tribute to Marvin G. Harman

Today, December 23, would have been the 100th birthday of my grandfather, Marvin G. Harman. The world was lucky to have had him as late as 2004. He was possibly the kindest soul I have ever known, and if “he didn’t have a single enemy” has become a bit of a cliché, it is nonetheless true in this case.

Marvin was the great grandson of the first member of our family to move to Iowa, in the 1830’s, before it was even a state. (The family was based near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania before then, and is presumably German in origin– though the story is lost in shadow before 1805.) Marvin lost his father to cancer at about age 10, and had to work from a young age to help support his mother and his three younger siblings. It was hard on him. But eventually he was able to attend university and become a civil engineer. His specialty was designing rock-crushing machines.

He also had the best, most resonant singing voice of anyone I know who is not a professional singer. He never sang tongue-in-cheek, but took a childlike delight in whatever song came to his mind. It was with a similar sincerity that he pursued religious life, in which he never forced his views on anyone, or even brought them up unless asked– and even then, only gently.

I watched a lot of sports with him in my childhood, and he is partly responsible for that side of my mental life. His baseball team was the Cincinnati Reds, though I’m not sure of the history behind that distant allegiance. He didn’t care for professional basketball much. The various Iowa Hawkeyes teams were his other favorites, of course.

As mentioned before on this blog, he was also fascinated by the geography of our planet, and would spend long hours carefully consulting atlases about places he would never be able to go. Late in life, living near Kansas City rather than his birthplace in Iowa, he took a special vicarious pleasure in my travels. I would often bring him exotic sample currency and send him as many postcards as possible from wherever I was. Just as Kant gave lectures in geography despite never leaving the confines of East Prussia, my grandfather lived in a mental world filled with distant countries despite just barely making it over the U.S. border into Ontario a couple of times.

His physical meticulousness was an admirable trait that I failed to inherit. One day I was shocked when he pulled his Social Security card out of his wallet. It had been in his wallet ever since Social Security was first instituted, which I believe was under FDR in the 1930’s. It was in mint condition! He also had a 1930’s Cubs-Yankees World Series ticket, still in perfect condition. And that’s how I first learned that the term “World Series” must be fairly recent: the ticket itself said something more ponderous like “World Championship of Baseball Games.” Something like that. But it was the World Series, all right. It could have been either 1932 or 1938, both Cubs-Yankees World Series years. But I no longer remember which. He and his friends decided to ride motorcycles all night long from Eastern Iowa to Chicago in order to attend that game. Today it’s a 4.5-hour trip by car, though it presumably took longer by motorcycle over two-lane highway in the 1930’s.

Indeed, any physical object in his custody would remain in pristine condition for a half-century or more. By contrast, I’m the sort who accidentally sends my Social Security card through the washing machine a few times per year.

This was also evident whenever he was given a gift. You could give him the most trivial item imaginable. He would carefully unwrap the present, never even damaging the paper, as slowly as it is humanly possible to open a gift. Once it was open, his level of excitement always approached that of Howard Carter discovering King Tut’s tomb. You could give my grandfather something of relatively little value, and he would treasure it for months or years. Once when I was about 10 years old, we were all at the Iowa State Fair together (a fascinating cultural experience that I haven’t relived in too long). My brother bought my grandfather a simple pocket knife as a gift, and he was reveling in that knife several years later, entirely without affectation.

Another enduring memory of my grandfather comes from the summer of 1981. That was my first time outside the Midwestern United States: spent in the Washington suburbs at the home of my aunt. Washington was as foreign to me then as Bhutan is now, so it was an exciting summer. I spent a lot of great time with my grandfather on that trip, doing such simple things as playing horseshoes (he always beat me, a 72-year-old veteran vs. a 13-year-old rookie).

He was entirely himself until 1999. In that year he had major health problems leading to lengthy hospitalization, and when he came home he was not the same, physically or otherwise.

Marvin Harman had a much harder life than I did from the start, but he came through his challenges as someone you could trust with your fortune or your life. He was also an excellent listener. He is much missed by his 9 grandchildren (I am the eldest of them, while the youngest is 23), as well as the handful of great-grandchildren he did live to meet.