A Eulogy for Harry Guise (1997)

A Eulogy for Harry Guise
August 14, 1997
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Harrisburg

David B. Schwartz


It is with a sad heart that I walk from my home in the shadow of this cathedral to join in mourning the loss - but celebrating the life - of my colleague, friend, and mentor Harry Guise. I wish to sing the praises of a good man.

Harry and I worked together. Anyone who knew Harry even slightly knew that for him work was not a casual affair. He worked hard all of his life, and his work was helping people. I want to tell one story that tells a little about this work of his.

A few years ago our organization in government had an opportunity to hire someone for the summer to help us. When the paperwork was completed, the bureaucratic office handling hiring offered immediate approval - if we would take a person they’d like us to hire. In fact, she could start tomorrow. But Harry felt differently. We were an office to help people with disabilities, and we should hire someone with a disability for this job. So he persisted.

Harry had to persist a long time to get what he wanted, and the summer was long past and he had done a lot of additional work before he was able to hire such a person. That is how Horace came to work with us.

Horace was an older man who seemed to have never had much of a break in life. Harry took an interest in him, spent time with him, and he did good work for us. When the position ran out, he went on and moved someplace else.

A couple of years later, I was surprised to see Horace sitting in Harry’s office, visiting him. He had come back to town, and the first thing he did was to see Harry. Horace was dying, Harry told me later, and had come back to see Harry one more time. In Harry, this old disabled African-American man who no-one seemed to want had found someone who wanted him, who encouraged him, who saw something in him. So it was no surprise, actually, that he would come back to see Harry one more time.

How many Horaces were there in Harry’s long working life? How many people did he take an interest in and help them to find the blessings of work, a blessing that they would otherwise have not known, and which was so important to him? In fact, if you assembled all the people who Harry helped in this way, the crowd would fill this Cathedral, and the street beyond.

Harry, as others have said, was very self-effacing. He would never sit still for such praise as this. I used to tease him with a nickname I had for him: “Columbo,” after the Peter Falk character in the detective series. For Harry, like Columbo, combined his self-effacing nature with extraordinary perception and intelligence in service of his calling. Like Columbo, when he needed to get to the bottom of some knotty problem he would engage people in offhand conversation. If it was winter, perhaps he would even be wearing a rumpled raincoat. People would take in his comforting diminutive figure, look into his innocent face and his twinkling Irish eyes, and they would tell him everything. Then Harry, who would never miss the subtlest of inflections, would figure out from what they had unself-consciously told him just what to do to be able to get someone a job, or fifty people a job, or a hundred people a job.

I quickly learned not to do anything important without asking him. I would sit down in the big chair in his office, and run by him some new, enthusiastic idea of mine, and Harry would reveal the gaping hole right before my feet that I would disappear into if I took one more step. “How on earth do you know where all these holes are?,” I once asked him in amazement. “Oh,” he replied with a wry chuckle, “I fell in all of them.”

Sometimes, after patiently hearing out some new exciting proposed plan of mine, and being asked what he thought of it, Harry would ask, “How about if I sleep on it?” This, I came to realize, was Harry’s gentle way of saying “David, that is such an extraordinarily bad idea that I am actually worried about you, and maybe if you sleep on it you will forget about it by the morning.”

He was always saving me, and us.

In a meeting over some difficult problem, when everybody was starting to get just a little irritable, Harry would look up and say “Well, are we having fun yet?”


It is important to sing the praises of unsung heros, and Harry was such a hero. He was a hero of mine.  He helped people. He was never confused about what was right. He was unwavering in his commitment to people, and untiring in his efforts. He taught me patience.

Thanks for being patient with me, Harry. And be patient for a moment, past the threshold of this world, while I sing your praises; that of a good man.