Harriet Harvey, 82, of Round Pond, passed away March 7 at Massachusetts General Hospital.
She was born April 23, 1924 in Lake Forest, Ill., to Lucy Smith Harvey and William Dow Harvey.
She was an author, editor, conservationist, and founder of the Department of Health Education at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, Mass.
After attending Vassar College, she struck out for Japan, where she arrived in November 1945 in Nagoya. She drove over 400 miles of cratered, debris-strewn roads, using cigarettes and a small collection of Japanese army keepsakes to negotiate her way through U.S. military checkpoints. Less than 24 hours after arriving in Tokyo, she had landed a job as a reporter in the bureau of the United Press wire service.
The following year she married Navy lieutenant, Frank B. Gibney, who also became a journalist. The marriage ended in divorce in 1956; Gibney died in April 2006.
In the 1960s, Harvey went on to establish the Department of Health Education at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Mass.
In 1969, Harvey married Yale University chaplain, The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., on Marsh Island in Muscongus Bay. On Marsh Island, Harvey and Coffin became regular hosts to an eclectic, revolving array of activists and intellectuals, including Michael Ferber, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dallas Cowboys running back Calvin Hill, the poet Robert Lowell, and playwright Arthur Miller.
Harvey was a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Yale. She lived in Washington, D.C., New York and Marin County in California, but always returned to Round Pond, where she was living until shortly before her death. In 2004, she and her longtime friend Olive Pierce deeded the development rights for Marsh Island to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
Survivors include her children, P. Alexander Gibney of Summit, N.J., and Margot M. Gibney of Oakland, Cal.; grandchildren, Morgan, Nicholas and Eleanor; many grandnephews and nieces; brothers, Philip of Cabin John, Md., and William P. Harvey of Austin Tex.; sisters, Julia Harvey of Sudbury, Mass, and Lucy Henderson of Orinda, Cal.
A memorial service will be held on Sat., April 21.