John Harris stands next to one of the classic automobiles in his collection in his garage in South Bristol. Harris shares his passion with the public through various cars shows, community events, and loans to appropriate museums. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Whether or not they know him personally, it is likely a Midcoast resident with a keen interest in vintage automobiles is familiar in some fashion with South Bristol resident John Harris.
Over the course of his lifetime, Harris has built up a comparatively small but enviable collection of antique automobiles, frequently sharing his collection with the public while driving in parades, displaying his cars during community events, and exhibiting them in state and regional shows.
According to Harris, he came by his interest honestly. His grandfather was an early and enthusiastic motorist. Harris currently has a car on display at the Owls Head Transportation Museum with his grandfather’s 1909 New York state license plate affixed to it.
“His first car was a one-cylinder Rio,” Harris said. “He was a doctor in Rochester, N.Y. so he got into cars early.”
Harris grandfather eventually handled his car down to his son, John’s father, Robert Harris. Years later when John Harris bought a 1929 Rio at an auction, the first thing he did was call his dad.
Robert Harris advised his son to be careful shifting so as to not to ruin the transmission. Later, Robert called his son to let him know he had found the owner’s manual for the vehicle in his basement and promised to send it along.
Pointing to a picture of his father and his uncle riding in the Rio handed down by their father, Harris said it was subsequently converted into a truck and used to haul stones for the foundation of the family cottage on the shores of Lake Ontario.
“They put that out in the pasture when I was probably 6 years old,” Harris said. “I can remember, the seats were gone, but there’s a gas tank. I’d sit on the gas tank and play with the controls.”
Harris purchased his first car, a Model T, when he was 12 years old.
Harris does some of the restoration work himself, but he farms out a good deal of it and he is not particularly mechanically inclined, he said.
However, he said, his collection is not about financial value.
“People spend fortunes on restoring a car,” he said. “You never get the money out of it. They lose interest and want to do another one, so they’ll put it in the auction up at Owls Head and you buy something for $20,000 that somebody put $80,000 into restoring.”
Cars are meant to be driven, Harris said. Harris is a multitime competitor in the Great Race, a timed, 2,300-mile road rally dedicated to pre-World War II automobiles. Working together, a driver and a navigator follow a preset course attempting to meet specific time goals.
If the team manages to meet the designated time exactly, they get an “ace” for the accomplishment. Cars leave a minute apart and times are taken a various checkpoints.
John Harris polishes a fender on his Model A Ford at The Lincoln Home’s 95th birthday celebration in August 2022. Harris drove a group of friends to the event in the classic car, one of 27 in his automobile collection at that time. (LCN file photo)
“The computer knows where you’re supposed to be, exactly when you’re supposed to be there,” Harris said. “It is still hard for me to believe you can drive 50 miles and be somewhere exactly when you’re supposed to, when you have stop signs and school buses and all of that.”
For the last couple years, John and his wife Koko Harris have supported their son, Charles, as he has competed in the race. When they do so, the Harrises transport the vehicle to the start by trailer, follow the course to the end, and bring the vehicle home again.
“Charles and the navigator are working people,” Harris said.
Charles Harris now owns and operates Indian Trail Antiques on the Newcastle property that once was his childhood home and his parent’s former place of business, Country Farm Furniture.
It was the opportunity to buy the business that first brought the young Harris family to the Midcoast in 1971. John and Koko had met as college students at Middlebury College in Vermont almost 10 years earlier.
Born in Rochester, N.Y. and raised in nearby Ontario, N.Y., John Harris had just returned to campus after taking a year off to travel around Europe when he noticed the attractive coed with the equally attractive car.
“I spotted her ‘35 Ford convertible in the parking lot,” Harris said. “I got a blind date with her and tried to buy the car. She wouldn’t sell it.”
Although she wouldn’t part with her car, Mary “Koko” Hart took a shine to the young man. Never the greatest student, Harris said, he appreciated her support.
“She showed me where the library was,” he said. “I wasn’t a very good student, but she saw that I graduated. She wouldn’t sell the car, but it’s in our garage.”
