Peace on Earth

Image courtesy of the Harris Family.  Thank you!

TV Scout Reports

Stacy Harris lays claim to being television's top killer.  He bases it on the rather impressive record of having killed more than 400 people on television shows, plus another 34 in movies.  Any challengers?

-Abilene (TX) Reporter News, June 13, 1962

Johnnie comes home

Bitterness and misunderstanding may mar the homecoming of your serviceman if you are not fully prepared to help him re-establish himself in normal living

STACY HARRIS knows that, to a returned soldier,
home may be only a series of disturbing problems
instead of the haven about which he has dreamed.
Judged 4F by the U.S. Army, Harris got overseas
as an American Field Service volunteer, and then
finished out the African campaign with the British
and Free French Armies. Wounded, decorated and
discharged, he is now heard in many favorite NBC
dramas.

By STACY HARRIS

AS TOLD TO THE EDITOR

There isn't a soldier anywhere who doesn't dream about coming home.  Believe me, I know how you dream about it.

I dreamed too.  No, that's wrong.  It's not dreaming exactly.  It's thinking.  It's thinking constantly of the things you took so much for granted.  At night, in some muddy hole, you'd think about a real, honest-to-goodness bed with clean white sheets and the warmth you could never seem to get where you were.  When you ate, you always thought of the way tables looked at home, white linen, sparkling dishes and shining silver.  And the food--you though a lot about that.

No, it's not dreaming.  It's an obsession with every man at the front, the constant comparison between the uncomfortable, sleepless, changing present and the sane, safe and comfortable life he has left behind him.  I think every soldier at some time has sent this prayer climbing to the steep: Dear God, let me get home all right and I'll never gripe again!

Well, I got home.  I got home, and everything looked the same but it wasn't the same.  I wasn't the same either, I guess.  And this is no gripe.  It's an attempt to tell you how the soldier you know may feel when he comes home.

A funny thing happens when you've fought in the war.  You change.  You grow up fast and get tougher--not mean, but able to take lots of things you couldn't take before.  You get so you can stand on your own two feet.  You learn that the lives of lots of men may depend on how well you can stand on your won feet.  I learned that.  All the men who've seen action and met the enemy have learned it the hard way and well.

Yet, all the time you're learning this, when you think about home, you think about its being the same as when you left.  You think about how it will be.  You think about how the things you'll say and do.   You think about it a lot.  Then you come home and it isn't like that at all.  This is how it is.  This is how it's been for lots of the soldier I know.

Men discharged for dependency reasons are perhaps the luckiest ones.  Most people are anxious to help them locate jobs and places to live.  There are always a few people who make remarks about their being goldbricks and getting out of the Army on false pretenses but not many.  Such people usually have someone in the Army themselves and are a little jealous.  Some people, of course, are too anxious to help, and that too can be bad.  After awhile, these people begin to make the boys feel foolish or as if they need charity. Still, men in this classification are pretty lucky and get jobs without too much trouble or fuss.  Most people understand and are kind.

But thousands of men are being discharged every month from the Armed Forces, and very few of them are released because of dependencies.  The majority are men who have seen service in combat and who have been wounded or men who have suffered what is called battle fatigue, or men who have turned out to be psychologically unsuited to the job of soldering.  This last category is a tough one to be in, tough in all ways.

In the Army there are jokes about Section 8, which is what the psychopathic wards in G.I. hospitals are called.  It seems to me there are always jokes everywhere about psychopathic wards.  It also seems to me that this is nothing to joke about, especially in the Army, because I know that many of the men who find themselves in Section 8--for observation, or because of battle fatigue--are not crazy by a long shot.  The Army doctors don't think they're crazy or irresponsible and neither do their buddies.  They don't get along in the Army, sure, and they are nervous and undependable under stress.  But don't many civilians go to pieces when they're in the wrong job?  And remember the Army is plenty tough job. 

A Section 8 discharge, however, seems to be the worst kind to get.  Like a guy I know.  I'll call him Joe because that's not his name.  Joe was a nice guy, not a goldbrick, and sincere about soldiering.  But the first time he went into actual battle maneuvers he cracked--and not because he was a coward.  The simulated chaos of battle conditions confused and bewildered him.  He tried.  The tried so hard he bit his lip through and sobbed and cursed himself at the same time.  He had a job to do and fell down on it.  The knowledge of his failure coupled with the shock he received broke him completely.

