by Jim Bissett, The Dominion Post

MORGANTOWN – Sometimes, you have to compose your day with a little comedy.

On a sun-splashed autumn afternoon 12 years ago in the choir loft of Morgantown’s First Presbyterian Church … Dr. Summers Harrison did just that.

He seated himself in front of the terraced, triple keyboard rows of the church’s 22-rank Schlicker organ and struck a pose.

Harrison let his hands hang in the air, dramatically.

Or, (mock) melodramatically, as it were.

From the back, he looked like Lon Chaney Sr. in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The people who had gathered in the loft to watch and learn – all were students in West Virginia University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute – got the reference and chuckled appreciatively.

“Where angels fear to tread,” the genial physician said with a grin and wink.

It was an exaltation of air and ivory when he leaned into Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Sunday-go-to-meeting workhorse most of us know, even if we don’t.

Sternums genuflected.

Pews vibrated with the power of the divine decibels.

WVU’s lifelong learners gave him a good round of applause, which hung in the air with the final notes from Herr Luther’s opus. Harrison capped it with a self-deprecating aside.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “it kind of goes like that.”

Harrison died at the age of 93 on the final day of 2025 in Tennessee, where he had relocated to be near his son and family.

The Morgantown funeral service is 11 a.m. Monday at Suncrest United Methodist, another house of worship where Harrison was known to play the organ on Sundays if he was needed.

Making your home, making your name

Knowing him was the key of his song. People were familiar with Harrison by way of a lot of communities, with medicine being first and foremost.

Maybe he treated your kids. He was a beloved pediatrician for years in town. Maybe he treated you, even – after his transition to the emergency room and then general practice.

Perhaps you made your acquaintance through the Rotary service organization or the numerous other community causes where he lent his time and talents.

There were the seminar-style classes he taught with the Osher Institute at WVU, including the popular “Organs of Morgantown” offering that brought everyone to First Presby that day.

Knowing him meant knowing that music occupied his sonic and social space.

Before medical school and the military, he studied at the WVU School of Music.

For him, music was healing.

Performing it, listening to it, all made for a soothing balm.

“If I was worried about a problem,” he said, “I would sit at the organ and play Bach. It all went away.”

A shadow over summer

Harrison was born in Nicholas County in 1932.

Arriving in the world at that time, and in rural West Virginia, in many ways informed his life as a physician, he said.

Especially during his time as a Rotarian in his later years. One of Rotary’s main missions is to eradicate the world of polio once and for all.

When he was a little boy, polio was most definitely the scourge of the Mountain State, he remembered.

“I wasn’t allowed to go swimming until after August,” he said.

Many a mom then would worry that her kid would wake up feverish and with tingly legs. That’s how polio started.

In the worst cases, paralysis would set in, which meant medically sanctioned prison sentence in an iron lung – an 800-pound, tank-like respirator that did the breathing for patients who no longer could on their own.

Harrison always marveled at the common-sense engineering that went into the design and operation of the devices.

Each came equipped with foot pedals to manually keep the bellows going in the event of a power failure.

There were whole crews on standby ready to lend their feet for just such an emergency at Women and Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, where Harrison was completing his U.S. Army residency in medicine in 1964.

By then, the Salk vaccine was established – but still, two patients diagnosed with polio came in during his time there.

One was a 30-year-old man and the other was an 8-year-old boy, who was especially fearful.

“We eventually got him laughing and talking with us,” the physician recalled.

The man went home on crutches, but the 8-year-old was still in treatment when Harrison rotated out for a posting in Germany.

“I often think about that little boy,” Harrison said. “I never got to find out how it went for him.”

Encore, encore

After the Army, Harrison made a life in Morgantown. He met and married Jacqueline Croston – everybody knew her as “Jackie” – and children and grandchildren followed.

He didn’t necessarily want to leave Morgantown after Jackie’s death in 2018, his friends said, but his own aging and infirmities played their own tune.

The spirited Harrison, though, made sure to pack his heart and his personality, along with his personal belongings. He eventually settled at the NHC Place at the Trace retirement community in Nashville.

It was there that a monthly reading club presided over by a certain good-humored physician from Morgantown was a hot ticket.

Author: Jim Bissett, The Dominion Post