By Mason Hood
Charlotte, Nov. 16—On Monday night, November 16th, Charlotte, with representatives from among the editorial writers from the state and with representatives from other professions in the state, will assemble at the Chamber of Commerce to celebrate with Col. Wade H. Harris the rounding out of his 50th year as a North Carolina editor.
It is believed here that Colonel Harris’ career as an editor will challenge any in the state for length of service and for volume of editorial matter written over a period of 50 years.
At first, a few friends of Col. Harris in Charlotte, learning that it had been a half century this year since he entered upon his career as an editor, had planned a small informal dinner. C.O. Kesuter, business manager of the Chamber of Commerce, and E. Randolph Preston, long-time friend of Col. Harris started the matter when Mr. Preston made the discovery as to the length of service Col Harris had put in as a North Carolina editor.
However, the first plans were found wholly inadequate, as others learned of the affair and asked the privilege of being in on it. The upshot of it was that the occasion will be made an event for the city, with the Chamber of Commerce sponsoring it. Consequently, handsomely engraved cards went out last week from the Chamber of Commerce, bearing its official insignia and inviting the receiver to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, and the city in an event to honor one of the state’s greatest editors.
Colonel Harris put on the editorial harness in 1875, and has never put them off. He is a fine example of how one’s occupation, if it is of the kind to arouse enthusiasm, may prove a matter of both recreation and labor at the same time. He says he has got lots of kick out of being an editor 50 years and “has had more fun than most of the boys.”
Mr. Harris was born at Sandy Ridge, Cabarrus County, the son of Richard Sadler and Mary Annette Harris, January 1, 1858, three miles east of Kannapolis, went to town school under General James H. Lane’s tutelage for a while and later was under the instruction of B.F. Rogers at the same school. At the age of 15, he entered the printing office of The Concord Sun, established and owned by his uncle, Charles F. Harris. He became a proficient typesetter and all-round printer there.
In January of 1875, young Harris was sent off to Blacksburg, Va., for a session at the agricultural and mechanical college, now the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and was there again under the influence of General Lane, who was head of the military department of the college. He came home in the same year and entered definitely upon newspaper work as the editor of The Concord Sun.
In the fall of that year young Harris went to Wilmington to take the position of city editor of The Daily Sun printed there. The paper did not last long and the spring of 1880 found him back in Concord. While awaiting arrangements for again taking over the editorship of The Concord Sun, he did editorial work on The Greensboro Patriot, in association with Major P.F. Duffy. The Sun came back into his possession in the summer of 1881 and in May, 1882 he answered the call of Col. Charles R. Jones to come to Charlotte and take a position on The Charlotte Observer.
In Charlotte he began in earnest the long editorial career that has marked him out as one of the great editors of the state and of the South. Accurate and painstaking education drilled into him in a private school at Concord, conducted by Misses Helen and Lily Long, are reckoned as factors in the timely training of a mind that has blossomed into fine fruitage for his native state. Miss Lily Long survives.
In 1888 Mr. Harris left The Charlotte Observer and founded The Charlotte News, which he sold a year later to W.C. Dowd and went back to The Observer. In 1892 Mr. Harris became editor-in-chief of The Charlotte Evening Chronicle, which had been founded six months earlier by Howard Banks. In May 1912 Mr. Harris became editor-in-chief of The Charlotte Observer, and has served in that capacity seven days in the week ever since without an assistant. All this work on Charlotte papers was in the capacity of editorial writer, except when he came to “Charlotte in 1882 to become city editor of The Observer. He became editorial writer shortly after taking the position on The Observer.
The editorial work of Mr. Harris has been conspicuously and unceasingly on the side of progress during his stay in Charlotte, with in high record for having won the points he advocated. It began with persistent advocacy of street cars for Charlotte (referring only to civic matters in Charlotte) and soon extended to initial and valiant support of the Catawba River power project started by the late Dr. Gil Wylie, which was the beginning of the Southern Power Company.
Mr. Harris’ editorial crusading in the field of North Carolina politics has been co-extensive with his editorial responsibilities. He was valiant protagonist for Vance and Vance’s cause in 1876, when the state was rested from the reconstruction regime, in the Vance-Settle campaign.
Another notable contribution as a winning factor in a major political campaign was in the Simmons-Kitchin-Clark campaign for the United States Senate, in which Editor Harris with characteristic persistence and unrelenting advocacy, secured Simmons’ nomination.
Another notably successful editorial triumph was the Morrison-Gardner-Page gubernatorial campaign in 1920, in which he did the major editorial fighting among state editors in advocacy of Morrison as the logical man for the place. He was consistently a strong advocate of Morrison’s program of progress that has turned the eyes of the nation on North Carolina.
In 1916, Mr. Harris was a delegate from North Carolina to the national Democratic convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson for the second time at St. Louis, and a delegate-at-large of the national Democratic convention in 1920. He was also a member of the North Carolina delegation sent to Shadow Lawn, N.J., to notify President Wilson of his nomination.
In 1919 Mr. Harris spent three months in Europe as one of a delegation sent over by the Southern Commercial Congress and was one of the invited group of American editors invited in 1924 to attend the United States naval maneuvers in the southern waters, the visitors also taking in Porto Rico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and the Virgin Islands.
Mr. Harris takes most pride in the work he accomplished in the Vance-Settle campaign, the Simmons-Clark-Kitchin campaign, and the campaign that made Morrison governor, with its relation to the success of the $50,000,000 bond issue and the program of progress that has so spectacularly placed North Carolin among the progressive states of the union.
Those who have read Mr. Harris’ editorials over a period of years pay him the tribute of being perhaps the state’s best informed editor about all topics relating to North Carolina. He is credited with being an authority on her forests, minerals, climate, people, institutions, history and potential possibilities as a commonwealth and to find more unalloyed joy than any other editor in dwelling lovingly upon the merits of both the people and the state he has so long served.
From the front page of the Concord Daily Tribune, Monday, Nov. 16, 1925. Puerto Rico was spelled “Porto Rico” in 1925. To see the photo of Wade Hampton Harris, go to:
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-11-16/ed-1/seq-1/
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