By the time John Harris graduated Middlebury in 1962, the Vietnam War was ramping up. John and Koko married and, anticipating being drafted, John enlisted in the Navy, following in his father’s footsteps. Initially he was assigned to the USS Forrestal, where he was tasked with managing the ship’s store, serving the aircraft carrier’s 5,000-person crew.
Harris likes to say he had a “girl in every port,” fondly referring to his one girl, Koko, who followed the Forrestal to its Mediterranean ports of call in a Volkswagen.
Rotating to shore duty, Harris was assigned to Seattle, where he ran the Seattle Navy Exchange and ultimately mustered out for a government job in Washington, D.C. overseeing the resale program for commissaries and exchanges.
“It was very interesting work,” he said. “I was liaison between the services and between congressmen. So if you bought something like rotten eggs in the commissary and wrote your congressman how bad it was, I would have to research it and prepare the letter for the admiral to send back to Congress.”
Returning to Middlebury in the late 1960s the Harrises settled down to raise their family, eventually including children Kate, Charles, and Heather, find a farmhouse to live in, and open a business of their own. They investigated several options but were still looking for the right opportunity when in 1971, John spotted for-sale ad in The Wall Street Journal offering a retail furniture store located on a circa 1800 farm in Midcoast Maine.
Harris said he had been to Maine a couple times previously, but he knew very little about his future home.
“I said ‘Well, Maine does have lakes like Vermont,’” he said. “’It has ski areas like Vermont, and even this big salt water ditch that Vermont doesn’t have. Let’s go take a look.’
John Harriss automobile collection includes a Rio fire engine, believed to be the same one the classic rock band REO Speedwagon used as an inspiration for their name. Harris said he made several unsuccessful attempts to reach the band whenever they played in Bangor, hoping to arrange a reunion. (Sherwood Olin photo)
After visiting the business, then known as the Red Barn, the Harrises decided to buy and moved the family to Newcastle.
In 1977 they would change the name of the business to Country Farm Furniture and go on to open three more locations. Currently the only one that remains in operation is the Bath location, which the Harrises sold to their employees when they retired in 2004.
Looking back Harris chuckled at the thought the young couple put everything into finding the business they wanted, but they spent very little time considering the community they were moving into. In that respect, Harris said they lucked out.
“We couldn’t have picked a better community,” he said. “Good churches, good hospital, good schools, and it was cosmopolitan enough so we outsiders were accepted.”
A lifelong Republican, Harris dabbled in state politics, losing a race for the Maine Senate in 1996 and the Maine House of Representatives in 2000. He later chaired the Lincoln County Republican Committee. Harris said he never planned to enter politics, but he couldn’t refuse when then sitting state representative and future Maine Commissioner of Agriculture Bob Spear, R-Nobleboro, recruited him.
“Bob Spear came in when Koko and I were working in the store one day and he said ‘One of you is going to run for the Senate,’” Harris said.
Among the positives that came out of his political career was meeting legislative leaders in Augusta. That experience eventually translated into appointments to the Maine Real Estate Commission and later the Maine Board of Pharmacy.
“That was probably more rewarding being on those boards than fighting it out in the Legislature,” Harris said.
Now 86, he is a good health although he suffered a serious bout with COVID as couple years ago that laid him low. Currently, Harris regularly volunteers to provide hospice care and he is extremely active as a trustee of the Owls Head Transportation Museum and with the Stanley Museum in Kingfield, where he has a steam car in display.
“If I was to map something out, I don’t think I could have mapped out a better path to have the experiences and the friends I have, being involved with the Owls Head museum; the Stanley Museum,” Harris said. “I mean Jim Rockefeller, one of the founders of the (Owls Head) museum, very active until the last couple of years, died this year. It was his 98th birthday. I think I emailed him, congratulating him: ‘Happy birthday.’ He emailed back to me, still very sharp of mind. ‘Thank you, John’ and died the next day. What more can we ask for?”
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