Broadway Dressmaker Anna Harris, 103, Dies




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Broadway Dressmaker Anna Harris, 103, Dies
by Patricia Sullivan, the Washington Post
November 11, 2003

Anna Eastman Harris, shown in 1999, was still sewing after she turned 100. She also worked at the Pentagon and aided female inmates.

Anna Eastman Harris, who had been a dressmaker for Broadway stars and who sewed the vestments for priests at Washington's Cathedral of St. Matthew, could still handle a needle and thread after she turned 100 years old.

Mrs. Harris created her own dress in three days for her 100th birthday celebration three years ago and made her last dress, for a friend, when she was 101. Even in her last two years, she made alterations, and, friends say, her appearance was impeccable, her stride was brisk and her figure was model-thin.

Mrs. Harris, 103, died of complications from anemia Nov. 7 at Prince George's Hospital Center . She lived independently until just a few weeks ago, when she moved into Rose's Place in Bowie .

She carried her birth certificate with her to prove her age and kept playbills from her days as a maid to Broadway and Ziegfeld Follies star Marilyn Miller and a seamstress to other Broadway actresses. And although those years passed quickly, she retained the graceful mannerisms she saw there.

"Her skin was smooth, and she would tell you, 'I look good!' " said her friend Mary Shipp. "She had a full head of hair, and she looked younger than people who were 70 or 80."

Born in Washington , Mrs. Harris was raised near the Capitol, in the 200 block of C Street SW. Except for her New York period, she lived her life in Washington . Her father, who died when she was 3 years old, was a roofer, and her mother was born a free woman, just after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mrs. Harris's mother taught her that it was polite to call herself "colored" rather than black or African American, and so she did, except when she simply called herself "American."

Mrs. Harris attended the now-demolished Bell School , the now-closed Armstrong Manual Training High School and the O Street Vocational School , now the Margaret Murray Washington Career High School . She married Arthur Harris in 1922; they divorced in 1929. She had no children and no immediate survivors.

She went to New York in the 1920s and became Miller's maid. She told Mary Shipp that she lived in the same Harlem apartment building as James Weldon Johnson, the diplomat, poet, educator and anthologist who wrote the lyrics to "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

After she returned to Washington to care for her ailing mother, she called on Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the grandson of another New York acquaintance, to get a job at the Pentagon. She worked there from the mid-1940s until 1969, tabulating military statistics and verifying computer information. She told a Washington Post reporter in 1999 that her training as a seamstress served her well when she wanted to learn to type: "I saw a man sitting there and just said, 'Show me how you do that,' and I caught right on."

She organized a group to help female prisoners at the old Lorton Reformatory, raising money and visiting them on a regular basis, a 35-year volunteer effort that won her thanks later. She was a member of Zion Baptist Church in Northwest.

Mrs. Harris visited both Paris and Rome . In Washington , she relied on public transportation to get around town, preferring Metrorail but using the bus regularly. Her optometrist, Jeffrey Kraskin, said she first patronized his grandfather, then his father, before she became his patient. He called her "wonderful Mrs. Harris."

She told acquaintances that she planned to write an autobiography, but as far as anyone knows, she never did