Among Other Things: "Valuable scholarships"

Each year several valuable scholarships are presented to deserving western Montana high school graduates by the late George and Faye Harris. In the early 1960s I reported on a talk that George Harris gave to the Polson Rotary Club.          

The talk reflected this unusual man’s sense of humor and outlook on life from a tender age until well through his retirement years. After 12 years in Hardin, he worked for the Federal Land Bank for a couple of years and during that period, the Harrises purchased their Finley Point property.

George served as superintendent of the Thompson Falls school system in 1935. Four years later he suffered his first coronary attack, a condition which ultimately caused him to retire. They moved to Polson to recuperate in 1939. By 1953, his health was stable enough that he and Faye became world travelers. In the next 12 years they visited nearly 100 countries and George took more that 12,000 photographic slides and developed numerous travelogues.

When George turned 65, his wife presented him with a complete set of painting materials. “My first attempts were complete blanks,” he recalled. “The results were not surprising. They were no better than a first attempt at playing the piano or the violin without instruction. So, rather than disappoint my wife who evidently wanted her husband to become a painter, I signed up to get instruction.

“My first two teachers just didn’t teach, and their criticisms left me cold. Then I signed up with Bill Schimmell, a true artist, and one of the very best teachers I have ever had. His very first statement to the class was, ‘You have to know what you are doing before you can paint a picture. You must know your values thoroughly. The hues and colors you can learn easily – you can tell when the colors are dull or bright, warm or cool. But values you have to learn, and unless they are correct your picture will fall apart.’ That sounded like teaching to me.”

Before he met Schimmell, however, he took a course of eight lessons at the Desert School of Art under Lew Davis. For one lesson there was a model – an old-fashioned walnut stand that he found difficult to paint.

After a couple hours, George asked the instructor, “How am I doing?”

The artist looked for a full half-minute and then asked him, “You say you were a school teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Ever have music in your school?”

“Yes.”

“Violin?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you picture looks just like a first lesson on a violin sounds.”

Harris said, “I was on the verge of telling him to go to thunder and walking out, but before I spoke, something told me to stay and think it over. I did. Then I tried my level best to get one little compliment from that man, and do you think he would give it? No. Not once in those eight weeks did he take my brush and show me what I was doing wrong.”

One day, to quiet a member of the class, the instructor took her brush and practically painted her picture, then he handed the brush back to her with the remark to take the picture home, sign her name to it, and show her friends how well she was doing.

“I understand that is just what she did, but she never came back to class,” he said.

Harris felt that one does not “paint” a picture. Rather, “You paint yourself. Not your profile or facial features. You cannot paint nature, but you must interpret nature. You must get into the mood for what you want to do.” George Harris got into the mood all right. He and Faye traveled worldwide and his art work recorded highlights of their travels.

George and Fay Harris had no children of their own, but through memorial scholarships they are helping Flathead and Mission Valley high school students attain a higher education.

* * *

A footnote to the story: A Pennsylvania native, George had an unusual hobby. As a boy he would accompany his father, a rural architect, to various barn raisings. Usually the boy would watch the men at work, but once he wandered into an old country cemetery nearby where he met an old man who led George through a maze of grave markers.

“He knew the history of every person buried there. Although I was old enough to read, he would read aloud the inscriptions on the tombstones,” George said. From that experience George became fascinated with what was said about people buried in old cemeteries. In later years he made it a point to visit the last resting places of pioneer men and women.

Among the epitaphs he noted were:

•”Some have children,

Some have none

Here lies the mother

Of twenty-one.”

•”Under the sod and under the leaves

Lies the dead body of Solomon Pease.

He is not here, only his pod.

He shelled out his soul and went up to God.”

•”Beneath this sod a lump of clay

Lies Arabella Young,

Who on the twenty-fourth of May

Began to hold her tongue.”

In Philadelphia George learned that Benjamin Franklin had written his own epitaph:

•”The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer,

Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents torn out and stript of its lettering and gilding,

Lies here, food for worms.

But the work will not be lost,

For it will, as he believed, appear once more,

In a new and elegant edition,

Revised and corrected by the Author.”