|
By Diana Schoberg For nearly 40 years, Paul and Jean Harris
hosted Rotary meetings and entertained visiting Rotarians at their
home on Chicago's South Side. Today, Comely Bank, which they
affectionately named after the street in Edinburgh, Scotland, where
Jean grew up, is badly in need of repairs.
The Paul and Jean Harris Home Foundation
hopes to raise $3 million to carry out renovations, repay its debt
from the house purchase, and add enhancements that would make the
site a worthy tribute to Harris.
“Comely Bank is the Mount Vernon of Rotary --
it's the home of our founder, and it's too important an asset to not
do something about it,” said Robert C. Knuepfer Jr., 2010-11
governor of District 6450 and president of the Harris Home
Foundation.
After Paul Harris died in 1947, Jean sold
Comely Bank. It remained in private hands until the Paul and Jean
Harris Home Foundation bought it in 2005 with money borrowed from
the charitable foundation of the Rotary Club of Naperville. The
Harris Home Foundation replaced the basement floor and made a few
immediate structural repairs so Rotarians could safely visit the
house during Rotary's centennial year.
But since then, the restoration project has
come to a standstill. The foundation hopes to restore the home to
the way it looked when the Harrises lived there. It also wants to
install digital monitors in each room that would display archived
films, speeches, and photos of Harris.
“It's got a serenity in it,” said Sunil K.
Sharma, 2010-11 governor of District 5890 (Texas). “You feel like
you want to sit and think.”
“To me, it was like walking in Rotary
history,” added his wife, Rashmi. After the tour, the Rotarians
agreed to help with the restoration efforts on behalf of their class
of district governors.
Eventually, the Harris Home Foundation would
like to establish an endowment fund to pay for the home's
maintenance. The foundation's board envisions creating a Rotary
history trail, with stops at Comely Bank, Harris's nearby gravesite,
and Room 711 at RI headquarters -- a re-creation of the office where
the first Rotary meeting was held.
Knuepfer says Comely Bank could also be used
as a meeting place for the RI Board and local or visiting clubs, and
for Rotary Foundation functions.
|
Group
hopes to raise US$3 million to restore Rotary founder's home for
visitors
During
a celebration of the end of the Rotary year in late June, Knuepfer
took a group of outgoing district governors and their spouses on a
tour of Comely Bank. The 50-plus visitors checked out the basement
where Harris held meetings around a table made of plywood and
sawhorses, viewed the fireplace where he held his fireside chats,
walked through the friendship garden where he planted trees in honor
of his visitors, and stood in front of the bedroom window that he
was looking out when he died.