After a life among influential men, she wanted to help those in need.
Katherine Eliot Harris (1912-1963)
Katherine Eliot “Kitty” Sumner was born January 19, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Eliot and Diana Rockwell Sumner. When she was a teenager, her family moved to Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, where she graduated from high school. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Vassar College in 1933.
Her grandfather, William Graham Sumner, was a Yale University graduate, Episcopal clergyman, ardent Social Darwinist, and leader of the American Apologist School, defending the belief that the weak were diminished and their cultures limited, while the strong grew in power and cultural influence. From 1872 to 1909, he taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation’s first professorship in sociology. Kitty’s father, also a Yale graduate, was assistant general superintendent of motive power for the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Eastern region.
In 1940, Kitty married Donald Morrison Harris, an attorney with the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. Donald was born in Manhattan in 1911 and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Amherst College in 1932 and earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1936.
The couple lived in Thomaston, a neighborhood in Great Neck, Long Island. They had four children, Thomas, John, Diana Elizabeth, and Don.
In 1941, Donald joined the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C., as a hearing examiner, returning four years later to practice law at Finch & Schaefler in Manhattan. In the late 1950s, he became a founding director of the Pall Corp., a manufacturer of fine filtration systems based in Greenlawn, Long Island. Pall grew to become a Fortune 500 company.
Kitty died of cancer December 12, 1963, at age 71. She established a fund in The Trust to promote international peace or public education or order in underdeveloped countries.