1. The Children’sCabinetcreated the Dixie May Philanthropy Award in 2012 to honorDixie May and others
like her who demonstratea tremendousspiritof community giving to carefor children,ensuring their
health,well-being,recreation and education.
Dixie May Award
Recipient of The Children’s Cabinet Dixie May Philanthropy Award
Keith L. Lee 2014
The Children's Cabinet founder Michael Dermody says Keith Lee is a man of “understated
greatness.” He revealed himself the cold January morning after President Obama’s 2009
inauguration.
“I’m walking up the street with him,” Dermody explains,
“and I say, ‘Keith, when’s the first time you came to
Washington?’ And he said, ‘You know when it was? It
was in 1964. And the first time I came here, I had dinner
at the White House with the President.’”
Lee served as Associated Students of the University of
Nevada President from 1964 to 1965, creating a student
support group for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Reno election
rally. The rally came and went, but Lee’s efforts earned
him—and two-hundred other university student leaders—a
dinner invitation. In their twenty-seven years together at
The Cabinet, Lee had never told Dermody.
“He said, ‘Well, I never thought about it,’” Dermody
explains. “If I even saw the President, you’d be hearing
about it already!”
Lee’s silence speaks, not only because it’s humble: his
worst habit is talking over others when ideas hit him.
“I want to blurt it out,” Lee says. “Interrupt people. And I know that because my wife tells me all the
time, ‘I’m not through talking.’”
Yet when Lee does talk, it’s not about himself: it’s about Nevada’s kids’ needs and how to serve
them. The theme permeated his Cabinet Board of Trustees member and Chair positions and drives
his veteran Nevada lobbyist and lawyer work: in 2013, he helped his daughter, Reagan J. Comis, pass
Juvenile Justice reform Bill AB 202, increasing the state’s automatic murder charge certification age
from 8 to 16. “Helped” being Lee’s choice verb: he always distributes credit where it’s deserved.
“I was just a small cog in all those things,” Lee says. “Whether at the Cabinet level or the Foundation
level. No man is an island unto himself: you’re the substance of all those people around you.”
It’s why there’s no “I” in “Lee,” but there is a Keith Lee in The Children's Cabinet legacy: he
currently chairs The Children’s Cabinet Foundation, the non-profit’s endowment fund board. Lee
lives in Reno with his wife, Gloria, with whom he shares four children and four grandchildren.