Joe was sent to the hospital and was put in Section 8.  After awhile he was discharged.  To tell the truth, most of his Company was glad for him.  He had no business in the Army in the first place.  They didn't think he was mentally deranged or insane.  He just couldn't take it.

I ran into Joe a couple of weeks ago in New York.  That was a funny place for him to be, because his home was in the Middle West.  Joe was bucking that Section 8 discharge.  His employers had questioned him when he went for his old job--and they regretted it very much but there was no job for anyone with--to put it mildly--and unbalanced mind.  Joe's a quiet guy and he took that.  He had to take a lot more of the same thing though, before he finally landed a job with a sensible employer who realized that the Army wouldn't release anyone who was insane, or incompetent, or dangerous.

That's a bad thank, that attitude toward Section 8 discharges.  When I think of all the people in civilian life who are being psychoanalyzed and brag about it and tell you about their maladjustments and phobias all the time and hold down responsible jobs without anyone questioning them, I get mad. The men discharged from the Army because they couldn't make the necessary mental adjustments shouldn't be punished for something that isn't their fault.  Some people can't make adjustments as easily as other.  Some people never can become adjusted to certain things.  And other people, who can make adjustments, use so much effort and so much nervous strain that they break down in the end too.

In an Army chosen the way ours has been, there are bound to be mistakes in selection and, if it takes a psychiatrist to weed them out later and leads to Section 8 discharges, the men so discharged shouldn't be penalized for having tried and failed.  These men are not insane.  Many of the them are a lot saner than some of those civilians who are running around being psychoanalyzed.  They're perfectly capable of doing their old work, or learning something new.  The only thing they can't take is being looked upon an mentally incompetent.  And if too many people go on treating them as though they were to be shunned and feared, they are liable to become unbalanced.  Who wouldn't?

When I think of Joe and of another guy I know who got a medical discharge and had such a hard time getting a job that he even went so far as to make himself out to be a hero in order to get a chance, I begin to think there's a lot of work for us here at home to do.  It shouldn't be necessary for veterans to struggle so hard and to fight against so many odds in order to win for themselves a little self-respect and get back their places in civilian life.  After all, they went into the Army willingly and were ready to do anything they could.  You don't need me to tell you what they've done. We owe them all at least what they left behind if not a whole lot more. 

Not that they want gratitude.  There's nothing a returning serviceman hates so much as gushing gratitude.  They hate sentimentality. They don't like having people make a fuss about them.  They don't like people acting idiotically as though they thought each individual soldier had won the war single handed.  They're smarter than that.  They know what they did and what it was worth.  All they want is to get back to normal living, to what they left to fight for--as quickly as they've got a right to expect.

I know a swell fellow, a mechanic, who was wounded and discharged.  He got back to normal living but it took doing.  He'd lost his left arm.  He's grown used to the idea, and the way people react to it, but now.  He talked about it to me at one time, though.

"It was bad in the beginning," he told me.  "A mechanic needs his hands, both of them.  I couldn't figure what the hell I was going to do. It kind of made me feel like I wasn't all of a man.  That 's a lousy feeling.  And after I was discharged, I'd walk down the street and people would look at me and sometimes I'd hear things they'd say and I'd want to slug them.  My wife was good about it though.  I worried about her the most, I guess.  I sued to lie on that hospital bed and think of how her face would look when she saw me again and I'd go cold inside.  But when she got her first look at me, it was all right.  She looked in my face and I could see that she was glad and happy that I was back and she patted my should and said we'd fix it all right.  That girl of mine worked with me.  She didn't just talk.  And now I don't miss it as much as I thought I would."

He talked more too.  He said the hardest thing to stand was pity, people pitying him and doing things for him they wouldn't do for other men.  They pity, the pampering, would bring back that feeling about not being a man any more.  And he hated that.  Almost as much, he hated the jovial people who slapped him on the back and pretended not to notice anything wrong.  "An arm's a big thing not to notice," he said.  "Hell, they've led normal lives.  Why don't they just act that way?  That's all I ask."

