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Doctor Harris
 "Life
is good. And we're all very fortunate to be here."
These
words are hard to dispute. But they mean a lot more when
they come from a man like Dr. Elmer Harris, 89, who has
made service the hallmark of his life after nearly dying
in the south Pacific during World War II.
Dr.
Harris and his late first wife, Ellen, were dedicated volunteers
for Operation Shoestring from the very beginning; in 1993,
Dr. Harris gave the lead gift that made possible the purchase
and renovation of Shoestring's current headquarters, which
was named in Ellen's honor.
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Elmer
grew up in Alabama, spending most of his formative years in Prattville
(a Montgomery suburb), where Ellen also lived. "She was four years
younger than me," he says now. Elmer did his undergraduate studies
at Wake Forest College, then entered medical school at Tulane,
finishing in 1941. The following year, while doing his internship,
he volunteered to join the war effort.
Dr.
Harris was sent to Hawaii for ten months to train troops for first
aid work in the south Pacific. He was sent in April 1944 to Hollandia,
Dutch New Guinea, to take part in an invasion to capture a Japanese
airport on top of a mountain. What followed was the most harrowing
experience of his young life.
"We
landed on the beach at dawn with little resistance," Dr. Harris
recalls. "We started moving up the mountain with the infantry.
On the second night, an infantry captain came to our temporary
aid station and said that there were about forty casualties from
grenades and small arms fire nearby. He asked if I could come
with him to help.
"While
we were on the way, we were hit by shrapnel from Japanese artillery
fire. I couldn't stand up because my wound was in the knee, and
I had no feeling there. So I cleaned my wound with water from
my canteen, and gave myself some morphine for the pain and to
hopefully prevent shock. I used a tourniquet sporadically to stem
the bleeding and was there overnight." Harris' leg was so mangled
that he woke with his toe in his mouth.
Around
the middle of the next morning another doctor arrived and began
to amputate Harris' leg. But then the doctor decided there was
a small chance he could save the leg, so he called several men
to take Harris by stretcher back to the beach - men whom Harris
barely remembered through the fog of injury and pain. Four men
carried the stretcher, while four more walked alongside with rifles
to protect the group from Japanese ambushes. It took them over
24 hours to get back to the shoreline, through a dangerous thicket
of jungle trails.
Harris
remained on the beach for several days while waiting to be evacuated;
finally, he was transported to a medical unit on a base 300 miles
south in another part of New Guinea. While he was sleeping in
a hospital bed, he heard the music from a USO show that had just
come to the base to perform.
"They
were singing the song, 'Oh! What a beautiful morning… oh, what
a beautiful day," Harris remembers with visible emotion. "I'll
tell you, it was a pretty day. Because I was alive. Not well,
but alive and on my way back."
Thirteen
operations later, Harris' leg was healed enough that he could
walk and practice medicine. He reconnected with Ellen while doing
a fellowship at Tulane and at Charity Hospital in New Orleans;
they married in 1947. He did his residency at Columbia University
Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, and began private practice
at Baptist Hospital in Jackson in 1950, where he started the large
radiological group that continues today.
The
Harrises were neighbors in the late 1960s of Operation Shoestring's
first full-time executive director, Nancy Cooper Gilbert. Ellen
Harris, who had done social work for many years, served on Shoestring's
founding board and worked with Gilbert in the early years there.
She asked her husband and other doctors around Jackson if they
would treat patients from the Bailey Avenue neighborhood who couldn't
afford to pay for it… which, of course, they did, starting a long
tradition of medical assistance provided through Shoestring's
efforts.
Not
long after Ellen passed away from complications of Parkinson's
disease in 1990, Elmer Harris was approached to help secure a
new home building for Operation Shoestring.
"I
had inherited a sum of money from my wife, which happened to be
about what they needed to get the ball rolling towards getting
that building," says Dr. Harris. "I looked at it as her money,
not mine. And I looked at giving that money as a living memorial
to Ellen." The building is now called the Ellen Harris Center.
"Dr.
Harris has always embodied the kind of commitment to community
and service that many of us talk about but seldom actually see,
much less do," says current Shoestring executive director Robert
Langford. "He's also incredibly humble and kind as he goes about
doing good things for people. Of course, if you know him at all,
you know that he'd absolutely hate any public discussion of how
much he's done for folks.
"I
think that what's really remarkable about Dr. Harris is how he
and Ellen left their social comfort zones to do things for children
and families when they could've elected not to do so. Moral leadership
requires a few very rare qualities, including resoluteness, courage
and humility-all of which I see in Dr. Harris."
Dr.
Harris rotated off Shoestring's board of directors several months
ago after serving for about fifteen years. Shoestring held a reception
in his honor on March 30th that was attended by dozens of friends,
family and parents of Shoestring children. Even though he's no
longer on the Shoestring board, he plans to stay closely connected,
which is something the staff and board of Shoestring are delighted
about.
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As
Shakespeare wrote, what's past is prologue. Dr. Harris still believes
that the lessons he learned in the jungles of New Guinea in 1944
set the tone for his life of service. These lessons did not stop
during the war, however. In 1999, Harris received a postcard from
Racine, Wisconsin.
"Tony
Kapla was the only one of the men who carried me who actually
volunteered for the job," Harris says. "I never knew what happened
to him. I often wondered whether he survived the war, or whether
he was still alive.
"Around
Christmas of 1999, I received this postcard that said, 'Lt. Harris,
if you are the doctor who was wounded in Hollandia, I want you
to know that I was one of the guys who carried you out of there,
back to the beach.' He said that his wife of 56 years had just
died and he was very depressed, and his son had suggested that
he try to contact some of his old Army buddies. And he said, 'So
if this is you, please call me, for I am very lonesome.'"
"I
called him right away and we talked for two hours. He invited
me to visit him up at his son's lakeside cabin in Wisconsin, which
I did the following summer. Later, he came down here to visit
me. We still talk by phone at least twice a month, and I consider
him one of my finest friends."
Tony
Kapla gives credit to God for saving both men from the ravages
of war, and Dr. Elmer Harris agrees.
"There's
a lot of things that, scientifically, we don't know," he says.
The tears begin to well up, then recede. "But we believe."
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