Nov 18 2008
Following in my father’s footsteps
November 18th marks the 30th anniversary of a deadly ambush and mass suicide in a place called Jonestown Guyana. At least 900 people killed themselves or were forced to drink cyanide laced Kool-Aid after their cult leader signaled it was time to self destruct a compound that Jones and his followers had carved out of a South American jungle.
Jones had promised the remote village would serve as a Utopian society were residents could live closer to God, the problem was Jones thought he was God.
As is the case with all self proclaimed disciples Jones began to abuse his powers. When word of the problems reached the San Francisco bay area, the place where many of Jones’ followers were from, Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate.
My father, Don Harris, covered the west coast for NBC Nightly News at the time and decided he would accompany Ryan on his fact finding mission in Guyana.
After some resistance, Jones allowed the media and Ryan’s delegation to visit the compound. For two days with the help of lots of signing and dancing Jones was able to put on a pretty good performance … the people in the cult said they felt safe and happy.
However on the second night one of the cult members slipped my dad a small note. The yellow piece of paper explained that Jonestown was not a happy place, that women and children were being raped and tortured. The author asked that my dad fly him out of Jonestown and my dad agreed to save him a seat.
However the next day my dad decided to take the note and confront Jim Jones on camera. It was the last interview my dad would do. An outraged Jones ordered all of the visitors out of the camp and my dad, his camera crew and Ryan returned to a nearby airstrip. While they waited to board their two planes and tractor pulling a small trailer pulled up next to the aircraft.
A group of men who had been laying down in the trailer suddenly stood up and started shooting. My dad was one of the first people hit. Bob Brown, his camera man, bravely kept rolling during the ambush and I fear recorded his own execution.
Word that something had happened on the runway reached my family in Los Angeles later that day. My mom Shirley called me at my part time job at a drive through dairy but I downplayed her fears saying my dad was more than capable of taking care of himself. He was one of the last reporters in Saigon when it fell and covered the Six Day War in the Middle East.
Unfortunately I was wrong.
We now know Jones specifically ordered my dad killed and there wasn’t a lot of cover out on that runway. My dad’s sound man Steve Sung was able to escape into the nearby jungle but not before a shotgun blast tore away a good part of his forearm. I got to see him several years later at a political convention and was shocked by Steve’s wound. The flesh missing from his arm was a painful reminder that my dad’s death had been very violent.
Thirty years later finds me doing the job that I’ve wanted to do since I was five years old. That’s when my family says I walked into my dad’s Tampa TV station and asked general manager Bob Doty for a job. Bob declined my offer to work but the year after my dad was killed hired me on as a summer intern at WINK TV in Ft. Myers, Florida.
I regret I repaid Bob’s kindness by doing an unauthorized story on security at the Ft. Myers airport. Without any managers permission I tried to sneak some simulated Molotov cocktails passed the baggage screening area and got caught. My idea came from a story my dad had done in Dallas in 1972 when the airport had just started to use magnetometers to search for guns. My dad’s investigative report, done with his bosses approval, showed the equipment was not as effective as it needed to be.
My story showed that I was an idiot.
Trying to emulate your folks is all well and good, but I clearly did not have the experience or maturity to do what I did.
Doty had to fire me and my photographer the next day. The FBI asked that I not return to Florida.
Since 1982 I’ve made other reporter mistakes but have tried to up hold my heritage of fairness and honesty. Like anybody who follows in their folks footsteps you try to keep those qualities alive. I worry a lot of our viewers don’t like us and even worse, don’t trust the news media and I try to change those impression relations every day.
When my dad was killed in 1978 I vowed to become the youngest correspondent to join the network. At the time Tom Brokaw had set the mark at age 36. So I started jumping from market to market but something happened when I got a job here in Spokane. We bought our first house here, had our second baby at Sacred Heart and when we realized there was a park or lake just about every other block we decided to make Spokane our home forever.
After living all over the country we know you’d be hard pressed to find a prettier city with nicer people.
I regret my dad never got to meet my wife Lori. He would be very impressed. He would also be very proud the way his grandchildren Brad and Jessica turned out. Most of all he would be glad 30 years later we have moved on with our lives and we are happy but his daughters, his son and his wife still miss him very much.
