John
John Sterling Harris
d. September 21, 2013
October 29, 1929 - September 21, 2013
John Sterling Harris, teacher and poet, died at home on the evening of September 21. He was 83. He had lived in his beloved Springville, Utah antique house, for 51 years. His final illness was a brief pneumonia complicated by many chronic medical problems.
He was the second child of Sterling Richard Harris and Viola Green Harris of Tooele, Utah. His father was a superintendent of schools and a state prize-winning football coach, who came from a family of educators (Sterling was a brother of BYU president Franklin S. Harris).
John was a child of the Great Depression, having been born on the day the U.S. stock market collapsed in 1929. By the early 1950's, in a better economy, he was able to work his way through college by working at a mining smelter and many other jobs. He eventually took a master's degree in English.
He served an LDS mission, and in 1952 married Susanne Spencer in the Salt Lake City Temple. Sue preceded him in death in early 2012.
He was a soldier. During the Korean War era his scores on a qualification test directed him toward technical training of his fellow recruits. He taught small arms repair. While performing this duty he gained a fascination with the process of technical instruction, as well as with gunsmithing and firearm design, which would last the rest of his life.
He was an enthusiastic scout and then scoutmaster, proposing the name of Utah's Explorer Peak when he was an explorer scout. Later, as a scoutmaster, he tested the endurance of his Explorer Scouts with trips into Utah's High Uintas Primitive Area, once with a two-week backpack journey to King's Peak which involved a 100-mile hike for a group of a dozen boys in rough terrain at high altitude.
He was a university academic (eventually rising to full professor) with a very broad range of interests. From 1963 until his retirement in 1994 he taught in the Department of English at BYU. There he inaugurated the university's first technical writing course and co-founded the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW). At the same time he taught English literature and published a volume of poetry. Often, his poetry dealt with emotional reactions to technology, while at the same time his work in technical writing instruction emphasized the usefulness of metaphor in engineering and the social and natural sciences.
He was an avid private airplane pilot, an avocation that gave him the chance to use his mechanical aptitudes to the fullest, in the construction of his own experimental aircraft. He was badly crippled in a light airplane accident in 1989. He spent his remaining 24 years in increasing physical disability, and often pain, from spinal nerve damage. Nevertheless, by effort of will he returned to teaching in 1990 and published a second volume of poetry. As before, his passion for the idea of a natural and useful combination of technological understanding with poetic art, served as a major inspiration for his work.
His older brother Richard and his wife Sue predeceased him. He is survived by his three children, Steven Bradley Harris, Scott Jefferson Harris, and Polly Anne Harris, by seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
A reception and memorial service will be held at 3 P.M., at the Springville Stake Center, 245 S 600 E, Springville, UT, on Friday, October 4, 2013.
Condolences may be left for the family in the comment section below.
John Sterling Harris, teacher and poet, died at home on the evening of September 21. He was 83. He had lived in his beloved Springville, Utah antique house, for 51 years. His final illness was a brief pneumonia complicated by many chronic medical problems.
He was the second child of Sterling Richard Harris and Viola Green Harris of Tooele, Utah. His father was a superintendent of schools and a state prize-winning football coach, who came from a family of educators (Sterling was a brother of BYU president Franklin S. Harris).
John was a child of the Great Depression, having been born on the day the U.S. stock market collapsed in 1929. By the early 1950's, in a better economy, he was able to work his way through college by working at a mining smelter and many other jobs. He eventually took a master's degree in English.
He served an LDS mission, and in 1952 married Susanne Spencer in the Salt Lake City Temple. Sue preceded him in death in early 2012.
He was a soldier. During the Korean War era his scores on a qualification test directed him toward technical training of his fellow recruits. He taught small arms repair. While performing this duty he gained a fascination with the process of technical instruction, as well as with gunsmithing and firearm design, which would last the rest of his life.
He was an enthusiastic scout and then scoutmaster, proposing the name of Utah's Explorer Peak when he was an explorer scout. Later, as a scoutmaster, he tested the endurance of his Explorer Scouts with trips into Utah's High Uintas Primitive Area, once with a two-week backpack journey to King's Peak which involved a 100-mile hike for a group of a dozen boys in rough terrain at high altitude.
He was a university academic (eventually rising to full professor) with a very broad range of interests. From 1963 until his retirement in 1994 he taught in the Department of English at BYU. There he inaugurated the university's first technical writing course and co-founded the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW). At the same time he taught English literature and published a volume of poetry. Often, his poetry dealt with emotional reactions to technology, while at the same time his work in technical writing instruction emphasized the usefulness of metaphor in engineering and the social and natural sciences.
He was an avid private airplane pilot, an avocation that gave him the chance to use his mechanical aptitudes to the fullest, in the construction of his own experimental aircraft. He was badly crippled in a light airplane accident in 1989. He spent his remaining 24 years in increasing physical disability, and often pain, from spinal nerve damage. Nevertheless, by effort of will he returned to teaching in 1990 and published a second volume of poetry. As before, his passion for the idea of a natural and useful combination of technological understanding with poetic art, served as a major inspiration for his work.
His older brother Richard and his wife Sue predeceased him. He is survived by his three children, Steven Bradley Harris, Scott Jefferson Harris, and Polly Anne Harris, by seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
A reception and memorial service will be held at 3 P.M., at the Springville Stake Center, 245 S 600 E, Springville, UT, on Friday, October 4, 2013.
Condolences may be left for the family in the comment section below.
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