Everybody who comes back from the war isn't going to be wounded though.  There will be lots of men returned, the vast majority of whom have nothing external to show for their long time away.  They'll look pretty much the same as when they went away, maybe a little older, a little more serious.  But they won't be the same. And it won't be anything they can change.  You here at home will have to change.  Your part of his war starts the day he comes back in to his home. Make sure he'll be glad to be back, and stay.

You'll be different to him too, of course.  Things will have been happening to all of you. But it would be a big mistake to try to tell any of our returned soldiers how tough the war has been on civilians.  It hasn't been so tough, not nearly as tough as in many other countries.  And even if it had been ten times as bad, no one at home could ever match what they've been through.

We ought to be getting ready for this job now.  Some civilians are already getting ready because they realize how important it is.  Down in Louisiana, they're planning one hundred local information and referral centers, where homecoming servicemen can get advice on anything from educational benefits under Public Law 346 to help in finding jobs and places to live.  The Louisiana State Department of Education, the Civil Service, Veterans' Organizations and labor unions, Office of Civilian Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs are all cooperating to make the plan work.  In Connecticut, seventy-five local committee are already functioning, giving advice on job opportunities and aids and benefits, applying their help to war workers as well as veterans.  In Fort Smith, Arkansas, the community counseling center is housed and finances by the local school system and also aids workers as well as veterans.  Kansas City, Missouri, is planning a big downtown center to take care of all servicemen.  In Freeport, Illinois, the Chief of Police is chairman in charge of help to all veterans with offices right in the City Hall.

This is a beginning, but only a small one.  Many more communities are going to have to get together and plan for the future before this problem is solved.  The fighting men have been away taking care of the interests, the well-being and the safety of the people back home.  We've got to do a real job of seeing to it that they're not let down when they come home, that it will have seemed worthwhile to have fought.  Making sure there will be jobs for them and that they will be able to find those jobs and get to them is something all of us have to do together, in larger or smaller groups.

As individuals, there are many things we must be ready to do, too.  You've got to remember they've been through something you haven't, something you can't really understand or feel, no matter how strong your imaginations and emotions may be.  You'll have to expect them to be changed. You'll have to learn how to behave toward them.  This isn't something I thought up by myself.  The Army and your government are very concerned about it.  I can see why they are concerned.

The Army has made a list of rules that I think all civilians should learn by heart--and take to heart.  Here is the list:

1.  Be natural--don't strain and gush.  Your man may be changed, but he's still a human being and wants to be treated like one.

2.  Treat him as a responsible citizen.  Now that he's home, he has a big civilian job to do.  Don't patronize him because he's been away and doesn't know what's been going on.  He'll have ideas.

3.  Don't pamper him and don't pity him.  He's entitled to real consideration but he probably knows more about standing on his own feet than you do.

4.  Don't kill him with sympathy.  He needs real help, not sentimental tears.  Genuine kindness and genuine recognition of his contribution are the best attitude.

5.  Don't urge him to talk.  He'll talk if and when he wants to.  Let him lead.  Remember, you're not the only civilian who's curious.

6.  Keep your poise.  Don't be startled.  If he's been crippled don't be either too curious nor too unnoticing.  He knows you'll notice but don't stare.  Try to be kind.

7.  Be realistic.  If he wants to talk about his problems and future, don't tell him he doesn't need to worry.  The GI Bill gives him a lot of help but he'll still have to compete with civilians and other veterans for a long-term success.

8.  Develop serenity of spirit.  This applies to those close to the veteran.  He may have thought you were wonderful--try as hard as you know how to be just that.

9.  Don't brag about how well you've done.  If he asks, tell him, but remember, he may think--and in some cases justly--that the war has given stay-at-homes an advantage.

10.  Don't kick about how tough ti's been at home.  It hasn't been and he knows it.  Just let him know most of us have done everything we've been asked to do and have wanted to do more.

11.  Help him in every way you can.  Be sure he knows his rights, his opportunities for education, his preference for his old job.  Help get your community organized.

12.  And remember that you face problems of adjustment too.  Your non-war job may not pay as well.  It won't be as easy to get a job.  The veteran has a prior right to any of ours--he did give up time and opportunity.

Make no mistake about this. When all the Johnnies come home, we'll be hard put to help them back into the kind of life they fought for.  It's going to take patience and understanding, kindness and work. It's going to be up to us to make home really the thing they have been thinking about while they were away.  Home to them is something wonderful and great--a good place they've thought about and fought for.  It's up to us to see that they find that place.  It's up to us to start thinking and planning now to face what may be ahead for all of us.


