Johnny Lee Inducted in 2004

John Joseph Lee Jr. (1936-2001), in Brooklyn and starred in basketball at Erasmus Hall High School. He chose Yale, he said, because ''I didn't want to be just another college athlete with nowhere to go after graduation."

Lee in the early 1950s was a 3-Time All-City and All-American basketball player for Erasmus Hall High School. Team Captain in both his junior and senior years.  Johnny 'Red' Lee led the Brooklyn Public School Athletic League in scoring and catapulted Erasmus to the Divisional Titles in 1953 and 1954. After receiving scholarship offers from over 65 universities, Lee chose Yale University (1954). As a sophomore, Mr. Lee went on to break all Ivy League scoring records and as a junior, gained national attention when he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated as the "next great Ivy League scholar-athlete."

He went on to lead Yale to their first Ivy League basketball title in ten years, was a member of the All-Ivy team for 3 straight years, and achieved All-American accolades during both his junior and senior seasons. As one of the top collegiate players in 1958, the NCAA elected Lee to their All-American Silver Anniversary Basketball Team in 1983. After graduating in 1958 with a degree in chemical engineering, Lee was drafted by the New York Knicks, and for a brief period of time, balanced an NBA career with his post-graduate studies at Yale.

The rigors of both professions soon proved to be too much and, in 1958, Johnny "Red" Lee retired from his basketball career to begin an ascension into the world of business. After a 5-year stint at W.R. Grace and co-founding a management consulting firm, Lee spent the next 25 years as a senior executive at 4 publicly traded companies.