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Jeff;
I had no idea. I was truly touched by the story.
My prayers are with you at what must be a difficult time.
Ben
Jeff,
That story was very touching. I will always remember this story. God bless you and your family on this day.
Jeffie:
As always, I love you, and your integrity does us proud.
Be well, be safe. Talk soon.
Always,
L
Jeff,
My old friend,
You’re the best reporter a photographer could work with. You shared your story many years ago with me, and I always think about you and your family this time of year.
Take Care
Hi Jeff:
Its really good to be able to contact you. I am glad to see you are doing well.
All the best!
My friend - I watched the coverage of your interview here. You have carried your Dad’s baton & passion for people … he and ALL OF US have been touched and blessed to have you on the beat. Always close … Tom
Jeff
I was 16 when that tragic event happened. It must be gut wrenching of losing your father in that situation. I have a question: Have you ever think about doing a movie based on your dad’s life? If so, who’ll played the role?
Dear Jeff, When we watched the KXLY news earlier in the week, we were
dumbfounded to hear the story about your dad. Thank you so much for your
willingness to share that heartbreaking story. I am sure many people will
gain strength and courage from your sharing.
I enjoyed working with you when I was mayor. You were always kind, sincere, knowledgeable, and pleasant! Now I know why - Best wishes in the
years ahead. Sheri
Dear Jeff,
I met your father back in 1967 and recently shared this recollection of him with my old friends from those days. I send it on so you and your mother can see it as well.
Sincerely,
David Nolan
St. Augustine, Florida
******************************************************
Dear friends,
In early 1967, Tom Gardner, Nancy Hodes and I headed to Florida for the first of the statewide “Peace Tours” that I feel, in retrospect, were one of the good accomplishments of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). The thought behind them was that Ann Arbor and Berkeley and other places had many resources and speakers to call on for the Vietnam Teach-Ins that were then sweeping the country. But our southern schools did not. So we would educate ourselves and form a traveling teach-in, which would go from campus to campus, presenting views on Vietnam, China, and American foreign policy that would otherwise not be heard.
Tom was the impresario, and, when Bob Dewart made an unscheduled departure in Atlanta, he also became our “everything but the kitchen sink” speaker. Nancy talked about China, where she had grown up in the last half of the 1950s, and I talked about Vietnam (in a speech that later became a popular SSOC pamphlet: “Vietnam: The Myth and Reality of American Policy”).
We started at Florida State University in the capital city of Tallahassee, then went on to the University of Florida in Gainesville. There, students had placed a conestoga wagon in the campus square to publicize our program–and it was burned down. This was a reflection of the sentiments of the time (we would later all be arrested for “speaking without permission” at Miami Dade Junior College. A painting of Gardner being dragged off by the police was made into a SSOC poster).
Our third stop was the University of South Florida in Tampa, then a relatively new school with what I immediately thought (as a University of Virginia alumnus) was the ugliest campus architecture I had ever seen. A glitch arose. Dean Wunderlich wanted to ban our speeches there (very much in the spirit of the times for southern college administrators, and one of the reasons that SSOC had to be active in academic freedom and campus reform issues).
He would have succeeded, had not a deus ex machina appeared: a local television newsman, Don Harris, wanted to do a program about anti-war sentiment on
campuses, and planned to film our appearance. This scared the creepy dean off, and we spoke to a group of a hundred or so people (including, as we later learned, a spy for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, who filed a lengthy and bizarre handwritten report on our appearance, including the fiction that Bob Dewart was one of the speakers!).
Irony on top of irony: something came up at the last minute, and Don Harris was unable to do the filming, but just the threat of it had gotten the miscreant dean to back down, so there was at least one day of free speech at USF that semester.
Don still wanted to do the story, however, so he followed us to our next stop, at New College in Sarasota. There he filmed our appearance, and afterwards sat down with us in one of the Ringling family mansions that formed part of the campus, to talk over a cup of coffee.
At my advanced age, I can’t pretend to remember the conversation verbatim, but I remember that here was a person of honest sentiments, trying to understand what we were thinking, and I DO remember that at the end he said “I’d really like to know what you guys are doing ten years from now, and how you feel about all of this.”
