being truthful, a little unsatisfactory.
For several months, I try in vain to locate relatives of Clare Winger Harris. I finally give up. I send a last, desperate Facebook message to someone named Dan. He writes back and says he is part of the larger Harris family, but doesn’t know anything. I give up again. The following Monday, I get a call. I almost don’t answer until I see the glowing words “California.”
“Hello,” I say.
“Hi.” A pause. “It’s Don Harris. I got your number from my nephew. You wanted to talk about Clare?”
When Don was twelve or thirteen years old, he remembers visiting the Brookmore Apartments, an elegant, four-story brick building in Old Town Pasadena. Don went there to visit his grandmother. When he entered her one-room apartment, he was always struck by one inescapable fact: it was filled to the top with books.
“You could tell she was smart,” Don says.
Donald Lynn Harris visited his grandmother every couple of months. She shared books with him on Tibetan Buddhism and Rosicrucianism. She was analytic, but also philosophical. Don remembers one time she gave him a book by Manley P. Hall, the metaphysical thinker and occultist whom Clare knew. It sparked quite an interest in him. One time, she gave him her own book of stories. He remembers reading part of it.
“Clare was brusque and businesslike,” Don says. “But she was nice to me. She would have been a bad grandma for a young child, but she was a good one for an older person.”
Years later, Don and his family crowded around the computer and started typing the names of relatives into a search engine. They were astounded when Clare’s name filled the results.
“There was nothing about my grandfather Frank,” Don says. “We thought he was more famous than her.”
When I ask why they divorced, there is a pause.
“We have a whole family of eccentrics,” Don says, laughing. They stayed together until their kids were fully grown, but their personalities were just too similar. Grandfather wanted to be chief of the roost. He was a big man—six feet, eight inches tall. His sons saw him as overwhelmingly powerful.
“But he was gentle with me,” Don remembers. “He gave me some Chinese art once.”
Don recalls that Clare didn’t have a lot. Sometimes, when she needed extra money, she would work the switchboard at the Brookmore, plugging wires in and out. She was supposed to inherit a great deal of money from D. C. Stover, but by the time it eventually reached her, the estate had been plundered. Others tried to warn her of this, but she was reluctant to believe it. She was a loner.
“They found her in the hall,” Don says. It was October 26, 1968. She was seventy-seven. “I’m not sure any of us knew what it was. A heart attack? She didn’t waste away. She was very healthy.”
All three of her sons came to California for the funeral. There was the elder Don, who flew missions in World War II. There were rumors he had flown over Dresden. Someone whispered that during one flight, one of his copilots got hit and had his head severed. Don flew back with it in the plane with him.
“He came back darker,” says Don, who was named after him.
Lynn was a Marine who came back with a little bag of gold teeth. He showed them to Don. Lynn was very close to Clare. But he was always getting into trouble, says Don. He lived in the Yucatan and she had to bail him out of various problems. When Clare died, Lynn was accused by the family of looting her apartment.
“He took the TV,” Don says. “I have some stuff of hers, mostly books. She didn’t have much. She was relatively reclusive.”
When I ask if the family was influenced by her work, or at least the spirit of it, Don says that his dad was the biggest fan. Clyde Harris was a physics nerd who worked on heat-seeking missile systems. Don, a liberal, would often argue with his dad and try to guess at his various projects, which were classified. His dad would often cave, and they would argue about the ethics of it all.
“It was all in good fun,” says Don.
After his dad died, Don traveled to Nepal with his wife. They went to Lumbini, the windswept birthplace of the Buddha. Don attributes his interest in Buddhism to his grandmother Clare, who he said was one of the first in southern California to embrace it.
Don takes a breath that I can hear over the phone. He explains to me that he saw something very strange on that trip. Something weird.
“There was a dog,” he says. “Only I looked into his face and I saw my dad. I can’t explain it. But I saw it. My dad told me something then, just by looking at me. I had a big change after that.”
Donald Lynn Harris is the grandson of Clare Winger Harris and lives in a house in the California woods. When he was younger, he was into drag racing. He joined the Back to the Land movement, bought land, and set up probably the first solar panels in the county. He started small-scale hydro systems to encourage renewable energy resources. He set up similar systems in Nicaragua, where he met Benjamin Linder, the American engineer who was murdered by the Contras in 1987. Infuriated, Don became vocal and political, drawing the attention of the government. Years later, he would end up, for a moment, on a long list of suspects in the Unabomber case. Don laughs when he tells me this. He is still very political but gives me the advice to choose my battles. But, he says, thinking aloud “the older I get, my belief system means more to me than my own aging body.”
Don must radiate out from his remote home to get a good wireless signal. I picture him under an open sky, his voice beaming through the ether like the radio waves in his grandmother’s stories. He wouldn’t have it any other way, living along the outer rim of society, even though it’s getting a little harder to chop his own wood.
Don has no children. His wife of forty-two years recently passed away. When I offer my condolences, he tells me it’s okay.
“We believe in other dimensions,” he says, using the present tense. “So, keep an open mind,” he tells me, cheerily and full of wonder.
“We believe in that stuff.”
Brad Ricca
September 2018
The Artificial Man and Other Stories
The Artificial Man
I.
In the annals of surgery no case has ever left quite as horrible an impression upon the public as did that of George Gregory, a student of Austin College. Young Gregory was equally proficient in scholastic and athletic work, having been for two years captain of the football team, and for one year a marked success in intercollegiate debates. No student of the senior class of Austin or Decker will ever forget his masterful arguments in the question:—“Resolved that bodily perfection is a result of right thinking.” Gregory gave every promise of being one of the masterful minds of the age; and if masterful in this instance means dominating, he was that—and more. Alas that his brilliant mentality was destined to degradation through the physical body—but that is my story.
It was the Thanksgiving game that proved the beginning of George’s downfall. Warned by friends that he would be wise to desist from the more dangerous physical sports, he laughingly—though with unquestionable
