Johnny Harte

 

A Voyage from Sligo Bay

 

 

 

 

          John Joseph Harte was born in New York City on September 7, 1903, the second son of recent Irish immigrants Thomas Harte, born in County Sligo, and Susan Fitzpatrick Harte from County Cavan. He was educated by the Christian Brothers order of the Catholic church, first at the De La Salle Academy on the upper west side of the city. After he passed the Regents Exam in his sophomore year of high school, he was accepted to the Manhattan College Preparatory School and finished high school there.

          He was only 15 when his father died in 1918, a death quickly followed by his mother’s in 1920 and his older brother’s in 1921. All were stricken by influenza, tuberculosis or related respiratory diseases. 

          His Aunt Delia, or Bridget, Harte helped Johnny as best she could on her laundress wages until her death in 1928. By that time, the young man had graduated from Columbia University with a degree in engineering. He went south on a job to oversee the construction of a water-treatment plant near High Point, North Carolina. There, on a country road known as Kivett Drive, he met Sarah Pauline Kivett, the youngest daughter of a large family that had been farming in the state since before the American Revolution.

          The courtship was notable in that Polly, who walked down the road every day to care for an elderly neighbor, initially tossed her curls at Johnny when he offered her rides. After some months of these rebuffs, he caught her in a thunderstorm one day and she agreed to get into his car and be chauffeured home.

          That home was a commodious Victorian farmhouse presided over by Polly’s widowed mother, Esther Vestal Kivett, and occupied by most of the 10 children born to her and the late William Larkin Kivett, who had been killed in 1915 in a dynamite accident on the farm.

          One thing led to another and, in 1929, Johnny Harte asked Mrs. Kivett for her daughter’s hand in marriage.  Even though he was a Catholic in Quaker/Methodist/Baptist country, and a Yankee to boot, his warmth and generosity, love of life and engaging personality — along with his orphaned status — endeared him to everyone in Polly’s family.

          At one point during the courtship, Johnny — always interested in new experiences — had hired a small airplane to take him for a ride around Guilford County. When the plane passed over Mrs. Kivett’s manicured front yard, Johnny dropped his wallet out, so the family would know he was the passenger.

          At any rate, Mrs. Kivett, who always loved Johnny, gave her consent to the marriage, knowing that Johnny’s work and the Great Depression would take her youngest daughter far away.

          Johnny Harte and Polly Kivett were married by a Baptist preacher in Richmond, Virginia in late 1929.

          Their first “home“ was a hotel in Mount Holly, New Jersey, where Polly tried to entertain herself while Johnny sought work in New York City.

          The Hartes then lived in Florida, Texas, Georgia and wherever Johnny could find work. Around 1932, a tragedy in the Kivett family brought them Jane and Leckie, the young daughters of one of Polly’s older sisters. During the years in Toccoa, Georgia, where Johnny was supervising an engineering project, Polly routinely went to the Chicopee Mill to buy chicken-feed sacks, which were then made from good cotton. She would rent a sewing machine for a week to make clothes for the girls.

          Times were hard. Subsequently, Leckie returned to the care of her aunts in North Carolina. Jane stayed with Johnny and Polly.

 

         

                                                                                     

1939

 

 

          By 1939, the Hartes were in Atlanta, living in an apartment on Ponce de Leon Avenue, then a fashionable address. Johnny, who had been working for another engineering/architectural firm, decided to start his own business when he learned that he and Polly were to have their own child. Susan Harte, named for her Irish grandmother, was born in late summer of 1939.

 

          Then came World War II. Johnny was employed as chief supervising engineer for construction of army bases in South Carolina and at Camp Gordon in Georgia. His company was part of the building team at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the atomic energy was being channeled into wartime uses. At one point in the secret process, he had an FBI agent called “Mr. Trent,” complete with the proverbial khaki trench coat, assigned to guard him.

          He worked ceaselessly to build his company and, by 1942, had amassed enough money for a down payment on a house. It was a handsome brick structure on two acres and a stream on Lenox Road, then “out in the country” but now well into what is considered the affluent Buckhead area of the city. The house sat on a rise, and the parkland in its lower yard was actually the flood plain of a branch of Peachtree Creek.

