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John Harris started out in Morganton. He ended up getting paid to find Utopia. And he found it.
But a good storyteller would save that for the end. And John Harris loved a good story.
Harris, who was 76, died Oct. 9 of natural causes at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. On Saturday he was buried in his hometown of Morganton, 75 miles northwest of Charlotte.
His sister, Doris Medlin, has a tote bag full of mail from her brother. Every so often he would send a packet, carefully bound in a folder, full of copied newspaper clips, family history, and tales from his career - especially from the biggest story of his life.
He had worked on newspapers from grade school in Morganton, to the Berea College paper in Kentucky, to a couple of weeklies, to the Cincinnati Post. In Cincinnati, he did some freelancing for the National Enquirer - the supermarket tabloid that blends gossip, crime news and the occasional scoop.
One year in the early '70s, Harris took a Caribbean cruise. On the way back he stopped by the Enquirer's offices in Florida. He wanted to meet the people who had been sending him checks. But while he was there an editor dangled a story idea: to find out if anyplace in the world could still be a Utopia - a perfect place, free from conflict and misery, uncluttered by modern life.
Generoso Pope, who ran the Enquirer, came up with the idea. (Pope was the ideal newspaper publisher - rich and a little crazy.) The editor told Harris he would get to fly around the world. A big trip for Harris was Cleveland. So he quit the Post and packed a suitcase.
He took three trips for the story. Among the things he sent his sister was a flight schedule for one leg of the trip: West Palm Beach, to Washington, to Los Angeles, to Honolulu, to Molokai, to Tahiti, to Bora Bora, to Pago Pago, to Fiji, to New Caledonia, to Sydney, to Bali, to Jakarta, to Sri Lanka, to the Seychelles, to Mauritius, to Rome, to New York, back to West Palm.
"He came back with such great stories," says his sister, who lives in Charlotte. "He always wanted to eat the native food. But in one place, they wanted to treat him so well, to make him feel at home, they had flown in Franco-American, you know, SpaghettiOs."
Every time he thought he was close to Utopia, some little thing tripped him up. Too much traffic in Tahiti. Too many tourists in Bora Bora. The editors would tell him to keep looking.
Finally, on a trip to Samoa, Harris thought he nailed it. Beautiful people. Mountains and beaches. Paradise found. He typed up his story and called it in. The editors loved it. They gave it to Pope. He agreed. This was it. The editors got up to leave the room.
By the way, Pope said as they were leaving, how did Harris get us the story?
By phone, the editors said.
By phone? Pope said. Kill it. Ain't no phones in Paradise.
And so Harris spent four and a half months reporting, spent $100,000 of the Enquirer's money, and never published a word.
He kept working at the Enquirer - even got interviewed by Mike Wallace for a "60 Minutes" piece. He went over to the Boca Raton News. He drove a lemon-colored '72 Pinto into the '90s. He had a cat named Mr. Kitty. He retired and kept clipping and writing and filled 20 file cabinets.
And somewhere in there, he told friends later, he realized that he found Utopia after all.
It turns out Utopia is something different for everybody.
For him, it was the chance to go look for it. And the stories he could tell.
