Alum Lewis Campbell: A Lifetime in the Theatre

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Campbell has spent most of his life in the region — growing up, he says, “all over the Bay Area, Menlo Park, Mill Valley, San Leandro” — graduating from San Jose State College in 1955 and returning there, after a stint in the Army in Germany, to get his teaching credential. And for almost all that time he’s been heavily involved in theater, majoring in it as an undergraduate, directing with the Seventh Army Repertory Company while serving as a radio operator in a field artillery observation battalion. And getting his Master’s in theatre at San Francisco State. His theatre company, Multi Ethnic, or MET for short, grew directly out of his “umpteen years” teaching with the San Francisco Unified School District. For much of that time he ran a district-wide Center for Theater Training, a program that became part of the School of the Arts high school when it was founded, where he was “the actor training teacher until I retired in 1993.”