I couldn’t dial up industrial designer Charles Harrison to interview him for this story. The man behind the ubiquitous plastic trash can, the futuristic 3-D View-Master, the beehive-bonnet Jiffy-Jet hair dryer, and so many more irresistible versions of familiar 20th-century products died November 29 in Santa Clarita, California, where he’d lived for the last few years, at the age of 87.
Born in Louisiana in 1931 and raised in Texas and Arizona, where his father taught industrial arts at the only black high school in the then segregated state, Harrison was a smart kid, but he struggled with what was later diagnosed as dyslexia, and floundered as a 16-year-old economics major at the City College of San Francisco. After aptitude testing pointed him toward art, he wound up in industrial design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he flourished, though he was the only black student in his classes. He graduated from SAIC in 1954 and was drafted into the army, serving two years as a mapmaker in Germany. Returning to Chicago, he started evening classes toward a master’s degree at IIT; married the love of his life, Janet Simpson; and tried, without success, to find a job. He could freelance, but no one in Chicago seemed to want to put a black designer, no matter how talented, on staff.
In 1992, the year that Sears moved out of its iconic tower to Hoffman Estates, Janet was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 1999). Harrison retired the following year and began teaching part-time, first at UIC and then at Columbia College. When Sears decided in 1997 to cut retirees’ life insurance benefits to a token $5,000, he joined the National Association of Retired Sears Employees, picked up a picket sign, and marched in demonstrations protesting that the company was unfair to its workers.
