Sally Pomeran Harris, who excelled as a child actor, founded a small theater in New York, and went on to create and lead a drama program at what is now Stevenson University in Baltimore County, died on May 5 in a Mt. Washington senior living facility. She was 93.
The longtime Bolton Hill resident and her husband of 50 years, teacher and artist Les Harris, raised three daughters at a home they acquired in 1962 in the 1300 block of Park Avenue. An extensive obituary appeared in the Baltimore Sun.
“I first met Sally Harris when I was 15 when she and her husband, Les, directed ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ for the Council of Independent Schools,” said marketing designer and theater magazine publisher Lynne Menefee, harkening back nearly five decades. “Their daughter Laurel and I played wenches in the play — and pretty good ones. too. We also became fast friends. I found out that they lived in Bolton Hill just a street over and up and was thrilled. My mother had just bought our house on Bolton Street where I live now.”
Laurel, now living in New Jersey, “is still one of my oldest friends,” Menefee said. “I loved my time with the whole family through the years as they always made me feel I was a part of their family too. Sally was smart, talented, and so sweet.” In retirement after her husband’s death, Sally Harris ran The Amaranthine Museum, an eclectic collection of her husband’s visionary artwork, in Clipper Mill.
“Sally Harris lived love,” said two of her daughters — Laurel and Holly Harris of Baltimore — in an email shared with the Bulletin. “Her journey here on this very little planet was much like the journey of writer de Saint-Exupéry’s character in ‘The Little Prince.’ Like his, her sheep was drawn by an outline of a little box with holes. Not encumbered by the outline, this beautiful little sheep was whatever she could see with Love.”
Sally Harris’ graduate thesis theater production at Antioch-Putney College in Vermont was “The Little Prince.” She received a letter of commendation from then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
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