I never thought about it,’” Dermody explains. “If I even saw the President, you’d be hearing about it already!”
Lee’s silence speaks, not only because it’s humble: his worst habit is talking over others when ideas hit him.
“I want to blurt it out,” Lee says. “Interrupt people. And I know that because my wife tells me all the time, ‘I’m not through talking.’”
Yet when Lee does talk, it’s not about himself: it’s about Nevada’s kids’ needs and how to serve them. The theme permeated his Cabinet Board of Trustees member and Chair positions and drives his veteran Nevada lobbyist and lawyer work: in 2013, he helped his daughter, Reagan J. Comis, pass Juvenile Justice reform Bill AB 202, increasing the state’s automatic murder charge certification age from 8 to 16. “Helped” being Lee’s choice verb: he always distributes credit where it’s deserved.
“I was just a small cog in all those things,” Lee says. “Whether at the Cabinet level or the Foundation level. No man is an island unto himself: you’re the substance of all those people around you.”
It’s why there’s no “I” in “Lee,” but there is a Keith Lee in The Children's Cabinet legacy: he currently chairs The Children’s Cabinet Foundation, the non-profit’s endowment fund board. Lee lives in Reno with his wife, Gloria, with whom he shares four children and four grandchildren.
The Children’s Cabinet created the Dixie May Philanthropy Award in 2012 to honor Dixie May and others like her who demonstrate a tremendous spirit of community giving to care for children, ensuring their health, well-being, recreation and education.
