User:TerriB19/T George Harris

T George Harris T George Harris, a protégé of legendary publisher Henry Luce, was the founding editor of Psychology Today, American Health, Spirituality and Health and editor of the Harvard Business Review.

He won national magazine awards while editing two different magazines but also got fired from top jobs after clashing with publishers and, in at least one case, refusing a promotion that would have taken him away from editing. An unconventional father, he turned his home in Princeton, N.J., into a boarding house for college students after his first wife and the mother of his children died.

He was born a runt with rickets on a tiny, rocky farm on Lick Creek near Hillsdale, Ky., on Oct. 4, 1924. He was named T because his grandfather, charged with filling out the birth certificate, decided that the boy should choose for himself whether to take his father’s name, Timinus – a name his father hated. For the rest of his life, Mr. Harris fought to keep his first initial unburdened by a period.

At age 5, he barely survived pneumonia. A polio infection briefly paralyzed his right arm when he was 8. His mother, Luna Harris, took his recoveries as divine interventions and, to the consternation of Mr. Harris’s sister, Myra, persuaded her young son that he was destined for great things. He never lost that sense of mission. He slept on an iron cot as a boy to harden himself, trained himself to sleep only a few hours a night and became an Eagle Scout with Silver Palm.

After the Great Depression bankrupted his father’s grocery store in 1932, the family moved to a 300-acre farm near Trenton, Ky., that used plow mules and the labor of three black tenant families living in red shacks. The tenants were soon displaced by a tractor, an experience that led Mr. Harris to a life-long commitment to civil rights.

He and Myra did their homework by fireside and kerosene light. He edited the school news monthly, igniting a passion for journalism. He graduated at 15 and took a job as a printer’s devil for The Clarkesville (Tenn.) Leaf-Chronicle for $12 a week. As the staff left for war, Mr. Harris took on an array of functions, including sports editor and editor of nearby weekly newspapers. After seeing Sergeant York, a movie about a World War I war hero, Mr. Harris, then 17, volunteered for the Army. He became an artillery spotter on the battlefields of Europe, earning a battlefield promotion from sergeant to lieutenant during the Battle of the Bulge, a Bronze Star and an Air Medal with cluster for logging 116 combat air missions.

He entered the University of Kentucky in January 1946 but soon transferred to Yale University, where as leader of the Liberal Party and the Yale Political Union he frequently debated his conservative counterpart, William F. Buckley. He graduated in 1949, joined Time-Life and became a correspondent in Washington and bureau chief in Chicago and San Francisco. His reporting on race riots and protests earned him mentions in civil rights histories. In 1962, he became a senior editor at Look. In 1967, he wrote “Romney’s Way: A Plan and an Idea,” the biography for George Romney’s unsuccessful presidential campaign. In 1968, he briefly edited the ill-fated Careers Today before joining in 1969 the fledgling Psychology Today as editor-in-chief.

Mr. Harris turned a jargon-filled and profitless publication into a manual on human behavior that was dubbed the lifestyle magazine of the 1970s. Circulation grew ten-fold to 1.1 million. “We had a playful shop,” Mr. Harris would later boast, with a corporate surfboard and story conferences on the beach near the Del Mar, Calif., editorial offices.

Mr. Harris claimed that he needed just seven minutes to wake up, shower, shave, dress, and reach his battered Oldsmobile. In such a rush, he sometimes found himself halfway through a tin of cat food before realizing that his quickie breakfast tasted funny. He had cots installed in his many offices and routinely worked for days without break. But his years at Psychology Today were the best of his life, soon to be followed by the worst.

Ziff-Davis Publishing bought the magazine in 1973 and moved its offices to New York City in 1976. As a Time story explained, Mr. Harris’s freewheeling style clashed with Ziff-Davis’s button-down culture. “They winced when Harris risked offending liquor advertisers by publishing a tough cover story on drinking; they were displeased when he installed a Ping Pong table at the editorial offices (Harris paid for it himself), and they were confounded by the unregimented atmosphere he relished. ‘We have created the ultimate sweatshop, one where we have eliminated the difference between work and play,” Harris liked to say.” The company offered him a promotion and a raise to entice him into surrendering his editing role. When he refused, he was fired.

