Cheers Grow Dim and Colors Fade for Artist-Athlete, Critically Ill

Artist-Athlete Is Losing Hope

A serious illness has almost stripped from the heart of Stanley D. Harris, 20 year-old Roosevelt High School graduate, the will to live.  Until a few days ago young Harris, who lies in critical condition in Swedish Hospital, was taxed to find the time to do all the living he wanted to enjoy.

Artist and athlete, Harris is a curious combination of robust directness and quiet subtlety.  In high school, he alternated between playing football and lying on Seattle docks, sketching ships in quiet moods.  On other occasions he spent hilarious, voluble moments as Roosevelt's cheer leader.

He didn't like leading leather-lunged students in wild cries.  He felt it was "sissy."  But he found nothing "sissy" in several outlets of his artistic nature, carving figures in soap, and during the winter, in snow; making sketches and paintings.

Physicians at Swedish Hospital planned today to give the youth a little milk.  Recently he had been fed through the veins.  The youth's mother, Mrs. David Harris, 7803 W. Green Lake Way, took heart at that news, she said.

Only last Monday her son said to her: "Mother, I don't think I want to live.  I want to kiss you good-bye."

The hopeless tone in his voice, the tired look in his eyes, discouraged Mrs. Harris.  It sounded so unlike the virile son who used to stride about the house in his corduroys, eager for whatever he planned to do next.

Parents do Leading

If Stanley Harris isn't interested in life anymore--if the zest has been taken away from him by the long, dreary twenty days since his operation after he suffered a burst appendix--Stanley Harris' parents are doing the cheer-leading and cheering for their sick son.  They've taken a houseboat along Westlake Avenue, where bright sunlight streams across the decks of dozens of ships that would make fine subjects for the youth who likes to sketch and paint them.

Young Harris learned to draw and paint without instruction.  He engaged in art work, swimming and amateur acting with equal enthusiasm.  He graduated from Roosevelt last year, and since then has been doing whatever he could find in the way of work.  Stanley Harris may face another operation in a few days, but he doesn't know it yet.  That is best.  He is already too indifferent to his future for his physical good.


-Seattle Daily Times Apr. 16, 1936