ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

The Chinese Cajun Cowboy

by David W. Brown

Decades before Harry Lee was sheriff of Jefferson Parish, he was a geology student at Louisiana State University. He and his family had worked tirelessly to get him there — he was the firstborn son of an immigrant from Toishan, in the South China province of Kwangtung — and he didn’t choose his major. Rather, it was chosen for him. Times were different then, and his father wanted him to study geology, so that was that. At a geology field camp, one of Lee’s professors pulled him aside and said, “You are leading this group, but you really shouldn’t be a geologist. This is not where you want to be.” It was true. Harry Lee’s heart belonged to law. Regardless, after graduation, he did a stint in the U.S. Air Force, came home and took jobs in his family’s businesses. “My grandfather came over just over a hundred years ago,” says Cynthia Lee Sheng, the Council At-Large for Jefferson Parish Division B, and Harry Lee’s daughter. “As best as I can tell, it was 1917, and he opened a Chinese laundry, which wasn’t unusual for the time.” She says she thinks of it now as being very entrepreneurial, but back then it was likely out of necessity: “He had eight children to feed, and if you are an immigrant, you have got to make it happen for yourself — sell whatever you can, do whatever you can — to make ends meet.” Her grandfather later opened a barroom, and then a restaurant. In 1959, he opened the House of Lee restaurant on Veterans at Causeway. (At the time, that area was still largely swampland.) Harry Lee helped his father run House of Lee. It was the family business, and that’s simply what you did. “My father grew up with a mind-set where you work hard for your family to make ends meet,” says Councilwoman Lee Sheng. “All of the siblings had to work very hard in whatever business they were in. They lived closely together and they worked as a family. And that was his upbringing.” He was larger than life — the sort of celebrity from a different era of Louisiana politics — and voters and the national press couldn’t get enough of him, this highly interesting Chinese sheriff in the Deep South who wore a cowboy hat and shot nutria with the SWAT team. LAW SCHOOL Harry Lee had to convince his father to allow him to go to law school. The family patriarch was reticent, and only after the future sheriff agreed to continue managing the restaurant while attending classes did his father come around. Had it not been for that impassioned argument (something that would serve the lawyer well), he might have simply managed the restaurant for the rest of his life. But the younger Lee was now standing on his own, and his career was set in motion. He eventually earned his law degree, passed the bar exam and opened a small practice. By 1975, he was the chief attorney of Jefferson Parish, but much bigger things were ahead. In 1979, he threw his hat into the ring — in some ways literally — to be sheriff.

The Lee family, 1979 photo provided by Lee Family

Cynthia was only 12 at the time, and she stayed home from school for what would be a day that changed her family’s life. Her father and his campaign advisors were talking in the family living room, trying to figure out their first campaign commercial. “My dad went into the bedroom,” she says, “and then he busted out — I can still hear the door open — and he had his cowboy hat in his hand, and asked, ‘What if I wear this?’” He put the hat on his head. “I remember as a 12-year-old going, oh no . I was mortified. Please do not wear that.” But that’s who her father was. It was no show, no gimmick. He was a cowboy boot-wearing hunter and fisherman — a Louisiana boy. Deno Seder, his campaign advisor, understood this immediately and wanted to give the cowboy hat a shot. For the commercial, the Lees walked on the levee behind their house and, when it aired, word of this “new sheriff in town” spread like wildfire, changing the course of the campaign. “It hit the public in a strange and beautiful way,” says Cynthia. “Here is this overweight Chinese man who looks completely natural with his cowboy hat on, and his boots, and it came across that this is who he was, and they took to it. It was so authentic, and the public loved it.” The family would later hear from moms who said that, when their kids played in the front yard, with little cowboy hats on their heads and stars pinned to their shirts, they weren’t playing cowboy; they were playing Harry Lee.

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JULY•AUGUST 2019