Jean Harris, Neighborhood Mom

 

Jean Harris on her 90th birthday - her son Lance is on the right.

The last time I saw Jean Harris was about five years ago when we were sitting around her kitchen table, talking about old times in the old neighborhood. As she lit her second cigarette, I joked what I always joked when she lit up: “Jean, those are going to kill you.”

They finally did. Jean died yesterday.

She was 95.

Jean was more than just my best friend Lance’s mom, she was the neighborhood mom.

Her backyard was our baseball diamond. Her side yard was our football field. Her basement was our rainy-day playroom.

It didn’t matter what she was doing inside, cooking or cleaning, she was always listening. One tiny shriek from the ball field and she was out the door, cotton ball and mercurochrome in hand.

One of the first columns I wrote for the Kingsport Times-News when I moved back to town 20 years ago was about Jean Harris.

Here is that column:

 Every neighborhood in the fifties had a Jean Harris; it just happened that in my neighborhood our Jean Harris was named Jean Harris.

Technically she was Lance Harris’s mother but in deed and in word she was the neighborhood mother. The gang would move from house to house when it rained or when it was muggy but we always seemed to end up at Jean Harris’s house. She had the basement room where we could have carnivals and secret club meetings and she had the refrigerator with a bottomless pitcher of Kool-Aid. But mostly she just had the house where everyone felt welcome.

In addition to being the neighborhood mom, Jean Harris was also the neighborhood chauffeur, an important position in the fifties when a lot of mom’s didn’t have cars or couldn’t drive. Her husband Raymond drove a Foremost Dairy truck so the family car was available. That meant that when we needed to get to Boys’ Club for football practice, she drove. When we needed to get to the Strand Theatre for Saturday afternoon Circle F movies, she drove.

Chauffeur, mom, and, oh yeah, one other job. She policed the neighborhood. Believe it or not that was a good thing.

If a marauding band of toughs from a nearby neighborhood tried to move in on our football field, she was out there, mop in hand, to tell them she would appreciate it if they would leave the local field for the local kids.

If a teenager drove 100 miles an hour down Clover Street, she was out there, broom in hand, to tell the young man that children played in that street and she would appreciate it if he slowed down his driving.

No kid from Clover Street ever ended up on a milk cartoon. And I like to think that Jean Harris had something to do with that.

I was reminded of Mrs. Harris contributions to our neighborhood over the Thanksgiving holiday. Lance was home and he and I got together to exchange stories that may or may not have ever happened.

The highlight of our storytelling was the highlight of her career as neighborhood mother. One summer Chippy Markel - not his real name - began lurking on our street. Chippy lived a few blocks away but he had decided to make our neighborhood his. Literally. Chippy was a horrible kid. I’m sure he was neglected at home and picked on at school. So he took it out on the timid and the meek. In our neighborhood that was pretty much all of us. He happened to make the mistake of singling out Lance Harris.

That would be Lance Harris, the eldest offspring of Jean Harris, neighborhood mom.

He stole Lance’s Roy Rogers rifle, which in and of itself, would have been enough to draw the wrath of Jean Harris. But she didn’t know about it because Lance didn’t tell her because he was afraid if he told her and Chippy found out then Chippy would beat him up. In short, Lance was scared of Chippy. There was no shame in this; we were all scared of Chippy.

But where Chippy made his mistake was in attempting to go to the well a second time. He came back to take Lance’s stick horse, in broad daylight, off the Harris’ back porch.

The Harris’s back porch just happened to adjoin their kitchen, which had a picture window in it, the first picture window I ever saw, a portal onto our playground.

Using that sixth sense that only moms have, she spotted him. And he spotted her spot him. He leaped off the back porch, a jump of at least four feet, and she leaped off right behind him. I had never seen a mom move like that before. It was an all out sprint and she caught him at the gate in the back fence. But just as she pinched his shirt collar he wiggled loose and broke away, turning west and heading straight for the Garden Basket. Her dad, Lance’s grandfather, came out of his house, hollering to see if she needed any help. She didn’t even break stride as she told him she could handle it.

Chippy ran for his life and she ran just as fast. But in the end he managed to dart across Bristol Highway and disappear.

He abandoned the stick horse on his way. 

She walked back, carrying the purloined stick horse; she wasn’t even breathing hard.

We never saw Chippy Markel again.