Harry "Big Tad" Harris

PRESCOTT VALLEY, AZ - Harry "Big Tad" Harris ate the big peach on Saturday night, March 25, 2023, marking the end to a remarkable character's life. He was 95.

The second youngest of Harry Harris and Pattie Dugan's 10 children, Tad was born November 30, 1927, on a red dirt cotton farm with no plumbing or electricity outside Seymour, TX. Tad made an incredible life despite being as close to a feral child as they come. His mama died when he was 5, leaving his daddy to run a farm and raise ten kids essentially by himself. Tad learned to read and write at a farm school but dropped out in eighth grade because his daddy told him they couldn't afford pencils. He ran away from home, hitchhiked out of town and promptly got returned by a neighboring county sheriff. He worked on the family farm until running away again around the age of 16, finding a job roughnecking in the oil industry.

Tad wound up in Lusk, Wyoming in 1949 for a seismograph job and became enamored with his morning waitress Erma Dean Hawkins. When the job was over after four months, they eloped to Billings, had a daughter Linda, and spent the next 15 years driving from job to job pulling their trailer house along with a handful of other families that became a traveling neighborhood in virtually every western state.

They eventually settled in Casper, WY in 1966 where he paid cash for a house (and all the furniture inside), founded H.W. Harris Drilling and came into his own as a great businessman. He ran his business for fifteen years during boom and busts, accounting scandals that felled others, a trial after one of his trucks blew so spectacularly he could see the smoke across town, and friends who needed to borrow money to keep their businesses afloat. His success was a testament to learning from mistakes, treating every single person like they were special and cutting the right corners when survival was on the line.

After selling his fleet of rigs and trucks, he retired to a life of gardening, singing and picking three-chord guitar to old western songs, playing cards, hitting the gym at 5:30 a.m., eating out lunch seven days a week, rooting for the Denver Broncos and against the Dallas Cowboys, watching every episode of Gunsmoke and Sanford and Son, Hee Haw and the Grand Ole Opry, reading the National Enquirer, volunteering with the Sunrise Baptist church, feeding guests until they were nauseous and going to bed at 7:00 p.m. even if there was still company in the living room.

After the death of Erma in 2009, he married his second wife, Charlene "Charlie" Flury in 2012. They resettled to Arizona in 2014 after selling his house with all the furniture it just like when he bought it.

Tad had bright blue eyes, thick silver hair, an endearing southern drawl and the ability to cry with laughter anywhere. Blue pants gave him the flu and that was the truth. He was the first person anyone knew who owned Air Jordans, always carried a pocket knife, stuffed his shirt breast pockets full of pens and doodads, jangled when he walked from the pound of coins in his pants pockets, whistled everywhere he went, and later in life wore his favorite red Pendleton every day it snowed.

Children loved his propensity for stuffing $20 bills into their palms, teaching them to wash their hands with gasoline and driving as many of them could fit into the back of his pickup bed to the top of Casper Mountain so they could ride bikes down with no helmets.

Stories peeled off him in every direction and almost no one forgot meeting him. He once returned a rental car in a hurry at the Cleveland Airport with a case of dynamite in the trunk and only found out when the clerk called him at home. Another time, his grandson's high school driver's education teacher watched him rear end the school sedan in front of the whole class and then leave the scene of the accident without saying a word to anyone or even looking back to see what he'd hit. It was endless with him.

Tad loved being with his family more than anything and loved them all unconditionally in the truest sense of that word.

He is survived by his sister, Patsy; daughter, Linda English; son-in-law, Bruce English; grandson, Tad Whitaker; great-grandson, Fountain Whitaker; his wife, Charlie and her entire family that showed him so much love at the end of his life.

Tad will be buried in the family plot beside Erma in Lusk when the weather is nice. He never did like cold weather.

Tad loved animals - especially strays - more than just about anything. One of his favorite things was to load his daughter's dog in the bed of his pickup truck, drive him to the A&W drive-in for a cheap hamburger and then across town to Dairy Queen drive-in where the cashiers would feed him a vanilla ice cream cone.

In lieu of flowers or donations, the family would appreciate taking your dog out for a hamburger and ice cream c

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