'Tim and Tom' helped America confront racism with laughter

Television star Tim Reid comes home to Norfolk today, back to the college campus, now Norfolk State University, that helped "save" him from a life of gang violence.

He will speak today about his famous life as a producer, actor and director in television and motion pictures and his less-well-known life as one-half of what he believes is the only "black-and-white" comedy team in American show business lore.

Reid and his former co-comedian, Tom Dreesen, will appear at Norfolk State today on behalf of the mesmerizing and compelling new book "Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White." He will be just a few blocks from the Church Street neighborhood where he once lived at his Aunt Belle's whorehouse.

"When I left Norfolk for a good job with DuPont, years ago, only two of my old street gang were still living, and one of them was serving a life sentence," he said. "I got another chance, and I took it. I'm lucky to be alive."

Reid, who spoke in a telephone interview the other day from Los Angeles just as he was preparing to fly back to the East Coast, points out that the book spares nothing about his life. In fact, he's always talked candidly about the early years as well as the years of fame.

He seemed to rise out of nowhere to national fame as the disc jockey Venus Flytrap in the hit TV series "WKRP in Cincinnati" (1978-82). He went on to a long career in TV and film, including producing the critically hailed series "Frank's Place" (1987-88) and now lives in Petersburg, where his production studio is.

Before all that, though, he gave up a lucrative "real life" job at DuPont in Chicago to form a pioneering comedy team called "Tim and Tom."

The book tells how Reid and Dreesen met, dumped boring careers and built up their comedy act. Polished in Chicago, the act played the South as well as the North in the turbulent era of the 1960s, helping America confront racial division - by laughing at it.

"I don't think we could get away now with what we got away with then," Reid said. "We, as a people, don't have the sense of humor now that we had then. We think much too seriously about everything, but that doesn't mean we have passion about anything. There is particularly a lack of passion on college campuses among the young people. We need to learn to laugh again."

After their breakup, Dreesen went on to appear frequently on " The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and to tour as the opening act with Frank Sinatra for the last 14 years of the singer's life. At the same time, Reid went on to TV fame and eventually to produce his own critically acclaimed movies.

"Tom came up with the idea for the book two years ago," Reid said. "I resisted. I didn't know anything about doing a book like this, but I agreed on the condition that it be compelling - just a good story. I didn't want any whining or excuse-making. Racially, the situation was what it was, and I could have used that as an excuse for me being a failure and a lost person. Instead, I didn't make excuses. That's the story. That's the book."

"For the last one-and-a-half years, I examined myself and I learned things. A lot of it was painful. I went back to talk to my first wife and to examine that part of my life. I learned what other people thought of me at different times in my life. I regret some of the things I did to people, but a little selfishness is needed to survive in show business.

"Actually, I think a little selfishness is good. First you have to survive before you can help others. But, above all, I value my relationship with my two children. The best thing to come out of this book is that they came to me after reading it and said, 'Dad, now we understand.' I think it is compelling."

The book chronicles how, at age 8, Reid was sent from Baltimore, where his mother resided with his violent stepfather, for visits with his Aunt Belle, who ran what he called the largest whorehouse in Norfolk, right across the street from a whites-only YMCA.

"I was a bastard child," Reid says in the book. "Many war babies are, you know. Daddy's off fighting, and Mama's working at the factory."

His father, William Lee Reid, a brakeman on a coal car for the Norfolk & Western Rail way, acknowledged him later and brought him to stay in Norfolk. He was raised, though, by his grandmother who ran a boarding house at 719 Chapel St., where, on late-night TV, he watched Randolph Scott and Joel McRae Westerns. By the time he was 12, Reid was running with the Corner Boys, a Norfolk street gang whose major activity was rolling sailors as they stumbled out of the bars in the black part of town.

He laughed at our confusion about his large family.

"Yes, I had an extended family but, through it all, there was never a time when I felt unloved. I knew I was loved."

Reid's father built the Combo Terrace, a nightclub in Chesapeake where performers such asRuth Brown and Gary U.S. Bonds were hired, but it was closed down after a minor was planted in the bar and, according to Reid, "remains to this day one of the largest raids in the history of the state of Virginia." A total of 128 people were arrested.

Young Reid got a job as a waiter at Steinhilber's restaurant in Virginia Beach and got admitted to the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College (now Norfolk State University).

He married Rita Ann Sykes of Berkley early on, hung out at the Goody Goody Barbershop on Church Street, attended the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963, and saw Martin Luther King Jr. in person.

He said he was the first graduate of an all-black college to be hired in marketing at DuPont. In the book, he explained, "One day I was living in the projects in Norfolk, and the next day I was a businessman in a three-piece suit, smoking a pipe, and driving a Plymouth Fury with blackwall tires." He became bored with that life, though, and gave it up to try show business with Dreesen.

Reid met and married Daphne Maxwell Reid when she was in the cast of "Frank's Place." He founded the New Millennium Studios in Petersburg, one of the few independent production studios in the country. He is the founder of the Virginia Scholarship and Youth Development Foundation and hosts the Tim Reid Celebrity Weekend each spring in Hampton Roads.

Reid said the book debuted in the Top 10 listings of Amazon.com best-sellers. Reid and Dreesen will speak at 12:30 p.m. today at the L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center.

"It's a story of a changing time and of two changing people," Reid said. "It questions how much passion you need to change yourself. My generation failed, in a way, because we got lost in the drug revolution and lost our focus. Now it's a new generation's chance."

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com