 

          Johnny immediately set about improving the house, while Polly devoted herself to building what was to become a showplace of flowers, with terraced gardens in back, hundreds of daffodils on a hillside in front, all kinds of shrubs and plants, and a rose garden that was photographed for a garden magazine.

          To the main house, Johnny added a large game room with fireplace, sound system, screen for showing real Hollywood movies, card room and guest room, full bath and kitchen/bar area that he used as his darkroom to develop the photographs that were one of his hobbies. He devised a water tower and blower system that probably represented some of the first real air conditioning in the South.

          He took the old two-car garage, turned it around to face the back, had it bricked and added a covered breezeway that led from the garage to the kitchen door.

          From the back door to the game room he added a spacious brick patio and, under cover, a large barbeque pit on which he grilled his luscious steak dinners, often for 20 people. He bought the best meats, and was dumfounded if anyone suggested using steak sauce or other condiment to improve their flavor. He had known too many days when there was no meat at all.

 

 

1949

 

          All of the Hartes’ work on the Lenox Road house was in its full glory when, in June of 1949, Jane’s wedding was held at home. The wedding party descended from the front of the house on a curved set of flagstone steps to the lower yard, where sat a string orchestra and the guests. Spectators’ cars lined up on Lenox Road to watch the ceremony, which was in keeping with the country setting — Jane and her bridesmaids wore eyelet-trimmed organdy gowns made by a local seamstress, and the flowers were summer daisies.

          The receiving line was staged in back of the house, where Polly’s prize roses and other June flowers brought forth their best display.

 

          The John J. Harte Company, Architects and Consulting Engineers, had its offices on Techwood Drive at Baker Street, now part of Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. The firm was doing well, but Johnny never stopped reading and studying. He took courses such as Organic Chemistry from the International Correspondence School, and always made As.

                                                                                     

He taught himself how to speak perfect Castilian Spanish. He put talented but impoverished young men through Georgia Tech. He supported Atlanta’s fledgling theatre scene, and its first opera company, Opera Arts Atlanta.

He loved to fish, often rose at 5 a.m. and, with an ever-willing Susan in tow, drove miles to a friend’s bass lake off what is now traffic-clogged Johnson Ferry Road in Cobb County. An intensely health-conscious individual, he enjoyed walking, swimming and weight lifting, and occasional golf and archery. He swam regularly at the downtown Atlanta Athletic Club, where Polly and Susan often joined him for dinner.

 

          Every now and then, especially when he was building the refinery at Copper Hill, Tennessee, he would keep Susan out of school to accompany him on a one-day trip to survey the project’s progress.

 

          Every weekend for several years after Jane married, Johnny drove Susan and a friend out to Pine Hill Stables, then on Wieuca Road between Roswell and Lake Forrest, to ride horses. He was usually there with his camera when the girls returned from their hour-long jaunt through hilly woods that have long since been replaced by subdivisions.

 

 

1955

                                                                  

 

          As 1955 began, Johnny had projects and/or offices in Washington, D.C.; Houston, Texas; Mexico City; Bogota, Colombia; Quito; Ecuador and other cities. He was bidding on a major engineering project in Egypt that was to be his largest effort ever.

 

          Susan turned 16 in August, an event marked not by a big party or bundles of gifts. Instead, Johnny wrote his daughter the following letter, which illustrates above all else what kind of man he was and why his only grandchild, Davis Ison, chose to name a new company for the both of them:

 

                

 

 

 

 

          Then the pain began. It was foreign to a man who had always prided himself on his health and who, with his perfect teeth, had never in his life sat in a dentist’s chair.

 

            He returned home one night from a trip to South America in such discomfort that he could hardly stand. Thus began an agonizing period of medical tests, visits to many physicians and — always — pain.  Initial cardiology tests and X-rays brought various, inconclusive results and interpretations. After all, it was 1955 and local medical science was not always attuned to some of the more devastating forms of cancer.

          It was only after a plea from Polly Harte and an intervention by Massachusetts State Representative John McCormick, a friend and colleague of Johnny’s, that the family was advised to go immediately to the Lahey Pavilion near Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The most renowned gastroenterologists in the world were then practicing there.

