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A Conversation With World War I Author and Historian Steve Harris About His Most Recent Book: Duffy’s War


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Tuesday October 3, 2006

By Larry Johnson

It’s little wonder that Steve Harris became a writer; It would have been surprising if he had turned out to be anything else. Steve grew up in a family of newspapermen. His grandfather and two great uncles were reporters on the Kansas City Star, at the same time as Ernest Hemingway was working for that paper. His grandfather later transferred his typewriter to the New York Herald and became that paper’s foreign editor. It is a family whose bloodline was richly endowed with printer’s ink.

After high school Steve spent one year at the University of Arizona. He later transferred to Trinity College in Burlington where he received a B.A. degree. He later enrolled at The New School in New York City and spent an entire year fine-tuning his writing skills in a professional workshop setting.

Back in Connecticut, Steve continued his newspaper career, and later became a political reporter for The Burlington Free Press; eventually he worked a stint with WCAX-TV, Channel Three, as an editor, and then spent six years as public relations director for Champlain College.

Steve then went to work for General Electric, editing its award-winning magazine, “Monogram,” for the next 14 years. During those years, Steve worked under the leadership of CEO Jack Welch, who earned the reputation as a corporate revolutionary. Welch was instrumental in turning GE into a well-run and progressive corporation. “Welch cleaned out the deadwood,” Steve explained. “There were 28 layers of management when Jack took over, but he whittled that down to just three. He made every employee at GE take ownership of his or her own job, and he was very effective at bringing women into the company.” He wasn’t without his shortcomings, however. He had an explosive temper and an unquotable vocabulary.

“It was a great job,” Steve admitted. “It was undoubtedly the best in-house magazine in the country to work for.” While at GE, Steve traveled the world, wherever GE had a presence. “For example, I spent time in the Amazon River Basin and traveled through the Panama Canal on a container ship,” he told me. He also had many opportunities to do human interest pieces. One of the employees at GE was Michael Jordan’s father, and Steve spent a week at the Jordan family home where he was able to gain some insight into Michael Jordan’s success for an article titled “Michael’s Daddy.” It was obvious to Steve that the Jordan patriarch was a major influence on the son’s athletic success. There was a basketball court in the backyard that had been the training ground for the younger Jordan. Unfortunately, the elder Jordan was later murdered during an auto trip to Chicago. Apparently he got tired driving, pulled over to the side of the road and was murdered by two punks who stole his car.

His time at GE provided Steve with an important learning experience and undoubtedly contributed greatly to his next career move. He left GE in 1991 and became an independent consultant/speech writer for such companies as GTE, Xerox, IBM and Pratt and Whitney. About this time Steve also became interested in the Olympic Games and was employed as a “…senior writer on three best-selling CD-ROM histories of the Olympic Games. One of the histories, ‘Olympic Gold: A 100 Year History of the Summer Olympic Games,’ won the 1996 Gold Milia d’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival as ‘Best Reference Title in the World.’ ”

As an encore, Steve wrote his first book: “100 Golden Olympians.” This project was subsidized by the Xerox Corporation for the United States Olympic Committee. For this contribution, Steve received an honorary gold medal from the USOC and Xerox for his work. “I got an opportunity to talk to a lot Olympians,” Steve told me, “such as Andrea Meade Lawrence, Eric Heiden and Bob Mathias.

In 1999, Steve and his wife Sue decided to move out of their suburban house in Westport, Connecticut, for a variety of reasons but mainly because of a “McMansion” that was being constructed next door. “It almost blocked out the sun,” Steve told me. The couple was not without connections in Vermont. They had lived in Burlington during Steve’s TV and newspaper stint in that city, and Sue’s grandparents, Walla and Gladys Stearns, had lived in Brooksville on a farm just up the road from the late Dog Team Tavern in New Haven. The couple decided to move to Vermont and it was only a matter of where. They were driving through Middlebury one day and Steve turned to Sue and asked “Do you think you would like to live here?” Sue replied with an emphatic “Yes” and the two began looking for a home. They eventually bought a house on the Sheep Farm Road in Weybridge. Sue got a job at Middlebury College, as the coordinator at Ross Commons, and Steve set about completing the first of three books about World War I.

“Duty, Honor, Privilege” is a story about New York’s 7th Regiment, the 107th U.S. Infantry. It was made up, in large part, by New York City’s upper crust and the less than elite “Appleknockers” of upstate New York. This regiment was famous for “…breaking the Hindenburg Line on September 29th, 1918, and for losing more men in one day than any regiment in U.S. history.” The “Silk Stocking” regiment, as it was originally referred to, proved its metal when it successfully “attacked the center of one of the strongest fortifications yet constructed.”

His second book “Harlem’s Hell Fighters,” was a tribute to “the first African-American fighting force to land in France in World War I.” The idea for the book came out of the research Steve had done for “Duty, Honor, Privilege.” The black regiment, the New York 15th, was training at the same camp in Spartanburg, South Carolina, as the New York Silk Stocking Regiment, when the camp commander decided to kick the Blacks out of the camp. Apparently they had no where else to go but France, and when the Silk Stocking Regiment discovered what was happening to their New York comrades, “the 107th formed a double line, like a gauntlet, and as the blacks marched through, the white boys…sang to them George M. Cohen’s stirring ‘Over There.’ ”

Something similar happened to inspire the third book of the Trilogy: “Duffy’s War.” Researching “Harlem’s Hell Fighters,” Steve came across an incident that exemplified the southerner’s disdain for the New York black regiment and the New Yorker’s cohesiveness that transcended race. The black 15th was preparing to sail from Camp Mills when it came to their attention that the southerners at the camp were preparing to attack them. When the threat became evident to the Irish Regiment, that an attack was imminent on their black, New York comrades, “the 69th slipped their New York comrades-in-arms, ammunition for their rifles.” The threat was defused, and, more importantly for us, Steve Harris decided on the theme for his last book of the series. “Duffy’s War” will be out in early October of this year, and if it is half as good as “Duty, Honor, Privilege,” it will be a page-turner with few equals.


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