THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 24, 1995 TAG: 9501240304
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GUY FRIDDELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
Former Gov. Albertis S. Harrison Jr., a harmonizer credited with setting the stage in conservative Virginia for a succession of moderate governors, died Monday at age 88 in his home in Lawrenceville.
Handsome, white-haired, ever cool, Harrison looked like a Virginia governor, people said. Many thought he made a good one, too.
``Albertis was such an approachable individual, who believed in mediation rather than opposition if it was possible,'' said his sidekick, former Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr.
Harrison, who became governor in 1962, said Virginia had to be ``more than money-honest.'' In a frugal state of granitic integrity, he said the time had come to pay more heed to people's needs.
He left a hefty surplus as his term ended in 1966 and also urged in his final address that the General Assembly adopt a sales tax.
He thereby opened a way to pay for Godwin's progressive program. The two had huddled over the move and Harrison worked like a smooth quarterback in handing off the idea to the General Assembly.
One of his problems as governor was to reopen schools that Prince Edward County had closed in 1959 to try to evade the U.S. Supreme Court's order to integrate them.
President John F. Kennedy spurred a nationwide fund-raising effort to help a foundation reopen schools. But somebody had to head the venture.
Harrison asked former Gov. Colgate Darden to drop by his office. ``There's a little something I want you to do for me,'' he told Darden.
Darden arrived and Harrison posed the challenge. Darden finally agreed. In leaving, he turned and asked: ``Is there any other little thing you want me to do for you, Albertis?''
``That'll do for now,'' Harrison said.
Godwin appointed him to the Virginia Supreme Court in September 1967. In 1968 Godwin asked the persuasive Harrison to head an 11-member commission revising the Virginia Constitution.
Among other advances, it eased restraints on the state's borrowing powers and sought a guarantee of an education of high quality to every Virginia child.
When a half-dozen other states were rejecting constitutional reforms, Virginians approved them.
As state senator, governor and Supreme Court justice, Harrison was the first Virginian to serve in all three branches of government.
Born Jan. 11, 1907, he was the son of a Brunswick County farmer and a school-teaching mother who instilled in him a drive to excel.
With a degree from the University of Virginia Law School, where he was an editor of the Virginia Law Review, he won in 1930 a race for commonwealth's attorney of Brunswick County.
Harrison once said, ``I was not `urged by countless friends' to become a candidate, as politicians sometimes claim. The only people who asked me to run were my parents, who thought it was high time that I made some money.''
He kept that post, unopposed, for 16 years, broken briefly by World War II service in the Navy. In 1947, he was elected to the Virginia Senate and in 1957 ran for attorney general, backed by Harry F. Byrd's powerful conservative organization.
As a state senator, Harrison had a major hand in shaping on a legislative commission a somewhat moderate approach to the U.S. Supreme Court's school desegregation decree. It would have allowed localities flexibility in meeting the court's orders.
But Byrd bulled the legislature into adopting Massive Resistance to integration. In the most trying phase of his career, Harrison had to defend that stance in federal courts.
In 1958, Harrison wrote to Byrd that desegregation was inevitable. In December, a group of business leaders warned Almond and Harrison that new industries would avoid areas where schools were threatened.
In 1959, state and federal courts junked Massive Resistance. Harrison helped then-Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. develop the freedom of choice plan that freed Virginia.
In 1961, Harrison won a hot primary race for governor against valorous Lt. Gov. A.E.S. Stephens.
Harrison and other Virginia governors, Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly called on one another for help in those days.
KEYWORDS: OBITUARY by CNB