My father was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 4, 1895. At the time he was born his father was an evangelist for the Lake Union Conference.
My father went to Fox River Academy and canvassed summers to make scholarships for school and also to go to Emmanuel Missionary College where he lived with a family. He also worked at times at the Hinsdale Sanitarium, where he met my mother.
They were married in September, 1917, and my father pastored in some of the small churches in the Chicago area. Their first child, a girl, was born in September of 1919, and that same year my father was ordained by Elder A. G. Daniels, who was at that time the President of the General Conference. That same year he received a call to go to China. The day the boat sailed, their little four-month-old daughter died and they did not leave for China until May of 1920. After one year in language school, they were sent to the mission station in Tsinan, Shantung Province.
I was born in Tsinan. My parents have told me that my birth was almost a rickshaw event. The mission station was outside the city wall. My parents went to the hospital via rickshaws. I was my mother’s second child and her labor proceeded much faster than they had anticipated. My father said the rickshaw man was really worried and kept running faster and faster, saying, “I will not have this foreign devil born in my rickshaw!” As it turned out they barely made it to the hospital where they took my mother immediately to the maternity department and left my father at registration to sign her in. My father said that they must be really busy today in Maternity. And even as he spoke, the nurse came out and said, “That’s your baby; it’s a girl!”
After one year in Tsinan, the Harrises were sent back to the mission station in Peking. Elder Frederick Lee was the Superintendent of the North China Union Mission, and the names that I remember form those early years in l920 are the George Appels, the Henry Whites, the Dahlstens, the Blandfords, the Brodersens, the N. F. Brewers, Miss Lucy Andrus, the Adlai Estebs, and Quimbys.
During that year in the United States, they spent some time visiting my mother’s family and my father’s family. My mother had surgery that year at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and my father worked at night at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to pay for her surgery. When we returned to China in 1928, the Harrises were sent to Tai Yuan Fu in Shansi Province to start a new mission station.
After one year in Tai Yuan Fu, we were sent to Tsinan again. We were there with the C. H. Davies at first and later with the Cossentines. When I was about nine, all three of us had the measles and Elder W. A. Spicer, from the General Conference, was there for special meetings and was staying at our home. I remember one day all three of us were feeling really sick and we were all crying. Elder Spicer came back to the house for something and heard us crying and said, “Don’t cry, little boys; your mother will soon be home.” I stopped crying because I was so angry that he called me a little boy. While we were in Tsinan, my mother taught in the mission school that was in the compound adjacent to us and one of the school’s industries was making towels to help students through school. About twice a year, my father would go to Shanghai with towel samples and take orders from the large hotels and Navy YMCA in Shanghai for the towels. We always had in our home odd towels that students had practiced on, and I was quite grown before I knew that towels came in colors and that they were not always white.
While we were in Tsinan, my father had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and Elder Davies had an Indian motorcycle that they used itinerating because they could go where there were no roads on the paths between the fields or on paths at the top of the dikes to the Yellow River. My father would put his bedding roll on the back of the motorcycle and take some water and a tin can that had nuts and raisins in it and would be gone for days. One church that I remember that he visited often was the church and the people in Weishin. One summer when my mother and my brothers and I were in Tsingtao, my father came to Tsingtao on the motorcycle, which was written up as quite a feat in the newspaper. There were no roads from Tsinan to Tsingtao. It took him a week. Part of the way he had to go on the railroad tracks. In l934, my father was transferred back to Peking to be superintendent of the North China Union Mission. The Coulstons, the Mourers, and the Christensens really pioneered the work in the 1930’s on the border of Mongolia, and I remember that Elder Otto Christensen, when he translated portions of the Bible into Mongolian, had to even make the type himself in order to print the translations.
