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Rogers pediatrician Harry Harmon and his wife Jenny sent friends a Valentine’s Day greeting from their home building project at War Eagle Creek. In the past nine years, Harmon helped build three homes.

The year’s not going badly for Dr. Harry Harmon. In February, the Rogers pediatrician received a successful stem cell transplant for the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he’s had since 2000. This summer he returned to work in his Rogers pediatric practice of 33 years and he and his wife Jenny celebrated the birth of their first grandchild. Then in October he received a Congressional honor in Washington, D.C. for his extensive work over the years with the Arkansas adoption community.

The award from the bipartisan Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI)named Harmon a Congressional “Angel in Adoption”, an annual distinction bestowed on adoption champions from across the country. U.S. Representative John Boozman nominated him for the honor.

“I have known Dr. Harmon for more than 30 years and can attest that he has given generously of his time on behalf of children and children’s issues,” Boozman said in a statement at the time. “His commitment to adoptions has been as part of a team from which more than 700 children have been placed for adoption.”

Harmon said the honor was affirming, if a bit overwhelming.

“For me, the adoption work has always been a very private matter. This celebration that I went to in Washington was a very public matter.” He added that the highlight of the early October trip was meeting other adoption workers from the medical and social work fields at a grand gala attended by 850 guests and dignitaries. “It takes a really special family to take in a stranger’s child and love it as their own,” he said. Through the years of his involvement, he has never ceased to be amazed at the large hearts of those families.

Harmon grew up in the small Northeast Arkansas town of Corning. Following graduation from Hendrix College in Conway, he attended medical school at the University of Arkansas. He trained at University Hospital, St. John’s Hospital in Tulsa, Okla. and at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Harmon had thought of going into general practice at the time, but he enjoyed pediatrics and it had the added benefit of not being among the specialties being drafted for help in the war zones in Vietnam. Instead, after a year of residency, he served two years at the Patuxent River Naval Base in Maryland.

After his work for the Navy, Harmon worked in pediatrics in Little Rock for two more years before returning to small-town life and beginning solo practice, this time in Northwest Arkansas. In 1974, Rogers, now a booming city in the fastest-growing area in the state, had only 14,000 people and until Harmon came, no pediatricians. Within a few years, he and a good friend and colleague, pediatrician Barry Allen, expanded the Rogers Pediatric Clinic he had founded.

The Mercy-Rogers Pediatric Clinic now has seven full- and part-time pediatricians on staff.

Harmon helped set up the first neonatal intensive care unit in Northwest Arkansas at St. Mary’s Hospital. Although it pales in comparison to the technology available today, that neonatal unit was pretty sophisticated for its time, Harmon said. “We didn’t have much pediatric surgery to speak of, but ventilation-wise, we did about as much stuff on premature newborns as anyone,” he said.

Harmon’s involvement with adoption work came about because he “was standing there” and met Gene Kelley, a local attorney who now coordinates a vast number of adoptions for Arkansas children. Kelley needed a physician to look after adoptive children’s medical conditions and educate the prospective parents about the anticipated medical needs of the child. “If there are newborns that have medical questions or if there are families that have serious wrinkles, then I might get involved,” Harmon explained. “Basically, I’m just responsible for making sure the adoptive family is aware as much as possible of what they’re getting in terms of medical concerns.”

“Without his involvement and assistance, our local adoption efforts in Northwest Arkansas would not have enjoyed the success that has made so many adopting families healthy, happy and complete,” Boozman said. “On several occasions, it was Dr. Harmon’s expertise that averted a crisis in a medically sensitive situation.”

Occasionally, a patient who has heard of his work will approach Harmon directly to help find a good family for her child, but most of the time obstetricians and adoption agencies get the referrals rather than him. Harmon, who has two nieces adopted by his brother’s family, said that over the years the process has become more sensitive to the needs and emotions of the birth mother.

“People are a little more relaxed about knowing the mother, letting the mother see the baby, participating and letting go; it’s more the trend now,” Harmon said. “In the past, you didn’t let the mother see the baby; you hoped she didn’t hear it cry. Sometimes the mother was asleep when the baby was born and it was taken away and was sort of a non-event for her. I think that kind of stuff is done more humanely now. Then again, it’s kind of an individual thing with the families. Each adoption is different.”

Harmon meets with parents coming from all over the nation and even Europe to adopt Arkansas children. Meeting the parents and seeing how many more advantages the children will have with their new families than their Arkansas mother could provide always reminds Harmon of the most famous Biblical adoption story. “Just as the Pharoah’s family took in Moses after his mother left him in the bulrushes in the hopes of someone more capable raising him, these kids go on to have incredible homes and adventures they never would have had,” he said.

Low-severity neurodevelopmental disabilities and learning disorders such as ADD and ADHD are a special professional interest to Harmon. He’s worked to help children suffering from these issues through his practice as well as the 14 years he served on the Rogers School Board. He said that schools need a better understanding of how people learn, an understanding that needs to be reflected in policies and standards at the state level. Training teachers in the basic neurodevelopmental aspects of cognition could prevent a lot of unnecessary struggles in the classroom.

“Teachers aren’t lazy. They try very hard to get things across,” Harmon said. “But advances in imaging technology show us that children’s brains learn in very different ways. Some brains learn best by reading, some by listening, but the majority of kids learn best by hands-on techniques, which is not the emphasis of most classrooms. It’s almost like teachers need a course in the pathology of learning.”

Harmon is no longer on the school board and he’s easing himself back into work this year as his health allows, but he stays busy. In the past nine years, he’s helped build three houses, including his own in an idyllic location near the historic War Eagle Mill. Harmon said in his younger days he was an active outdoorsman, going fishing, hunting, kayaking, canoeing, and backpacking whenever he could. So the bucolic site of the home he and wife Jenny, executive director of the Ozark Natural Science Center, share is perfect for them. “It’s just beautiful out here,” he beams. “War Eagle Creek winds around our house and down to the mill and eventually becomes part of Beaver Lake. There’s a great sense of natural beauty and history. We even found arrowheads on this spot when we were building that have been carbon-dated back 7,000 years.”

The couple has two grown children, daughter Lee and son John, who both live in California. Even though he’s recently been made a grandfather, Harmon said he has no plans to retire to the rocking chair yet. “My colleagues will have to be the judge of my abilities, but if I can keep up and I can stay well, I can practice at least some for another five to 10 years. I don’t want to quit. I’m hoping a find some time when I’m well when I can begin to make a bit of a difference.”



December 2007

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