-Radio Mirror (March 1945)

New Show Has Agent After Spies, Smugglers

Stacy Harris, who has portrayed villains in movie Westerns for the past six years while performing on radio shows originating in Hollywood, has returned to New York for an eight-week run as a hero, Agent Doug Carter, in Doorway To Danger on NBC-TV.  The series, taking the time spot of Big Story for the Summer, will be seen Fridays, July 3 through Aug. 21 at 8 p.m.

Agent Carter investigates corruption in spy or smuggling rings operating in apparently law-abiding organizations, and intrigue in international espionage.  Raymond Bramley, who also is on Broadway in The Crucible, will be seen as Carter's chief, John Randolph.

Writers for the series are Martha Wilkerson, who wrote some of the Doorway To Danger scripts last Summer; Bob Shaw, for many years scripter of Mr. District Attorney; and Harry Junkin, formerly producer-director and often scriptwriter of NBC's Radio City Playhouse.

-Charleston Daily Mail June 28, 1953


Doorway To Danger was a summer replacement series, airing on NBC from 1950-1953.  Called Door With No Name for its first season, it seems to have been broadcast live.  I don't know if there are any surviving episodes.

Dragnet fans will recognize that Chief John Randolph shares his name with the man himself, John Randolph Webb.

The photo of Stacy Harris as Agent Doug Carter comes from Wikimedia Commons.

The Column on the Square

By Ed Brooks

 

Stacy Harris, formerly associated with Jack Webb on Dragnet, got plenty of money for starring in the TV crime series filmed here, N.O.P.D.  But ads announcing the beginning of the series Monday on Around the Town via Channel 4 ran all day and misspelled star Stacy's first name.

It's an old Welsh name, he reminded us, and when spelled S-t-a-c-e-y is feminine.  He prefers it the correct masculine way: Stacy.

-New Orleans Daily Picayune April 26, 1955

From Chicago

 

 

STAN HARRIS and Hugh Rowlands

 

(both heard on Arnold Grimm's Daughter) are planning to fly to the West Coast and Mexico this summer in a new plane Rowlands plans to buy.  Both boys are pilots.

 -Movie Radio Guide, April 20, 1940


Arnold Grimm's Daughter was a radio soap opera broadcast fifteen minutes weekdays from 1937-1942.  Stacy Harris played the part of Arthur Hall.  Hugh Rowlands played Bud.

To begin my life somewhat in the midst of my life, I record that I was born...

 

July 26, 1916 in Seattle, Washington

 

 

 

 

"Washington, King County Delayed Births, 1941-1942," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/VRM7-K53 : accessed 23 Oct 2013), Stanley David Harris, 1916.

Harris Plans Orleans Film

Ex-TV Star Here Slates Exploitation Movie

BY JILL JACKSON

 
HOLLYWOOD –After at least ten tries Stacy Harris and I finally set a date to spend a nice, long, leisurely evening to catch up on the last six years.

It’s been that long since Stacy lived in New Orleans for almost two years while he was portraying Lt. Victor Beaujac in the locally produced TV series, N.O.P.D.

The evening arrived, and so did Stacy, looking great, but a bit perturbed because he had just had a call from the studio to report early the next morning for a scene in a show he was filming, which meant learning his lines that night and arising at the crack of dawn.

The evening would have to be much shorter and more hurried than we had planned, but we did have time to chat in a charming little Chinese restaurant over lobster Cantonese, fried rice and sweet and pungent chicken, which Stacy ordered in Chinese.

Then we went to his beautiful hilltop home for coffee, so I could see it.  The house is built on three levels to conform to the hilly terrain.  The living room is large and graceful with a fireplace, comfortable chairs, treasures brought from Europe, piped music, and all the other accoutrements to make a man comfortable.

The study is his favorite room.  Here at a table he learns his “words,” as he calls his lines, and with a short turn of his head, through a large picture window, he can see all of Los Angeles below.

LINED WITH BOOKS

The walls are lined with books, bric-a-brac and boat models.  Sailing is Stacy’s hobby and he’s always out on the ocean at the tiller, time permitting.

