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,
orBridget, 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 herconsent to the marriage, knowing that Johnny’s work and
the Great Depression would take her youngest daughter far away. Johnny Harte
and Polly Kivett weremarried 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 entertainherself while Johnny sought work in New York City. The Hartes
then lived inFlorida, 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
summerdaisies.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:
INSERT LETTER

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.