Conway
Downing Jr.
The roll of the dice
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64When
Conway “Doc” Downing Jr. ’64 attended the University
of Virginia Law School, he thought he was headed for a career on Wall
Street. But his entrepreneurial flair took over, and he has built
a career providing services for the gaming industry—servicing
lottery machines, lobbying for a gaming trade association and currently
exploring Internet gaming.
“As an African-American businessman trying to get ahead in the
gaming industry, I enjoy the challenge and new opportunities on the
horizon,” he says. “Not long ago gaming was considered ‘mobbed
up,’ and those involved in this industry could not access the
capital markets and the Wall Street investment banking community.”
Even by deciding to come to Andover, Downing showed his willingness
to take on challenges. Growing up in Newport News, Va., he attended
segregated black schools. In a South that was still grappling with
integration, Downing’s father, a dentist and entrepreneur himself,
feared Newport News would follow the lead of Norfolk, where the white
high schools, rather than integrate, were closed.
So Downing considered boarding school in New England. When he showed
up at the SSAT test site—a white elementary school in Virginia—he
was told it would be a violation of state law for him to sit with
white students, and he was asked to move to the basement. His father
angrily protested, and young Conway took the SSAT with the others.
According to Downing, when he arrived on campus in 1960, he was the
only black student in the junior class. “Although I always felt
extremely blessed, privileged and honored to have had the opportunity
to attend Andover, I have always realized many of my childhood friends
and others were not so lucky—whether due to segregation, their
ethnicity, socioeconomic status or simply the roll of the dice,”
he says.
A varsity athlete in both track and basketball, he also was a trumpet
player in the band and jazz club, a disc jockey and a firefighter.
“When a smoldering fire threatened the bird sanctuary, the school
sent teams of three boys and one faculty member with fire extinguishers
on our backs to try to put out the fire,” Downing explains.
His basketball teammates included George W. Bush ’64 and Clay
Johnson III ’64, currently White House director of personnel.
“It was our first winning season, and we beat Exeter twice that
year,” he says.
After graduating from Harvard, Downing enrolled in law school, but
dropped out after two months to start a beer distributorship with
a Harvard classmate. That first entrepreneurial experience was short-lived,
and Downing returned to law school the next fall and subsequently
earned a J.D. degree.
For the past 14 years, he has been involved in providing a variety
of supplies, products and services to the gaming industry. His first
venture was the subcontract for lottery terminal maintenance for the
Virginia state lottery. His company, Ascendx, Inc., eventually diversified
into the casino side of the industry by establishing an office in
Atlantic City, where it has a gaming license and has done business
with every casino.
Describing himself as “a serial entrepreneur in the gaming industry,
trying to attract new opportunities,” Downing currently is senior
adviser for Mattox Woolfolk, LLC, a Washington government relations
firm that has represented the trade association for the interactive
gaming industry. “This industry involves some very contentious,
thorny and complicated issues that raise perplexing questions about
global trade, mores, individual rights, privacy and criminality,”
he says.
It’s currently illegal in the United States to operate a gaming
site on the Internet, but Downing predicts that will change. “I
am concentrating on legal, international jurisdictions that have taken
a more proactive and responsible regulatory approach,” he says.
Interested in inner-city education, Downing is on the board of the
Boys and Girls Clubs of Newport News. He and his wife, Marialice Williams,
live in Washington, D.C.
—Tana
Sherman
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