Crumbling Foundation

Until the 1960s, Philadelphia was a municipal magazine that never ventured much beyond chamber of commerce puffs. Since then it has developed a talent for muckraking and a willingness to take on just about anyone--even so unlikely a figure as Pearl Buck. There she was, some days ago, a silver-haired, 77-year-old Nobel-and Pulitzer-prize winning author, meeting the press to try to cover up for a colleague. He had been accused, in Philadelphia's pages, of mishandling charitable funds and making homosexual advances to the Korean boys he was supposed to be helping. "A bunch of downright lies," said Miss Buck gamely, but Theodore Findley Harris, 38, had already resigned as president and executive director of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.

The foundation was set up in 1964 to help Amerasian children in Korea, where youngsters fathered by U.S. soldiers are spat upon for their half-caste status. In April of this year, Philadelphia's Reporter-Writer Greg Walter listened to tapes a local radio station had made (but had never used) in which four Korean boys described unwilling homosexual contact with Harris. He then began digging. He traveled across the U.S., talking to former and current foundation employees, to board members and benefactors, to the young men on the tapes, to Miss Buck herself. Harris repeatedly refused to see him.

Daimler and Sapphires. As Walter tells it, Harris was a dancing instructor who, in 1963, wanted to be just a gigolo and began ingratiating himself into the comfortable Bucks County life of Pearl Buck. He fawned, she loved it; together they wrote a mawkish book (For Spacious Skies) about finding one another. A year later, she made him president of the new foundation. He left his dance-studio job and moved into (rent free) the organization's elegant town house in Philadelphia's Delancey Place. Soon, writes Walter, Harris had collected "several thousand dollars worth" of suits, jewelry (he went for diamond and sapphire rings), an expensive Daimler automobile, credit cards, exotic birds, camera equipment. The Buck name drew well, and by 1965 the board of governors included Art Buchwald, Sargent Shriver and Mrs. William Scranton. The foundation prospered.

But there still was no effective machinery in Korea. Harris eventually got around to appointing an overseer there; he was the first in a long line of "permanent representatives," all of whom, says Walter, have complained about the lack of money and direction from Delancey Place. But there has always been money to spruce things up just before Miss Buck arrives. Once, at the foundation's center at Sosa, Korea, $5,000 went into hurry-up redecorations, although there apparently was not enough to put up a fence around a small pond on the property. One evening during the Statesiders' visit, the body of a four-year-old was found floating in it.

Harris' behavior was erratic. He threw public tantrums and offended potential patrons in their own houses. One friend called him "a Svengali," but Miss Buck was firm: Harris acted as he did because he was "very brilliant, very high-strung and artistic."

Harris periodically brought Amerasians to the U.S. under various foundation study programs. There was difficulty in getting one, Bob Park, out of Korea because he was of draft age. But Harris found him so attractive that he had Miss Buck pull strings. Park, now a student at the University of Arizona, remembers: "One night on the way to America he asked me about my father and I began to cry; he kissed me on the neck. When I would go to bed he would hold me in his arms. I did not like, but I thought this is the way American father treat his son."

Recently, Park and some of the other boys complained about Harris' conduct, and the foundation responded--by withdrawing its support of Park and two others. One concerned board member had asked an auditing firm to look into things, but that is no longer necessary: the Pennsylvania attorney general's office has demanded a.report on the organization's finances and activities before deciding whether to renew its permit to solicit funds in the state.

The Harris article indicates the direction Philadelphia has taken since D. Herbert Lipson became publisher in 1961. "To make an impact as a city monthly magazine, you have to do handsprings," Lipson says. He has published provocative pieces on the city's clip joints and ghettos; Philadelphia inquirer Muckraker Harry Karafin was exposed for taking hush money from outfits he should have been attacking (TIME, April 21, 1967). Just after he was named ambassador to England, Walter Annenberg, former editor and publisher of the Inquirer, was the subject of a highly unsympathetic portrait. Some find the magazine scurrilous, but it has won reporting awards, and circulation has quadrupled since 1960; it is now 62,000. Editor Alan Halpern says Philadelphia, with a staff of 36, earns over $1,000,000 a year.

Walter, who collaborated on the Karafin expose, once attended a writers' workshop run by Miss Buck. For his recent article he interviewed her twice. The first session was easygoing and pleasant, but then Walter began to probe. "She told me I was vile. She said she was ashamed of me, that I had been her favorite pupil, but that now she was terribly disappointed in me."

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