Because we were heading south to Miami, we never did get a chance to see the program he put together, but I always kept Don on my mental list of good guys, and in the 1970s I was pleased to see that he had advanced to the national level, as a correspondent for NBC News. I always delighted when I would be watching the evening news, and there he would be.
I missed the tenth anniversary, but after eleven years I figured that I ought to write him and tell him what we were doing. I had just moved to Florida. I had seen Nancy Hodes at the National Day celebration in Peking in 1975, and Tom Gardner had attended my wedding in Atlanta that year, so I wrote down the details of what we were up to a decade later, and left the letter on my desk until I was able to get the address for NBC News (no internet in those days–Al Gore hadn’t invented it yet–so it meant a special trip to the library…).
I never got to send it, because I turned on the radio and heard the story of a horrendous massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. Among the victims were Congressman Leo Ryan of California, and NBC newsman Don Harris. I mourned.
We have just passed the thirtieth anniversary of Jonestown, and there have been many programs on television about it, all of them showing Don Harris.
There is an internet now, and, though I am not one of its better users, I thought I would look Don up, and I found this very moving piece about him and his son, who followed in his father’s career footsteps and is a television news reporter out in Washington state:
http://www.kxly.com/Global/story.asp?S=9372384&nav=menu683_1
I regret that Don Harris went to soon, but I am glad to see that he is being remembered.
Sincerely,
David Nolan
St. Augustine, Florida
Jeff what a very touching story. While I was on the department it was a pleasure to work with you knowing you would always print what i said. Keep up the good work because we need more people like in the press.
Jeff,
In November of 1978, I lived a few doors down from you on Berdon Street, where it turns into El Canon in Woodland Hills. I also went to El Camino High School and I graduated in 1974. I did not know you or your dad at the time, but I probably saw both of you at one time or another walking or driving home. I clearly remember the entire Jonestown incident, but until recently, did not know of your relationship to Don Harris.
Like a soldier, your dad died in the line of duty, and should always be remembered as such. My dad spent 30 years with LAPD as a homicide detective and luckily survived. I doubt however that anything he encountered in his years with LAPD amounted to what your dad bravely faced, unexpectedly, in that jungle hellhole.
I just wish I could have been there, with some of my “toys”. Things would have been different.
Take care and good luck to you and your family.
Phil.
Hi Jeff,
Many times you shared with me that it was a picture of your Dad and he died doing this story. Little did I realize the impact he had on so many lives.
As I watched the story over on the internet, I had never realized how much Brad looks like you growing up. Boy, you can never deny that kid! You have raised a great family.
I want you to know that I truly value your friendship, integrity and common decency.
I am honored to call your family “friends.” I know you were there for me through Darrell’s death and want you to know, you are highly regarded by many on a daily basis livng your Dad’s legacy. This account in itself speaks volumes.
See you on the water next summer. Take care.
After 31 years in the police business, I can look back with pleasure on the many times Jeff Humphrey sat in my police car (in the front seat) for a ride along. Whether he was working on traffic stories or burglaries, Jeff almost became a regular in my patrol cars over the last 7-8 years I worked at Spokane PD. I retired in 1997 (27yrs).
Jeff Humphrey was, and is, not just a good reporter, but a great guy.
Recently another SPD friend and retiree (Tom Sahlberg) forwarded Jeff’s story to me, and this morning I read it over once again. Very nicely done Jeff, and I salute the emotions that it took to put your personal thoughts on this forum.
Spokane is better off for Jeff being a part of our community, and for reporting the stories that are a part of the Spokane. Jeff, this story of yours was a side of you that never came up in our “on the job” discussions. I am very glad you shared it.
John D. Moore, CPP
Spokane, Wa.
99228-0715
Jeff,
Your dad was a terrific reporter and I always admired him for the guts & determination he showed whenever he went after a story. He was a role model for me during my days as a news reporter.
On another note, your dad actually did one final interview after he left Jonestown and that was with Congressman Ryan. He was questioning him about being attacked by a temple member which prompted Ryan to leave Jonestown with the others versus staying behind.
He has such a sense for news and where the story was. What a legend!!!
Ivan