          The surgical team found inoperable pancreatic cancer. After his surgery — and he was not told he was to die soon — Johnny related to his wife that he had dreamed he was fishing in Ireland with his father.

                                                                                               

 

 

          Johnny’s attitude and gallantry in the face of illness so impressed the medical staff that Dr. Russell Boles. Jr., MD and his wife took Susan and Polly one Sunday to pray at a grand old Episcopal church where, perhaps providentially, the main hymn was Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”                                                                                                    

          Polly and Susan were also befriended by Helen Sobey of Nova Scotia, who was there with her ill mother; and by Kitty and Wally Cohu, Franco-Americans who lived on Beacon Hill and owned a chateau in France. Mrs. Cohu gave Susan a pair of small gold brooches, in the form of cats and studded with turquoise and lapis lazuli that remain in the family today.  As for Helen Sobey, she and Polly corresponded for many years, highlighted by a visit that Polly, Susan and her son, Davis Ison, made to Halifax in the early 1970s.

 

          After Johnny’s surgery, Susan was sent home to resume school. The Hartes’ housekeeper, Mrs. Rosa Hill, stayed with her at the house.

 

          Several weeks of medical stabilization followed. Johnny was then put on a plane, along with Polly and a nurse from the Lahey Pavilion, to return to Atlanta. He was weak, thin and jaundiced.

          Back at home, his will to be healthy again overcame the pain, jaundice and weakness to the point that he would wake Polly at all hours of the night to walk with him, which she did whenever he called, around and around their second-floor bedroom and hallway of the Lenox Road house.

 

          Then, on Saturday, November 5, 1955, Johnny was taken by ambulance to Crawford Long Hospital in downtown Atlanta.

 

          Late the next night, Polly received a call from the head nurse to come to the hospital immediately. Though Susan and Marie Wicker, the close family friend who was staying at the house, were both able to drive, Polly insisted on getting behind the wheel of her Cadillac. She said that driving calmed her.

          As soon as the three women walked off the elevator, the nurse came forward and said, ”He’s gone.” Susan became hysterical and rushed to her dead father’s bedside, but pleaded “no” when a nurse came in with a sedative syringe. After that, she became amnesic and never regained her memory of some of the events surrounding the death, whose effect on the family manifested itself for decades.                                                                                                

Although Johnny had been more of a spiritual man than a religious one, he was born into a Catholic family and his Rosary was held on Monday evening, November 7, at H.M Patterson & Sons, funeral directors, on Spring Street downtown. The funeral was the next day at Christ the King Cathedral, with burial at Westview Cemetery in a new, garden section that contained flat bronze plaques instead of marble gravestones. After Polly died, at age 94, in 2003, Susan and Davis had the other grave opened and, on a warm, breezy day in May, scattered half Polly’s ashes there, thus reuniting a couple that had loved each other dearly. The other half of Polly’s ashes were to be joined with those of her second husband, Louis L. Williams, and scattered on the Altamaha River near Darien, Georgia, where Lou Williams had sailed as a boy with his own father.

 

          As word of Johnny Harte’s death spread, condolences poured in, from the humble people to whom he had showed kindness over the years, to the mighty — people such as the Mayor of Quito, Ecuador and then-U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver.                                                                        

 

 

          Samuel F. Marshall, MD, who had headed Johnny’s surgical team, wrote this:

 

                   “Dear Mrs. Harte,

                  

                   I do wish to express my sympathy to you and your family about Mr. Harte. Even though one could see no outlook for him, these reports are always shocking to us, and this was especially so because he was so extraordinarily patient and cooperative.

                   We feel especially badly because we could do nothing with surgery to help in this very serious condition.”

         

 

 

 

          Although Polly believed she could continue the John J. Harte Company, none of the men who worked there proved up to the task of leading this organization that had been being built over three decades — lovingly and with backbreaking effort — from nothing but a poor, New York Irishman’s dreams. The company and building were both sold, separately, within a decade of Johnny’s death.

 

 

 

 

         

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