Ed Lewi Passes Away

Ed Lewi, the clever public relations maestr who was instrumental in the return to prominence of the Saratoga Race Course, died on Aug. 29–Travers Day–at Saratoga Hospital.

A moment of silence was held at the upstate New York track prior to the start of Saturday's program.

Lewi, 81, was born New Year's Eve in nearby Schenectady, N.Y. and for a time was a sports writer when he was in high school. He found his way into marketing and promotions at the Albany Times Union newspaper, where he spent 18 years, and worked part-time in his own business, which became Ed Lewi Associates.

An imaginative, enthusiastic man with a great sense of humor, a ready smile, countless stories and remarkable contacts, Lewi was known for staging wacky, attention-getting events. Lewi hatched the ideas and his wife and business partner, Maureen, handled the details.

The Lewis were close friends with Marylou Whitney, the socialite, philanthropist and horse owner who has been an important figure in Saratoga Springs for nearly 60 years.

“He helped put Saratoga on the map,” Whitney said. “Saratoga is the place it is today because of Ed Lewi.”

Whitney and Lewi are credited with coming up with the idea of calling Saratoga “the August place to be.”

Times Union writer Paul Grondahl co-authored Lewi's 2014 memoir “A Wild Ride: Bears, Babes and Marketing to the Max.” In the paper's news story about Lewi's death, Grondahl wrote that Lewi “was a practical joker known to promote events with outsized props, including dancing bears, voluptuous women in bikinis and what he claimed was the world's largest top hat. He referred to himself as 'a ringmaster to the media circus.'”

Through the decades, Lewi's firm grew into a regional powerhouse, whose major clients included the New York Racing Association, the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the Great Escape amusement park in Lake George and Price Chopper Supermarkets. Lewi was the media director at the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid and he spent a lot of time that February explaining how the organizing committee was dealing with transportation issues.

Lewi's firm, now owned by longtime employee Mark Bardack, has handled marketing and promotions duties at Saratoga Race Course since the 1970s. When Ed Lewi Associates was hired by NYRA, Saratoga was starting to recover from two tough decades following the closing of the last of the illegal casinos. The city had a worn look and the summer race meeting was nowhere near as popular as it is today. Lewi helped develop a number of innovative promotions which continue today, including the annual hat contest, ice cream eating contest and a number of festivals and other events and activities that shined a spotlight on the Spa.