It's True about Harry Harris

A friend informed me yesterday that there was a rumor going around that Harry Harris had left this life, and the friend asked me what I knew.   I no longer hang anywhere near the grapevine, but my wife soon found out that it was true.

In recent times I had seen hardly anything of Harry Harris, but I feel like we were still very good friends.   He was that kind of a guy.

My son, Coltrane, ran cross-country track in high school with two of his sons, Jeff and Daniel, and between the older son, Jeff, and -- after Jeff graduated --  my son, the cross-country coach was assured that, no matter what happened, he was always going to be able to claim that coveted No. 1 spot among the finishers of each and every race, for four glorious years straight.   And this was also striking, because it was during the era when long-distance running was looked upon as being a purely "white" domain.  My wife and I followed those races around Virginia, as did several other parents, and during that time we saw a lot of Harry Harris.

Though we will not be there, for a variety of reasons, Harry Harris figures to have an extremely well-attended funeral.   For a Rainbow (read "black") man, he was highly respected, among the Euro ("white") population as well as among the Rainbow.   He was a tall, quietly spoken, dignified, affable man, and you could tell just by looking at him and noting especially his bearing that he had a great sense of proportion in all things.   

He was by far the most respected Rainbow in this county, and as such he was the first and so far the only Rainbow member of the county Board of Supervisors,  in a county where nearly a third of the population is "black."   Or at least 30 percent was what I read when we moved here 30 years ago, though now I see that Wikipedia has summarily moved half of us out and gives that number as being only 14.6 %, while suggesting that enough Euro people (from New Jersey of course)  have moved in to up their proportion to a whopping 82%.   I am skeptical, but anyway, hopefully another such aspirant won't have to be the equal of Harry Harris.  That is setting the bar a little too high to ask any man to jump.

Till he arrived the county government had been run by a board of four supervisors, and though, if you count women, Euro men are a definite  minority in the county,  none but them had ever been allowed to hold those exalted posts, even though they are not even the most benign of minorities.  No group composed of males could ever be.   But everything is still relative, and I must quickly add that, for a southern rural county, here they are exceptionally benign regardless.

  At first, however, even Harry Harris couldn't be elected to that prestigious post.  He couldn't have gotten enough Euro votes in his quadrant of the county, or in any of the other quadrants, even the one where there were more "hippies," i.e. transplants from somewhere else.  But as Harry Harris had a great reputation, with a fine family, and had obviously managed his affairs so that he was materially better off than the general run of the population of any color though he was not a doctor or a lawyer, and as the 21st century was almost here, and as that Rainbow 30 or 15  percent was still present in the population and waiting, quietly waiting, but still definitely waiting and looking, the powers-that-be contrived to  create a fifth seat at large on the board, with equal powers..   And when in that post Harry Harris showed that a Rainbow man could have as much restraint and good sense as any Euro (read "white") man, he was eventually  elected in his own right, and he even became the chairman of the board, presiding over decisions that admittedly would be seen as far less than earth-shaking in many other parts of this great, trembling country of ours but are of pressing  inportance here.    And meanwhile a woman (whom we also happened to know personally for a long time -- it is a small county) has also been elected to the Board.

The word is that after he left the Board of Supervisors, and with all his children grown and gone, Harry Harris' main mission in life was looking after his mother.  She passed a short while ago, but cancer, too, had been waiting, and now it has had its say. 

The departure of Harry Harris leaves an enormous  hole in the spirit of this county that will take a good little while to close, and those who are in a condition to be able to see such things -- such as the man who with such extreme caution asked me if I had heard the rumor  --  know that all too well .