As a distinguished PR executive, Butch Meily has spent an impressive career telling other people’s stories. With From Manila to Wall Street, he tells his own. While his rise from modest beginnings in the Philippines is itself an inspiring story of self-determination, his is a shared memoir and work of biography that focuses on the years from 1987 to 1993, when his life was bound up with that of Reginald Lewis, a pioneering African American entrepreneur whose legendary career was defined by his billion-dollar acquisition of the food giant Beatrice International. 

When Lewis “achieved the biggest business successes of his career,” Meily writes: 

I was there. I joined him during those six intoxicating years in many of the events before and after the acquisition of Beatrice International…and in much else besides. I was in corporate boardrooms, private homes, and luxury resorts in New York, Paris, the Hamptons, Capd’Antibes in the south of France, and St. Moritz. I flew the supersonic, ultrachic Concorde and Beatrice’s private plane. And the entire experience was one of the great adventures of my life.

Meily’s separation from his wife after 29 years of marriage gave him the impetus to write From Manila to Wall Street. “I found that I had more time to write,” he says.“The emotions at the end of the relationship spurred me to do what I’d been meaning to do for a long time—write a history of my time with Reginald Lewis, while reflecting on the immigrant experience in ’80s and ’90s New York City.” 

Meily was introduced to Lewis in 1987, when he was 32 and had landed a job with global public relations firm Burson Marsteller. Lewis’ wife had gotten Meily’s name from a Wall Street Journal reporter and called him.“My husband has a PR problem,” she said. “Don’t worry. He’ll be a big client someday.” Later, the phone rang again: “I’m Reginald Lewis. Call me Reg.” And that, Meily says, “is how I came into contact with the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.” 

Lewis died in 1993 at the age of 50. “We accomplished great things together,” Meily says. “Reg was a larger-than-life character whom I believed I had to capture for posterity, since we’d been so close.” 

Meily came to the United States to study at the University of Florida. Achieving the American dream, he says, “wasn’t necessarily my goal initially. I wanted to excel and earn a good living. I never expected that I would reach the heights in the corporate world that I did. It happened quickly. You have to be ready when your big break happens.” 

The drive to succeed was instilled in Meily by his parents and the American Jesuits who ran the Ateneo de Manila, the strict Catholic university he attended growing up in the Philippine capital. “America,” he says, “changed me and opened up my horizons. I am a different, more confident person because of the United States, and for that, I’ll be forever grateful.” 

But it was Lewis who had the most profound impact on him. “He had a presence that made you instantly take notice of him [and]was impossible to ignore. As I say in the book, he was like the sun around whom we minor planets revolved. He was a great leader, too, like the quarterback who drew up the plan and demanded that we follow him.” 

What impressed Meily most, he says, was that “he wasn’t intimidated by anyone. He never let anything or anybody stop him. In speeches, he stressed the importance of determination and hard work. He often said, ‘Keep going, no matter what.’” 

In From Manila to Wall Street, Meily writes that Lewis felt the weight of representing Black excellence. As a Filipino immigrant trying to succeed in corporate America, Meily felt similarly. “Not to the extent that he did,” he says, “but I felt it was important that I do well for Filipinos in general to show what we were capable of.” 

Both men faced systemic racism and other obstacles. “His path as a Black man was much more difficult than mine,” Meily says. “Working with him gave me a fresh understanding of what it meant to be Black in America. In my own case, I brushed the negative experiences aside. They never tarnished my faith in the essential goodness of America and Americans. My faith in God and myself helped as well.” 

Today, Meily admits thathe’s discouraged by the government’smore restrictive immigration policies and the harsh rhetoric aimed at immigrants; he believes that bothelements diminish their contributions.“I believe immigration has been a boon for America and has powered its growth,” he says. “When I look at Canada and the United States over the years, America’s growth has been striking by comparison. The main reason, as I see it, is the openness in the past of the U.S. to immigrants from around the world, whose talents and hard work helped make this a great country. I only hope that the spirit of the Statue of Liberty—the America that I have grown to love and admire—is still there and will return someday. I agree that we need secure borders and common-sense enforcement of immigration laws, but we don’t need the hostility.” 

He also bemoans the loss of the type of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs that benefited him on his immigrant journey. “DEI was something we used to take for granted,” he says.“I believe they helped minorities, and I still think they’reimportant values to enable true progress for everyone. In the end, however, merit should be the determining factor in everything.” 

Lewis’ influence continues to be enormously important to Meily, but he’salso learned a great deal from other CEOs and leaders he’s worked with. “I can’t help but look back with wonder at what we achieved in a very short time—and what more we could have accomplished if his life hadn’t been cut short.” 

Meily currently lives in Manila,where he runs the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation (PDRF), a private-sector organization focused on disaster management. He also runs two startup enablers, IdeaSpaceVentures and QBO Innovation, public-private partnershipsthat mentor startups. 

His primary advice to those who seek it is that there’s no limit to what people can achieve if they’redetermined and willing to work hard. “Those values will carry you far,” he says.“You have to believe in yourself if you want your dreams to come true.Faith in God is something that will sustain you during the dark days.” 

Kirkus Reviews praises Meily’s “engaging style” and notes that “the book provides a rare glimpse into the lives of racial minorities in a white-dominated corporate space.” 

Meily hopes that the story about his pivotal relationship with Lewis conveys what he calls the “enormous possibility of life.” He emphasizes,“You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. The American dream is alive and kicking to this day for everyone who’s willing to push for it.” 

He also has advice for people who want to write their own life stories. “Do it,” he says, “if only so your children and their children will understand who you are and what your life was like. Whatever happens, you won’t regret writing your story.” 

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who’s beenpublished in the Washington Post, Town & Country magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and on vanityfair.com.