Model Headmaster

The Rev. Erdman ("Erd") Harris is an unusual Doctor of Theology: brisk, athletic and cheerful as a dynamo, he is an expert pianist (hot and classical), a talented songwriter, a painter of landscapes and murals, an Arabic conversationalist, an authority on Biblical literature. At Princeton (class of 1920) he Wrote the music and part of the book for what many Princetonians consider the best Triangle Club show ever: Isle of Surprise. He once reached the finals of Egypt's national tennis championship. At 45 he can still trim any boy on the Lawrenceville School tennis team.

Erd Harris has always looked like the very model of a modern headmaster. Last week it was announced that he is to be come one. The school: Pittsburgh's Shady Side Academy.

"I've always wanted a school of my own," said Harris. He has been well trained for the job. Toronto-born son of a Baptist minister who was also a power in Canada's Massey-Harris Co., Ltd. (farm tools), he followed Hotchkiss and Prince ton with Oxford and Edinburgh. Ordained a Congregational minister in 1925, he later studied at Union Theological Seminary. Since 1936 he has been chairman of Lawrenceville's department of religion--as well as Lecturer on Religious Education and Psychology at Union.

For years Lawrenceville boys have hung on Erd Harris' sessions at the piano--as well as his straight-from-the-shoulder homilies in chapel. The late Florenz Ziegfeld once tried to sign him as a Broadway songsmith, but Harris has always preferred to write for school auditoriums. For radio's Music Is My Hobby he has demonstrated his remarkable memory both for his own tunes and others' (he can play three out of four numbers in a musical show flawlessly after one hearing).

"Leading families of Pittsburgh early sent their sons to Shady Side," says Porter Sargent's Handbook of Private Schools. Founded in 1883 by fondly remembered Dr. W. R. Crabbe, it has a junior school in the Pittsburgh residential section, a senior school in rolling country a few miles north of the city. Headmaster Harris has no radical innovations in mind for his new school, but does hope to expand its religious and musical activities. And he wants to use visual education everywhere he can. Shady Side is rated the best boys' prep school in western Pennsylvania. Now that Composer Librettist Harris is there, its schoolboy musical shows should be among the best in the U.S.

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