Katherine Harris

HARRIS, Katherine Mary Kraft, 93, widow of Dr. William Henry Harris Jr., and a resident of West-minster Canterbury Richmond for the past five years, died on April 23, 2010. The only child of Edna Rendall Kraft and John Hill Kraft, she was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on October 29, 1916. Katie, as she was called, attended the public schools of Des Moines, graduating from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1934. She spent her freshman year of college at Grinnell in Grinnell, Iowa, and then transferred to the University of Iowa, where she was chosen as the Pep Queen for 1936 and was a member of the Beta Zeta chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. In 1938 she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in journalism. She continued her studies in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where one of her professors was Douglas Southall Freeman. After earning a master's degree in journalism from Columbia in 1939, she remained in New York City, doing research and publicity for Carl Byoir & Associates, a public relations firm. It was in New York that she met her future husband, William Harris, a Richmond native who was serving his residency at Bellevue Hospital. They were wed on June 15, 1940 in Des Moines. When Dr. Harris joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps several months after Pearl Harbor, Katie traveled with him to a succession of army bases and training schools. After he shipped out to the Aleutian Islands, she returned home to Des Moines and worked for the Iowa Poll (which would evolve into the Gallup Poll) at the Des Moines Register and Tribune. After the war, in 1946, she and her husband settled in Richmond, where they lived for the rest of their lives. They had three sons, and Katie was active in many cultural, social, artistic, and service organizations, among them The Woman's Club, the Tuckahoe Woman's Club, the Council of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Windsor Farms Garden Club, the Tuckahoe Artists Association, the Richmond Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Home for Needy Confederate Women, the English-Speaking Union, and several others. Among her special interests were painting and bridge playing. Her vibrant and colorful paintings, mostly done in watercolor or acrylic, adorn the walls of numerous Richmond homes, and a 50-year retrospective of her work was exhibited in the second-floor gallery of the Richmond Public Library in May of 2002 as part of the First Friday series. She was also an avid player of bridge and she kept detailed logs in spiral notebooks of the activities of the many bridge clubs to which she belonged. In the fall of 1964 she served as society editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch while the then-editor, Edith Lindeman, was on sabbatical. She was predeceased, in 2002, by her husband of 62 years. She is survived by her three sons, all of Richmond, Tyler Rendall Harris (Frances), William Henry Harris III (Gail), and John (continued)


This obituary was originally published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.