Time, however, doesn’t permit too often as he is one of Hollywood’s most “in demand” actors.   He works constantly which is [text missing] limited roles and thousands of actors.

Stacy usually plays the “heavy” and can be counted upon either to get killed, beaten up, or brought to justice.  Recently he has been in The Untouchables, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and is very proud to say that in Wyatt Earp he played a nice guy.

Stacy’s latest plans are to make an exploitation movie in New Orleans.  The title, at this writing, is This Gam for Hire.  He will produce, assist with the writing, and possibly play a part.  In his own words he says, “New Orleans was good to me, I had a love affair with that City.”  He adores it and can’t wait to return.

KNOWS ORLEANS

Stacy Harris probably knows New Orleans better than most Orleanians.  As Lt. Beaujac his screen partner was a real life detective, Capt. Louis Sirgo.  Many was the night, and day too, that Stacy rode with the boys on authentic calls to saturate himself with the feel of the city, and the ways of the police to bring authenticity to his role.

Over coffee, listening to lovely music, we talked over old times, if you can call six years ago old times.  He adored Owen Brennan, and though he lived at the Claiborne Towers, he called the Old Absinthe House and Brennan’s his “offices.”  Stacy said he cannot visualize “our town” without Owen, and Tom Caplinger, Bob Tallant, Papa Celestin, Banjo Annie, and all the other departed characters.

All too soon it was ten p.m.  Stacy had fourteen sides to learn that night, so off we tooted in his T-Bird, down the hill to take me home.  We’re still going to get together to finish the conversation.

-New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 29, 1960

Jill Jackson (1912-2010) was a successful Hollywood-based columnist for many decades.  Originally hailing from New Orleans, she was hired by the Times Picayune to write a celebrity gossip column beginning in 1960.  Her column later expanded to a syndication package of 1500 news outlets.  Tulane University has a nice retrospective of her career here.

Louis Sirgo (1924-1973) costarred with Stacy Harris in N.O.P.D., a television series based in New Orleans.  Patterned after Dragnet, it was a low budget, but fun show.  Thirty-nine episodes were filmed on location in 1954 and it was nationally syndicated beginning in 1956.  Two movies were later compiled from the existing footage, New Orleans After Dark, released in 1958 and Four for the Morgue, in 1962.  He joined the NOPD in 1946 and worked as a homicide detective and later as a police captain before his retirement in 1964.  In 1970, he was reappointed New Orleans Deputy Police Superintendent.  He was gunned down on Jan. 7, 1973, one of nine people killed and ten seriously injured during a horrific rampage by a crazed sniper.  An account of the events can be found here.

Meet the G-Man of Radio

 

The Nemesis of Gangsters Has Rich Background




HOLLYWOOD

Stacy Harris, good looking and personable G-Man of the airwaves who heads the cast of This Is Your FBI, embarks upon his adventures nowadays with a script in his hand and a microphone at his lips, but the high excitement in his young life has not always been so synthetic.  Before he settled down to an acting career four years ago he had packed away enough experiences to last him for the rest of his days.

Timber cruiser, deckhand, boxer, radio sportscaster, newspaper artist, ambulance driver in United States wartime field service overseas,  motorcycle courier with the French troops in north Africa, he was a restless rover and, before he came here from New York with the airshow, he had seen the world from many different angles.  Now his is looking at it for the first time as a movie, as well as a radio, actor, having lately entered the films in Postal Inspector, starring Alan Ladd and Phyllis Calvert at Paramount.  Oddly enough, while he is indefatigable in his pursuit of public enemies as one of J. Edgar Hoover’s special agents on This Is Your FBI, he is against the law as a gangster in this picture.

Born in a Quebec lumber settlement, Harris nonetheless calls Seattle, Wash., his hometown, for he began to live there in his early boyhood.  His father, David S. Harris, used to be a trouping actor, but during his school days Stacy has little interest in show business.  He wanted to be a forest ranger and with this end in view, he majored in forestry at the University of Washington, paying part of his tuition and upkeep by working during summer vacations as a lumberjack.

He Went to Sea

FORESTRY, however, last an eager recruit when this undergrad, who was active in athletics, began to broadcast sports events on a Seattle station.  Soon he was newscasting as well.  After switching to another station as an announcer, he fell out with the boss and was fired.  Thereupon he shipped as a seaman on an oil tanker bound for Alaska and the Orient.

