Samuel Harrington
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Samuel Thurston Harrington, 64, passed away due to complications of heart disease Friday, June 6, 2008 at his residence in Kansas City, MO. Born on September 14, 1943, he grew up in Lathrop and spent his time on the family farms where he rode his horse and played with his friends in the hay barns and later worked in the fields. He loved driving his Willies Jeep exploring northwest Missouri.
Sam attended primary and high school in Lathrop, graduating in 1961. He attended the University of Missouri at Columbia from 1961 thru 1965 and then Rockhurst College in Kansas City. He graduated from Rockhurst in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Sam enjoyed traveling during summer breaks from college. After leaving MU he traveled the entire US and into Mexico in his new red VW bug. After graduation he worked in the men’s department at Halls on the Plaza in the early ‘70’s. He then became a cab driver for Yellow Cab (Cabbie 1111). He retired after his heart attack in 2001. Sam never married.
Sam was a voracious reader. He enjoyed traveling to visit friends and relatives throughout the US. He made trips to London, England to visit his sister and sustain his passion for English literature. He was an avid collector of rare curios, but most of all, loved movies, with his most recent passion being Film Noir at the Kansas City Library.
Sam was very charitable, helping friends and acquaintances when he could make a difference in their lives. His achievements were personal rather than professional. He knew many people and more about Kansas City than most. Enhanced by his experiences as a cabbie, he had thousands of stories to tell – peppered with embellishments to keep us all interested. His family constantly encouraged him to become a writer, but he never took upon anything that wasn’t his own idea first. We will never know all of his good deeds or how much of each fantastic story was true. Kansas City has lost a great friend.
Sam was preceded in death by his parents John E. and Maria Harrington, and sister Kathleen de la Motte. Survivors include sister Elizabeth Tharp and husband Steve, brother John R. and wife Peggi, and sister Meredith Klamm and husband Mike as well as nieces and nephews Megan Smith, Katie Klamm, Phillip and Marc de la Motte, Andy Collins, Joshua Harrington and Jonathan Klamm as well as 8 great nieces and nephews and many dear lifelong friends.
A memorial service will be held on Saturday, June 21 at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, 416 W. 12th K.C, MO at 11:00 am. A reception for friends and family will follow at Tanners, 1000 Broadway. A family burial service will follow in the Lathrop Cemetery, Lathrop, MO. He signed his emails: “i am sam”
Sam was a good friend to the Kansas City Public Library and a good supporter of Bob’s film series. We both will miss him very much and will miss his comments on film, food and The George Pub in London.
I knew Sam for most of sixty years. We started school together in Miss Mabel’s 1st grade class of 1949, at the age of 5. To say that Sam marched to the tune of a different drummer is an understatement. Two things come to mind to illustrate that. They both involve working on the farm during our high school years for his step-grandfather, Lincoln Walker. The first occured when we were disking and Sam chose to remove one of his new contact lenses to clean it. Yes, you guessed it, there we were down on our hands and knees looking for it in plowed ground! I don’t remember the outcome, but I will never forget the event. The other memory occured on a hot and muggy day in June. We were cultivating corn on the farm south of town when a very dark and ominous cloud approached from the southwest. I quickly made the observation that we needed to head for town in the yellow jeep with red wheels. But if you knew Sam very well, he was never in a hurry to get started to anywhere, rain or not. He was sure we could make a few more rounds. Well, we got a good bath that day. It rained so hard ( I believe it was six inches in fifteen minutes or so) that the jeep’s engine drowned out before we got out of the field! Did I mention, the jeep had no top?! After high school, Sam dropped out of my world and didn’t reenter until the death of our high school latin-english-speech teacher Francis Evans died. He called me and suggested we go to the funeral. We did, and he drove my wife Dorothy and I to the Converse Cemetery in his cab after the service. That is when it became apparent to me why he had driven a cab all those years. He had a captive audience upon which to impart his many stories and observations with few if any worries of ever seeing them again. Sam has gone on to join that group of rare and uniquely talented people that made up the population of one of the greatest little communities of the world, Lathrop, Missouri. No doubt, Sam is already bending the ear of some one like Dieter Walker who could tell a good tale also and whose favorite prefacing line was “Now this is a true story!” I will miss Sam and look forward to seeing him again someday.
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I knew Sam at the University of Missouri (Columbia) while I was engaged in doctoral work, 1964-1967, and Sam was an undergraduate and a close friend of a mutual acquaintance, Tom Schulte. All I can say is that Sam was a great, charitable, loyal person, a wonderful friend, one I will never forget. Sam, I remember some great times in Columbia, and I do grieve your passing. Sammy