In 1936, the Harrises with a number of other missionaries were sent on furlough and also to the General Conference in San Francisco. One of my father’s assignments and special burdens for that furlough was to find a doctor to take Dr. Elmer Coulston’s place. Dr. Coulston had lost his life in saving the life of a little Mongolian girl. At the General Conference, he spoke and made a special plea for a doctor for Mongolia. While we were still in San Francisco, a young doctor, practicing in the State of Washington, came to visit my father and asked him many questions. This was Dr. C. E. Randolph. By the time we returned from furlough in 1937, the Randolphs were in Hong Kong trying to find a way to get to Kalgan. When we got back to Shanghai in the summer of 1937, because of the war with Japan, we could not get back to Peking. When the Japanese took Shanghai, women and children were sent on the President Jefferson to Manila, and for several months we did not know where my father was. As it turned out, he had somehow returned to Peking, and in the autumn when Far Eastern Academy was relocated in Hong Kong, my father managed to get to Hong Kong, and finally got my mother and brothers back to Peking.
By May of 1941, he was sent to the General Conference in San Francisco, and there were no more Adventist missionaries in the North China Union Mission. This was a sad time for my father. He had expected to spend all of his life in China.
At the General Conference, he was asked to go to the Southern California Conference with headquarters in Glendale, California, to be the Sabbath School Secretary for that conference. If I remember correctly, there were ninety churches in that conference and he would be in at least one different church every Sabbath. After preaching for years in Chinese, he had a hard time getting used to preaching in English and would often pause in the middle of the sermon and tell the congregation that the Chinese had the perfect word for expressing his thought. He liked to read his Bible in Chinese because he felt it was much more expressive. He felt that the Oriental languages were more closely allied to the original languages in which the Bible was written. After three years in the Southern California Conference, my father received a call to be the President of the Hawaiian Mission. This was a happy time because my father felt very close to the many Oriental people in Hawaii. One of his dreams for Hawaii was to have a mission hospital, but this was not to be during his time there; but he was very pleased in later years when Castle Memorial Hospital became a reality. After five years in Hawaii, my father reluctantly asked for a transfer back to the mainland because he had become so allergic to so much of the tropical vegetation that breathing was difficult for him and the allergy medications of that time had so many adverse side effects. He was transferred to be Sabbath School Secretary for the Northern California Conference with the office at that time in Oakland. During his time in Oakland, he became friends with the San Francisco Chinese Church, which proved to be a wonderful blessing a few years later when my father was no longer in the area but asked people from the Chinese Church to call his sister who lived in San Francisco who had left the Adventist Church in her youth. The Chinese Church members befriended my Aunt Pearl in her declining years and in her seventies was baptized in the San Francisco Chinese Church and died a few years later a faithful member of that church.
At the General Conference in 1950 my father was called to go to the Sabbath School Department of the General Conference. He became a strong advocate for the Vacation Bible School and for Branch Sabbath Schools and spent the next sixteen years traveling all over the world carrying a large suitcase of VBS materials, and the people in his office called him “Mr. VBS”. He felt a great burden for making this message relevant and meaningful and interesting for children and young people. During those years it was not possible to travel in Mao’s China, but he traveled for the General Conference in many of the nearby Oriental countries. The last trip he made while in the General Conference was to Australia where he said he was treated like a king and wonderfully appreciated. This was very gratifying to him because he knew that now at the age of seventy he would be retiring at the General Conference in Detroit in 1966. Their first retirement home was in Lodi where my mother had a sister. During those years there he helped Elder Bietz, who was Sabbath School Secretary for the Northern California Conference, and at the age of eighty in Lodi when no one else wanted to take charge of VBS, he took charge of VBS; but other people there were wonderfully helpful to him. During those years, my father had several small strokes and became somewhat handicapped, so in 1978 my parents moved to St. Helena to a retirement community to be near Adventists doctors and an Adventist hospital. In those years in St. Helena, he had more severe strokes and spent the last nineteen months of his life in the St. Helena Hospital where they took wonderful care of him. He died quietly on a Sabbath afternoon in December, 1983 at the age of eighty-eight and is buried in the cemetery at Lodi. It was very comforting to my mother and me, when after he died, the nurses came to us and said that it was a privilege to take care of my father and that he was a very sweet patient. My mother lived almost another five years after my father died. She lived with me in my home for the last three and a half years of her life and also died in the St. Helena Hospital in July of l988 at the age of ninety-four. My father was a happy Christian, a very positive, dynamic person, and his influence is very strong with me to this day. I will always know what that it was a privilege to be the daughter of my parents.