“That,” he says, “was a rough experience.”

Back home again after a long voyage, he tried briefly to be an artist of sorts on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, then went to sea again, steaming out to Asiatic ports for a second time.

“I hated it,” he said, “but I was out of a job and had to have one.”

His return from the Far East found him in San Francisco, where, he reports, “I had my brains kicked out” boxing for $25 a night across the bay in Oakland.  Previous experience as a lightweight in Golden Gloves matches while he was in college fortified him with sufficient courage to take on this job.

A Modest Man

A LITTLE of this, however, was more than enough, so Harris drifted south to Hollywood, and for the first time got into radio as an actor, working for $10 a performance.  But the roles were few and he got hungrier and hungrier. Then, discouraged about his prospects here, he decided to become a pilot in the United States Army Air Force and was sent to Randolph Field, Texas, for training.  He did not stay there long.

“I was healthy enough and young enough,” he said, “but not smart enough.”

Further job hunting, first in New York, then in New Orleans, led nowhere, so more or less in desperation the young man turned again to the sea as a deckhand on a vessel sailing for England.  There, he says, he “skipped ship” and “bummed around the Continent.”

Upon Harris’ return to these shores, New York, New Orleans and Chicago were all on his zigzag course from job to job, and the work he did in these cities included more illustrating for a newspaper (“I was the kind of artist,” he explained, “who draws the dotted lines and cross that marks the spot where the body lay”); acting again in radio and playing a part in a Broadway show.  While in Chicago in 1940 he married.  Not long afterward he and his wife split up, and he “ran away to Canada,” he says, “to make her sorry.”

There he wanted to join the Canadian Air Force but found he couldn’t because of a United States law, whereupon he enlisted in the United States field service and was sent to the Middle East as an ambulance driver.  Later he served through the British push westward from El Alamein across North Africa, then transferred to the Free French as a motorcycle courier.  Wounded near the end of the war, he was invalided home and discharged from service early in 1945.

In New York, radio now attracted him once more.  This time he made his acting pay, doing many roles on various shows, including Gangbusters, March of Time, and others.  When This Is Your FBI was started in April 1945, he got into it through the producer, Jerry Devine, for whom he had appeared previously on Army broadcasts.  It was not until about 18 months later, however that the role of Special Agent Jim Taylor came into the scripts.

Milwaukee Journal Aug. 21, 1949

This is the article that provided the inspiration for this blog.  Dragnet fans will note the part in bold about wanting to become a forest ranger.  Of course, if all the events outlined in the article didn’t happen exactly as they were written, well, then, they should have.

‘Like Father, Like Son,’ Rules in Harris Family

David Harris (left), veteran Seattle Repertory Playhouse actor, “didn’t think much of the idea” when his son, Stanley (right) said he was going to be an actor.  Fathers always say that, but they’re pretty proud when their sons select fathers’ professions.  Anyway, Stanley has made good in Repertory Playhouse, try-outs, and here he is in getting a lesson in grease-paints from father.

 

When Stanley Harris, 16-year-old Roosevelt High School student, heard the Seattle Repertory Playhouse was casting boys in its next production he determined to try out.  But his father, David Harris, a member of the Playhouse group of actors for nearly six years, said “No!”

It was a fairly formidable “No!”

"There are enough actors in the Harris family already,” he told his son.  “I’m just doing what almost any other father would do – tell his son to keep out of the profession or business that the parent is in.”

That didn’t daunt young Harris, however.  He appeared at the Playhouse, tried out and was given a role in Little Ol’ Boy, which opens on the Playhouse stage next Thursday.  The Repertory Players said that Stanley Harris would make an excellent actor.

Little Ol’ Boy is a play built around events at a reform school and most of the players are youngsters. 

The elder Harris originally had a role in the play, but changes made dropped him from the cast.  He discovered his son’s entrance into the drama world, however.

“Well, I guess if he’s bound to try it there is nothing I can do about it.  All I can say is that I warned him,” Harris commented.

But the Repertory Players believe the father is pleased secretly, and that he will be among the heartiest applauders when the curtain rings down after the first performance of Little Ol’ Boy.

-Seattle Daily Times November 11, 1934