Grace Kemp Harris

Grace Kemp Harris, age 90, of Fort Collins passed away on the morning of January 18th, 2016 of natural causes.  In the days before her death Grace was surrounded by family and friends, and had joyfully celebrated a belated 90th birthday party including all her children and grandchildren.

During her 18 years in Fort Collins, Grace was an active volunteer and organizer, particularly through the First United Methodist Church in Fort Collins and in the mission activities of the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church. Through the Conference, she was a co-organizer and participant in trips to Angola to support rebuilding of church activities in that country after almost 30 years of civil war ended in 2002. Her mission interests grew out of her own background, having spent her early years in Angola as the daughter of Methodist missionaries. Her volunteer activities were wide-ranging and included action on affordable housing, voter education, peace advocacy, and economic development in underserved communities, including work at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Grace had a strong sense of civic duty, a generous spirit, and profound regard for the value of all human life. All who knew her were witness to her indefatigable cheerfulness.

Grace was born on December 1, 1925, in Angola, Africa, where her parents, Alexander and Winifred Kemp, were serving as missionaries of the Methodist church and where her father, a doctor, had founded a medical center. Grace remembered her time in Africa fondly, with stories of watching her father treat illnesses and perform surgeries and of strikingly beautiful Angolan geography such as the Pungo Andongo Rocks and Kalandula Falls. Grace was the second of four girls, all born in Angola: Winifred (Winnie) was the eldest, and Lois Anne (Sanne) and Martha (Marty) were younger.

In her pre-teen years, Grace's family brought her to the United States. Grace stayed with an aunt and uncle in Montclair, NJ while her parents and younger sisters returned to Angola for a second tour of missionary work. Her cousin, Adelle Dean Buck, still a resident of Montclair, became a good friend whom she considered a fourth sister. Grace attended middle school in Montclair and high school at Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts.

Grace received a BA degree at Swarthmore College and an MA degree in biology at Wesleyan University. She worked for a time in developmental biology research at Princeton University and then in a lab at Harvard Medical School. While in the Boston area she met Dwight Lowe Harris, who was finishing his Sc.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grace and Dwight were married on September 13, 1952, in Chautauqua, NY, where Grace's parents had settled after nearly 30 years of missionary activity.

For the next 33 years, Grace and Dwight followed Dwight's jobs in mining engineering and metallurgy across the country, starting with a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, on to mining locations in Montana (Nye and Columbus), to California (Trona and Altadena), Pennsylvania (Yardley) and finally back to California (Westlake Village). When Dwight retired in 1985, they moved to the woods of Clayton, Washington, to be near Dwight's boyhood home and family members.

Grace and Dwight raised three sons and one daughter. Grace also continued her education in new areas with programs in childhood education and nutrition, and she worked for the Head Start program in Ventura County, California for several years.

Grace and Dwight moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1997, after Dwight's failing health made rustic living impractical, so that they could be near their son, Rodney Harris, and his wife, Jane Slusarski-Harris.

Everywhere they lived, Grace and Dwight were active in the local Methodist church and community. For Grace, this meant mission work and outreach projects, continually making local and global connections. In Yardley, she helped form the cooperative Scammells Corner preschool. In California, she started an annual Crop Walk fundraising event. In Spokane, she started a Habitat for Humanity chapter and received a Volunteer of the Year award from the city. While in Fort Collins, she renewed ties to her roots in Angola. She returned twice to the compound that her father had built and gathered donations through the church and H.E.L.P. International with the hope and plan of rebuilding after the country's long civil war.

Grace and Dwight both had a love of the arts, especially music and dance.  Grace recently endowed the Grace and Dwight Harris Dance Scholarship at Colorado State University.
Throughout their lives Grace and Dwight were also active outdoors people, and hiking and camping trips were ever present in Harris family life. Grace enjoyed taking in the beauty of natural surroundings, and enhancing indoor and outdoor spaces with flowers and trees.

Grace was preceded in death by her husband, Dwight Harris, one son, Craig Everett Harris, and two sisters, Winifred Husted and Lois Anne Kemp.

Grace is survived by one sister, Martha McKnight (Theodore McKnight); three of her children, Alexander Harris (Annemarie Drummey), Rodney Harris (Jane Slusarski-Harris), and Donna  Harris (ex son-in-law, Donald Hagberg); her grandchildren, Kendall Harris, Evan Harris, and Anna Hagberg; as well as 10 nephews and nieces and their families.

A memorial service will be held Friday, January 22, 2016, at 2:00 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church of Fort Collins.

In lieu of flowers, a donation may be made in memorium to the United Methodist Church Global Ministries ( http://www.umcmission.org/Give-to-Mission/How-to-Give )  or the Grace and Dwight Harris Dance Scholarship at Colorado State University.  (Tonya Malik-Carson, Assistant Director of Development, 970-491-3558 or Tonya.Malik-Carson@colostate.edu )