Life at Paul Harris’ Comely Bank
At their Chicago home, Rotary’s founder and his wife welcomed visitors from around the world
One winter day I was walking on Longwood Drive in a suburban district in Chicago. The drive skirts a hill spoken of as “the Ridge,” which extends for several miles in a southwesterly direction, an unusual feature in Chicago as most of the city lies on flat ground. The houses on the west side of the drive are built on the crest of the hill which parallels it.
On that particular day, the hill was covered with snow and many youngsters were coasting without regard to the property rights involved. No property owner, however, seemed disposed to question the rights of the youngsters to make common ground of their hillside lawns.
The picture seemed so true to the New England life I had known and loved that the thought came to me if ever I was to have a home of my own, it would be on the top of the hill on Longwood Drive. The time came sooner than expected. It was on one of the countryside hikes of the Chicago Prairie Club that I met a bonnie Scottish lassie who, dismayed by a rip in my jacket, offered to repair it for me. That was how she got in trouble for it wasn’t long after that when I persuaded Jean Thomson to become Mrs. Paul Harris.
Paul Harris stands in front of Comely Bank, the home he and his wife, Jean, shared for 35 years.
I married my bonnie Jean in 1910, and two years later, acquired a home on the hill. We named our home “Comely Bank,” after the street in Edinburgh where Jean spent the days of her childhood and youth, and never, during the thirty-odd years of our ownership, has any boy ever been refused free use of our lawn when coasting times come.
How could I refuse them! Like my mischievous boyhood friends, they are rapscallions one and all! During this Second World War many of them have been fighting for us on foreign soil, on the seas and in the skies, far, far from home. God bless and protect the rapscallions of our beloved land!
The great city comes nearer and nearer to us as its population increases and, as the years roll on, we can almost feel its breath. We are still on the outskirts, however, and ten minutes in our motor car suffices to take us into the Illinois farming country where wheat and corn fields, pastures and woodlands give us a feeling of having made good our escape.
Diagonally across the drive from our home, there was, in the early years of our married life, an ideal bird refuge of which we were very proud. The entire block was covered with a growth of wild crab apple trees so dense and so studded with long, sharp thorns that it afforded the birds ample protection from cats and dogs. As a refuge, it was especially popular with the robins that remained there during the mating and nest-building period. Thousands of them made their appearance and took up temporary quarters each spring. The air would be full of song.
As neighbor Silvester Schiele watches, Harris fills his bird feeder.
Just why these discriminating creatures considered this Heaven-made protection undesirable for permanent residence, I have never been able to determine. No robin, to my knowledge, ever thought of building a permanent nest in the crab apple trees on Longwood Drive. They were all prospective papas and mamas and I imagine that the prospective papas like to give the prospective mamas the once over, and then, having made their selection, hie away with the ladies of their choice to find homes far from the madding crowd of robins.
One morning, after the birds had left on their home finding expedition, tractors dragged the trees out by their roots; not one remained as the day drew to a close. When the robins returned and witnessed the depredation committed during their absence, they were distracted. The tumult of whirring wings and their cries were deafening. One could imagine that in bird language, they were crying, “robbers! robbers! These rapacious humans have not only pillaged our houses but they have actually taken our houses along with them; did you ever hear of such things!”
Within ninety days from that time, an apartment building, affording homes for five hundred human beings, had been erected where once a bird sanctuary had been. The structure was beautiful and the property well landscaped, but where had our privacy and our feeling of being “country folks” gone? Well, we had to make the best of it and we did. We found compensation in the thought that nearly five hundred human beings had made their escape from the noise and confusion of the city and that the twinkling lights from scores of windows would throw out a certain friendliness of their own.
My wife and I have tried to make the best possible use of Comely Bank. We have entertained scores of Rotarians from all parts of the world, sometimes seating at our table guests from as many as eight different countries at one time. In honor of our guests, we have planted many trees in our friendship garden, and, in many instances, guests so honored have passed to the Great Beyond, but the trees still stand as memorials to our friendship.
Paul and Jean enjoy a quiet moment at Comely Bank.
So here we are at the end of our journey, and Jean and I are sitting at our fireside drinking a cup of tea. One who marries a Scottish lady must acquire the habit of sitting at the fireside and drinking black tea, and indeed it is a delightful break in the cares and duties of the day. If the tea is good and the fire burns merrily, one enjoys recreation and rest. It’s a good way to end the day.
At our fireside scores of friends from all corners of the globe have delighted us by their presence. They have come as the result of my planting a sapling in 1905. The first Rotary club was that sapling. It has grown into a mighty tree in whose shade it is delightful to dwell.
Tonight my thoughts most naturally drift. No one knows how long such thoughts might have continued had not Jean’s voice broken in. “Why, I declare! I believe you have been asleep, Paul; wake up and drink another cup of tea; the fire is burning low and we must soon be in bed.” So goeth life at Comely Bank.
Adapted from My Road to Rotary: The Story of a Boy, a Vermont Community, and Rotary by Paul P. Harris, published posthumously in 1948. Access the original text at on.rotary.org/MRTR.
This story originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.