ALLEN G. "Greg" HARRIS
1926-2004
I have lost another old friend, The General. That's what we called him and
he was a general in the Air Force Reserves, a brigadier general, which means
2 silver stars, and that's one day I remember vividly, the day Greg got his
2 stars, how proud he was, beaming, a pinnacle it took him 40 years to achieve
since he had joined the Army Air Force in Chicago in 1944 when he was 18 going
on 19.
And here is Greg,
after getting his wings at Tuskegee Army Air Force Base, Alabama, as a member
of the famed black aviators that would go down in history as the Tuskegee Airmen.
Greg started his flying career by transporting troops to the Northern Africa
campaigns, learning in the process how to fly some of the largest planes ever
in the Air Force, ending by flying huge cargo and carrier jets near the end
of the active duty. I don't know how many hours Greg had in the air, but it
must have been an enormous amount of time.
I first met Greg in, as best I can recalculate in my memory, 1974, a bad year
for me that was topped off by my wife of 10 years divorcing me and casting me
out into the streets of New York City. In 1972, I got a job at Time-Life, after
moving to New York from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I had piddled around enjoying
the enrapturing mountains, cool air, and cool friends in that wonderful old
city (now rehabbed up to where it looks like a phony old city) and trying to
start a writing career. Santa Fe got tough. My wife and I who had come there
with a nice little piece of change left over from my inheritance after my parents
were killed in an automobile accident in 1964. Both of us had always wanted
to try New York City and that we did, coming first to Morris Plains, New Jersey,
to live with my wife's brother, soon finding our own place on 1st Avenue and
56th, the corner, across from the Catholic Diocese, and the wonderful old Sutton
East Hotel (who the hell knows what that is today...I haven't been over there
in years).
Soon I had to get a job, so, I went to Time-Life (old man Luce was still alive
in those days and his limo elevator was carrying from the street up to his executive
offices in the high 40 floors of the new Time-Life Building on the Avenue of
the Americas, having just moved from 1 Rockefeller Plaza to that new building
in 1969. I got a job at Time-Life Films, as an copyeditor. The director liked
me, so I had a great job and got to hanging out in the old Cinco de Mayo Restaurant,
where Le Cite is today in that same location, at the back of the Time-Life Building
with an entrance on East 50th. It was one afternoon in Cinco de Mayo that I
met a woman who changed my life in terms of future friendships in NYC, Sharon
Bailey, who had come to Time-Life as one of the first graduates of what was
called Harlem High, a special school to help black folks get an advantage to
entering the NYC job market on an even keel with whites, this coming from the
Civil Rights struggles of the sixties. Through Sharon, I met Robert W. Taylor,
the archivist at Sports Illustrated who had a strong desire to be an accomplished
photographer with a chance at a Sports Illustrated staff photography job, a
hell of a great job in those days. Robert knew all the best Time-Life and Sports
Illustrated photographers, the young and the old. Robert would become very fastly
my very best friend ever in New York City.