Mayor Ken Ladner issued a proclamation at Tuesday night’s Town Council meeting, declaring June 22, 2022, James William (Bill) Harrison Day. He was honored to share this special moment with his family, right before his 100th birthday.
“Being old isn’t for sissies,” Bill Harrison said this week, just days before his 100th birthday. “That’s a saying I would certainly agree with. I have to be extremely careful I don’t fall, and I have to be careful getting out of bed — making sure my equilibrium is established before I get up.”
James William “Bill” Harrison, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and as Silver City’s town manager, a Grant County commissioner and Southwest New Mexico Council of Governments director among his many careers, will celebrate his 100th birthday on June 22.
The observances began Tuesday at the Silver City Town Council meeting, where Mayor Ken Ladner proclaimed next Wednesday as Bill Harrison Day, and will continue next Tuesday at the Silver City Rotary Club’s meeting, where he will speak. He’ll begin his birthday morning at breakfast with his comrades in the American Legion, just as he does every Wednesday, and he’ll also be feted at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd on Sunday, June 26.
And at every event: carrot cake.
Harrison came to Grant County at age 47, but began his life in 1922 in the small town of Piedmont, Okla., born to a sharecropper father and a mother who tragically passed away 16 days after his birth. That’s something he said he has struggled with to this day.
“My dad took my sister and I out to my grandmother’s farm, where she was raising five of her grandchildren whose parents had died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1917 to 1918,” Harrison remembers. “I was raised by my grandmother, my five cousins, my dad and my sister until I was 6. When I was 6, my dad married again, and we moved to a house about 4 miles away.”
That house burned down within two months of the family’s moving in. They moved to a new home, and Harrison began to have problems with his new stepmother, who he said was exceedingly abusive, both physically and mentally.
“She could not have children, and she was jealous of us — it made our life hell,” Harrison said. “I still have a great deal of problems with self-worth, because she made me feel like I was worth absolutely nothing, and everybody would be better off if I was dead. In particular, she made me feel like I should’ve died, and my mother should’ve lived. I’ve lived with that my whole life, and that has motivated my overachieving and doing more than I was required to do.”
Around age 12, Harrison and his father went on a fishing and hunting trip to the Illinois River in eastern Oklahoma. The trip led Harrison to an unlikely group of men who taught him how to hunt squirrels.
“We went to a little town, and my dad went up to the filling station men and asked if they knew a place that they would allow us to fish,” he said.
They were allowed to fish and set up camp at a cabin by the river — so long as they agreed to leave once the man’s nephew arrived. In the middle of the night, a car showed up with two couples in it and allowed Harrison and his father to stay until morning, according to Harrison.
“In the morning, we moved our camp, and Dad went down the river fishing, and I had a single-shot .22 rifle I went squirrel hunting with,” he said. “I was sitting under a tree, and this guy walked up to me — he had on an old-fashioned cap with a snap in the brim. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was squirrel hunting.”
When Harrison said he’d had no luck hunting, the man took the opportunity to teach him. After the man taught Harrison how to kill the squirrels, he proudly brought the squirrels back to camp — knowing fried squirrels would be on the menu that night.
“My dad came in pretty soon and asked if that fella came by while I was hunting, and I said, ‘Yes, he taught me how to shoot squirrels,’” he remembered. “My dad said, ‘You know, he taught me how to catch fish out of this river.’ We stayed there two days, and then the night before we planned on moving, in the middle of the night we heard the car leave, and the four people were gone.”
As they approached the gate to leave, they found a padlock on it. Harrison’s father had to ask the farmer to unlock it. The farmer insisted that his nephew would not allow them to leave and this led to major confusion.
As it turned out, the man’s nephew was “Pretty Boy” Floyd — one of the most notorious bank robbers of the time. The men were there planning their next robbery, and did not want any outsiders to hear their plans.
“I had one of the leading outlaws in Oklahoma teach me how to hunt squirrels,” he laughed.
Soon after his fishing and hunting trip to Oklahoma, Harrison slipped and fell while playing outside — right onto a broken bottle, slicing his wrist and almost cutting off his entire hand.
“My cousin had been a Boy Scout, and he knew to put a tourniquet on it, but it was 9 miles to the nearest doctor,” he said. “My dad was not with us, so my stepmother called my dad at the filling station and told him to meet us at the doctor’s office. The doctor said he couldn’t do anything, and we had to go 30 miles to the hospital.”
Doctors there gave him a choice: They could cut off his hand or try to save it. The young Harrison chose the obvious option, and a doctor found ligaments and tied them together in order to save his hand. While the surgery saved the hand, it remained very weak, and led Harrison to realize he’d have to find a career that didn’t require physical labor.
After high school, he attended business college in Oklahoma City, 20 miles away. He would walk a mile to the highway and hitch a ride to Oklahoma City, and he claims he was very good at shorthand typing.
World War II was quickly approaching, and Navy recruiters told Harrison that he would be drafted into the Army before he knew it.
“I didn’t have enough sense to know that on the farm, I would have had an exemption, but I had nobody advising me of that sort of thing,” Harrison said. The recruiter offered him enlistment in the Navy Reserve, telling him that he’d probably never be called up.
“My grandma told me not to sign up, and so I did,” he said. “I signed up on the sixth day of June, 1941, and on the 17th day, I was on active duty in San Diego, California. But I was a third-class yeoman — which is a secretary. I did not go through any training of any sort.”
When the war broke out, the Navy was in the process of converting a civilian ship into a Navy tanker by welding guns onto the deck and so on. One month after the start of the war, Harrison arrived in Pearl Harbor, bringing oil from San Pedro to the fleet, and other places where it was needed in the South Pacific. At Pearl Harbor, he was promoted to yeoman second class, and was assigned to the public information office.
