Along Came The Fixer

By Harvey Lyons

As a minority just starting out in corporate America, Harvey Lyons had to work hard to overcome the challenges of his job while finding that elusive work-life balance. In Here Comes the Fixer, he relates his personal experiences and explores how he was able to find the positives in negative situations while rising to meet the challenges of a demanding life both at home and at work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098301149

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PART I: PHASE I

1

MY FATHER’S INFLUENCE

Three in One

I begin my story with a story about my grandfather, one told to me by my father.

He told me the story of a white man’s cruelty toward the family dog. My father was a little boy in Alabama. My grandfather, grandmother, cousins… everybody was a sharecropper. They sharecropped with this particular white man who lived on top of the hill. Everyone would walk together to the fields and leave their lunches around a certain tree. They had this dog named Boy. They would take Boy with them, and the dog would watch their lunches. My grandfather would then walk to the railroad, where he worked.

This particular day, the white man came down to the tree, and I guess Boy barked at him. He killed Boy. So when my grandmother and all other family members who worked the field came in for lunch, they found Boy dead. They found out what happened, and they all left the field.

Later on that day, my grandfather walked back to the field from the railroad. He usually picked everybody up from the field, and then they would all go home together. But no one was there. So he came on home. When he got home, my grandmother told him, Mr. So-and-So killed the dog, and so we left.

My grandfather didn’t come in the house. He turned around, and my father, a little boy, watched his father walk back up the hill. He stood at the bottom of the steps of the house, and he called the white man out. When he came out on the porch, he said, Don’t you ever come out to the field. As long as you live, and as long as you shit between two legs, don’t you ever come out to the field. When my grandfather said those things to that white man, he was taking a major risk. A man could be lynched back in that day, so my father, watching this, wondered what was going to happen to his father. The white man said to my grandfather: B. Lyons, you right. And I’m sorry. My grandfather then turned around and walked back to the house. He told my father, Son, that’s proof, if you stand for something, people will respect you. He used that example to illustrate that point. He said to me: "You need to always be respectful. You need to always extend an olive branch, and you need to always understand that people may not like you, but you want respect versus like. So whatever you do, you do it to maintain respect."

My grandfather’s story stayed with my father. My father passed his father’s story down to me, and his story stayed with me. It helped me through a lot of different things I went through as I grew up. My grandfather, largely on his own terms, reset the button for race relations, standing up for what he believed in during a time when it was dangerous to do so—when it could have cost him his life. That largely determined my decisions later on, and over the course of my life, whether it was business or personal, it allowed me to press the reset button, causing me to make major changes and bring about necessary fixes in and throughout my life.

My father demonstrated that same air of respect throughout his life. I noted it as I observed his work with the air force, and in his life as a pastor. He stayed in the air force for many years. His job was to refuel the planes and work with the fuel lines. At one point, he was an entrepreneur. He demonstrated this level of respect when the air force wanted him to reside as chaplain, but he didn’t want to be told what to preach, so he retired as a master sergeant and went on to preside over his own church, House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church in Fairbanks, Alaska. He was eventually offered an opportunity to preside over a larger church in Anchorage called New Hope Baptist Church.

My father died at the age of 59. He had a massive heart attack. I was in a meeting in

Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A coworker in the office tapped me on the