But his reputation was made as a creative and quirky editor -- wearing blue work shirts and plow shoes. For the next four years, he served as a consulting and freelance editor at a host of struggling publications, including Us Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Industry Week, Human Behavior and others.

Meanwhile, his personal life deteriorated. Sheila Harris, his wife and the mother of his four children, was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the move from their beloved California home. She died on Jan. 27, 1977.

Mr. Harris’s parenting style was unusual. Instead of allowances, he paid his sons for yard and construction work and expected them to buy everything they needed but food and school books. The boys painted much of the interior and exterior of the home, built a sauna and gained in skill and confidence what the house and their clothing lost in luster.

A fan of Cheaper by the Dozen. Mr. Harris bought food and clothing by the gross. He once filled a freezer with 200 pounds of small steaks and bought his sons identical underwear and socks that were kept in large wicker baskets in the hall, ignoring his sons’ considerable differences in size and taste. The socks, which Mr. Harris bought from a retailer his sons referred to as “the burned clothing store,” came in beige and burgundy because “those colors go well with anything,” Mr. Harris said.

With his wife dead and his penchant for long work hours undiminished, he was absent from home for days and even weeks at a time. College students and young professionals provided some adult presence in a home that resembled a commune or boarding house, but the boys’ school attendance became irregular.

In 1979, Mr. Harris married Ann Rockefeller Roberts, daughter of Nelson A. Rockefeller. A year later, he moved to Manhattan where Owen J. Lipstein, the 30-year-old former general manager of Science 81 magazine, persuaded him to help launch American Health. An instant hit, the magazine earned Mr. Harris his second award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, this one in 1985 in the category of general excellence. Mr. Harris and Mr. Lipstein eventually acquired other magazines, including Psychology Today. But the recession of the early 1990s found them over-stretched. Psychology Today went bankrupt and American Health was sold at a loss to Reader’s Digest, which eventually closed it. A messy financial falling out between Mr. Harris and Mr. Lipstein followed.

In 1992, he was named editor of Harvard Business Review, and a profile in The Boston Globe described him as an energetic albeit “flaky” creative force from which ideas flowed “like oil from a West Texas gusher,” including about such non-mercantile subjects as sex. “Harris often seems to revel in his unconventional image,” the profile noted. “He readily admits he sometimes appears as an unbuttoned-down kind of guy lost in the Land of White Shirts. ‘I wear a three-piece suit, but only in race riots,” he says with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.” “Still,” the profile continued, “he says he plans to ‘clean up my act’ now that he is at Harvard and eschew his image as a ‘crazy old man with a backpack.’” He then modeled for the reporter a briefcase with shoulder straps. The story noted that Mr. Harris “is also somewhat of a name dropper.”

The headline asked, “Is Harvard Ready for T George Harris?” Harvard soon answered. He learned from a reporter writing a story about his successor that he had been fired. “From the beginning,” another Globe story explained, “Harris's somewhat eccentric personal style has raised eyebrows at Harvard. From the quirky insistence that no period follow the T in his name to his sometimes touchy-feely New-Age thinking, the energetic Harris hardly fit the image of the staid, 70-year-old management journal.” Mr. Harris was one of four top editors fired in five years at the journal.

Increasingly living apart, Mr. Harris and Ms. Roberts divorced soon after his firing. Mr. Harris returned to La Jolla, Calif., where his editorial efforts turned to religion -- his mother’s passion and the guiding force of his early life. He helped to found Spirituality and Health in 1996 and later Beliefnet, a Web site. He was for many years a creative consultant to Proctor & Gamble.

He is married to Jeannie Harris and still lives in La Jolla.

Written by Gardiner Harris