“I actually wrote the story that the Navy used for the Battle of Midway,” he said.
After Midway, he was called into the office, where a tall and very distinguished-looking admiral asked how Harrison was on independent work without supervision. The admiral was Richard E. Byrd, who traveled the Pacific inspecting bases. He asked Harrison to become his yeoman.
“Admiral Byrd was the one who made the movie, before WWII, of Antarctica, and I had seen it, so he was a great hero,” he said. “Admiral Byrd said we were going to leave early in the morning, so if I had friends, I needed to say goodbye, and I did.”
A month later, on his way from late-night duty at the office, he hit a barricade with the childhood scar on his hand, which was paralyzed completely.
“I just couldn’t use it, and after a little while, they decided I couldn’t be a yeoman anymore,” he said. “They sent me back to the States for a medical discharge, but they sent me on the USS President Grant — which was a very slow Army transport. By the time I got back to the States, I could move my hand a little bit. So when I got back, I said, ‘Let’s take time to fix this. I don’t need a discharge,’ and they said all right.”
Later on, he was asked by his lieutenant to write a private letter for a Marine Corps officer in a rush.
“The Marine Corps officer was sitting there, and said he was in a real hurry,” he said. “He started out, “Dear Dad, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. I hope you’ll take care of yourself because we need you. I got a letter from my mother, as busy as she is doing everything.”
The man went on to list everywhere he had been, and everything he had been doing. Part of Harrison’s job was to censor enlisted men’s mail, he said, and he knew this letter couldn’t be sent, but he wrote it anyway. He was told by the officer to “sign that ‘Your loving son, Jimmy,’ and send it to Dad,” and the man abruptly left.
“The lieutenant came in and said, ‘Did you get that letter?’ and I said, ‘Yes, but it can’t go — it’s got too much stuff in it,’” Harrison remembered. “He said, ‘You idiot, didn’t you know who that was? That was Jimmy Roosevelt, [the president’s] son — you send it to the president of the United States. It’s going to the White House.’ They really teased me about that.”
Harrison’s four years in the Navy led him to become one of the subjects of Grant County Beat Publisher Mary Alice Murphy’s book, “God’s Umbrella: Southwest New Mexico World War II Survivors.” She said he was a treat to interview.
“He loves being with people,” Murphy said. “Bill has a great sense of humor, and didn’t mind being ribbed about his incident with Roosevelt.”
Harrison received an honorable discharge in November 1945, and went to law school in 1946 — graduating in 1949 from Oklahoma City University with an LLB before passing the bar exam.
“I got married in 1947, and we were married for 70 years — she died five years ago,” he said. “Everybody comes to see lawyers when they’re in trouble, and I decided I didn’t want to spend my whole life just dealing with people in trouble. Plus, people lie to their lawyers.”
Harrison began his first job as an apprentice to the city manager in Georgetown, Texas, and later became a city manager in Alaska, being certified by the International City Manager Association. In 1969, Harrison’s wife, Marge, learned that she had cancer, causing him to pursue a job in a new state with a better climate for her health.
“I looked at a list of cities looking for city managers, and Silver City was one of them,” he said. “My family was in Oklahoma City, and her family was in Georgetown, Texas — close enough to where we can visit, but not too close.”
After a visit and an interview with the Silver City Town Council, he was offered the job. But Harrison had conditions: a home, no personnel changes until he got on the job, 30 days’ notice before his termination and a letter that laid out the conditions. He and Marge moved to Silver City in November 1969.
Harrison helped make changes in Silver City government, and quickly became well known in town. Although he accomplished a great deal during his time here, he is adamant that it would have been impossible without the help of elected officials and the community as a whole.
“It’s not ‘I,’ it’s ‘we,’” he emphasized. “I didn’t do it, I just spearheaded it. It was done by a lot of good and honest people that devoted their time. So, if I’ve succeeded in anything, it’s because all these people worked together to get it done — and we got a lot done. When I became 65, I retired and ran for County Commission.”
The Harrisons raised three children, and have a total of four grandkids and seven great-grandkids who mean the world to him. Of course, he said, he has many regrets, but he would not change a thing.
“Physically, it’s not good,” he said when asked how it feels to be almost 100. “My hearing is impaired — since WWII, I can only hear out of one ear. My sight is impaired; I have macular degeneration and general blurry vision, and I hurt all the time because of arthritis.”
Mentally, he said that he only has one problem: remembering names, which he said bothers him a whole lot.
Harrison plans on living out the rest of his life in Silver City, and said he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. Despite the struggles that come with old age, Harrison said with support from his family and friends, he knows he will always be all right.
Harrison’s advice at age 100?
“If you hurt anybody, go tell them you’re sorry while you can,” he said. “I’m too handicapped to do it now, and many of them have died.
“You need to have peace with your maker — you have to have peace with God,” Harrison continued. “If you can, then everything else follows. You’ve got to have the help of a lot of people. But I don’t drink or smoke, and I try to eat decently and take care of myself. Really and truly — the thing most people die from at my age is loneliness, and I try to overcome that.”
He said he listens to audiobooks daily to help cope with feelings of loneliness, because hearing a human voice keeps him going.
And there’s always breakfast.
Harrison has also been an active member in the American Legion since 2018, enjoying coffee and doughnuts with his friends there from 8 to 10 a.m. every Wednesday.
“[Harrison] is a very thorough, very respectful, and a very honorable man,” said David Morrison, service officer at Allingham-Golding American Legion Post 18. “I know he was involved in a lot of things, veteranwise, and has been very active in our community.”
Jordan Archunde may be reached at jordan@scdaily press.com.
