THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602170142
SECTION: SUFFOLK SUN PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FRANK ROBERTS
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
In the 1930s, Robert L. Ripley created ``Believe It Or Not,'' a comic strip about people who beat the odds and other unique topics.
When readers found some of his presentations to stretch believability, he just referred them to the title.
Suffolk resident Russell Harris, 86, could have qualified as a Ripley subject. He claims at least 14 near-death experiences, most during his 17 years at sea - beginning in the mid-1920s - and most while working on tugboats.
His luck plummeted after he left the water and opened Harris Repair Service on East Washington Street.
In 1981, he was robbed by a man who hit him across the face with a beer bottle. Glass got into his eyes, and - 19 operations later - at least some of it is still there. He gets ``sharp pains once in a while,'' he said.
For nine years, he has lived in a Constance Road apartment. He's usually in an easy chair, next to a rack of tapes filled with song lyrics he wrote.
``My daddy left when I was 15,'' he recalled. With two younger siblings, ``I had to go to work,'' so ``I got on a tugboat.''
His 1971, U.S. Merchant Mariners Document lists him as an ordinary seaman, fireman, water tender, junior engineer, oiler, electrician, machinist, deck engineer, pump man, refrigerating engineer and mess man.
One of his adventures was on the tug Joseph M. Clark. Harris watched guns blasting away at a target on a Navy ship.
A dog, cat and rooster were on the ship. The dog and cat were killed in a blast, he said. ``The rooster was spared. They took it to the Portsmouth Navy Yard and built a gold cage for him. He stayed there till he died two years later.''
An Army target, towed on a barge in '26, also gave him problems. ``Shells were flying in all directions - duds, not live. One of 'em came between me and my buddy - blistered the side of my head.''
The shells kept coming, another flattening the smokestack. ``Nothing we could do - no radio. The captain said we should run for our lives. He blew the distress signal. The engineer said if we were gonna make any time, he should quit blowin' the whistle. ``It's takin' my steam.''
Harris smiles as he vividly tells his stories.
``He's gone over them many times,'' said his son, Jimmy, during a phone interview from his home in Moore, Okla. ``How many of the stories are true, I have no way of knowing.''
In another 1926 escapade, Harris's tug became a slave to heavy winds, heavy seas.
``I stepped out of my bunk into a foot of water. Once, I had to fight a goose that came through the window,'' said Harris, who also recalled that ``the second engineer got hit in the face by waves and was in the corner, crying.''
And this close call: He was to go to work on a collier docked in Newport News, but arrived there after the ship sailed.
``When I got back (to the office) a guy picked me up, carried me and hollered - ``here's the guy that missed the ship.'' It had gone down.
In a 1963 brow-wiper, a ship went down. Harris was supposed to be aboard, ``but,'' he said, ``I'd just gotten over pneumonia and the doctor wouldn't approve me getting on.''
Another escapade also took place that year when the tug, Louise, went down after being rammed. ``The sea rushed in and pushed me out. I had a mattress under me.''
Crewmen on a passing ship saw him floating on the mattress and hauled Harris in.
Space does not permit relating all the adventures, but this one seems appropriate, now that angels are all the rage.
Harris, who was flying to Hawaii to board a ship there, smilingly recalls meeting a ``tall, good-looking woman at the airport. I told her I was a marine engineer. She said they were making a movie called ``Hawaiian Eye.''
The two were so busy gazing into each other's eyes, they missed the plane. As you can guess by now, it exploded in the air.
Harris and the girl agreed they had saved each other.
``A moment later, I couldn't find the girl,'' he said. ``No one had seen her. I always called her my guardian angel.''
Believe it or not. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
When his eyesight was better, Russell Harris enjoyed painting.
by CNB