G Home: Emissary of Taste

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Emissary of Taste

G Home

Bathed in soft middle-of-December light, a calm Harritte Thompson stands in her cozy sunroom next to a cheery Christmas tree. Two pines are draped with lights and ornaments, and waves of greenery fill the mantels above her Tudor home’s fireplaces; the breakfast room’s table is set with holiday dinnerware, along with hand-written name cards that direct imminent guests to their assigned seating.

Harritte has neat blonde curls that just brush the top of her spotless white turtleneck. And throughout her home, subtle expressions of the Christmas spirit abound, both beautifully placed and nature-inspired. Silken Christmas balls, which Harritte decorated with sequins and beads, date back to 1946, the year she got married and spent her first Christmas with her husband, Gates Thompson. These handmade adornments share space on the sunroom’s Christmas tree with rare, limited-edition silver ornaments from The White House, while light-filled garlands drape the stairway to the third floor of her home.

Carriage lights around the outside brick patios are tied with feisty red bows and greenery, and tall jars filled with cranberries form a simple yet elegant centerpiece on her more casual breakfast table.

Last year, Harritte offered her Belmont Heights home to be part of Greer’s Historic Home Tour, raising money for area charities, something she strives to frequently support. Unlike many homeowners who opened their homes for this and other tours, she declined offers to work with local florists and interior designers to stage her home for visitors. “I did everything,” Harritte offers with an understated elegance that, once you get to know her, seems both remarkable and absolutely natural.

Those who find their way into Harritte’s home are apt to leave impressed not only by her style, but also by the woman herself, a maverick who has spent much of her life defying the odds and breaking societal barriers. A native of Duncan, South Carolina, Harritte had never left the state until 1946, when, at nineteen years old, she graduated from Winthrop College, got married, and moved to Washington, D.C., to be with Gates, then an officer in the Marines and a law student at American University.

There, she worked as a secretary, like most working women at the time, and logged six years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But she was—just as she still is—a woman of ambition and undeniable wit, and the head of the personnel department at the Central Intelligence Agency took notice.

“He called me and said, ‘Look, you’re never going to get anywhere at the Department of Agriculture,’” she recalls. So in 1952, she left to join the CIA, starting in what was then known as the spy services, in the Far East Asia division. “I hardly knew where Burma was when I first started,” she laughs. “I had to learn fast.”

As her husband got his doctorate in law and worked for the city of Alexandria as an attorney, she rose in the CIA ranks and, in 1979, became the first woman to be the CEO of operations for the Directorate of Operations, also known as the agency’s worldwide spy operations. She also managed a multimillion-dollar budget and a staff of fifty, all while traveling to nearly thirty-six countries, including war-torn Afghanistan and Vietnam, and most of Asia and Africa. “I was determined,” she says. “I was tough, but I was fair,” she adds, which earned her the nickname “Iron Lady,” as well as the respect of her peers in a male-dominated agency.

Gates and Harritte had lived in the Washington area for forty-four years when they decided they were ready to downsize and move south. “I liked the idea of coming back home,” she says. They started looking in the Greer area in 1990, and when they found their home, they knew. “The minute we walked in, Gates looked at me, I looked at him,” she says. “It was perfect.”

Nearly two decades later, the home is a veritable museum to her impressive list of accomplishments—framed, on a long wall in a hallway leading to the den, hangs the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency’s second-highest honor, which she was awarded upon retirement in 1989. Twelve years later, the agency dedicated a chair in her honor—she is one of only four CIA employees to have a chair dedicated to their service; the other three all were directors of the CIA, including George H. W. Bush. The original chair resides at the CIA, but a replica can be found in her living room. The annual holiday home tour, which benefits the Greer Heritage Museum and Greer Relay for Life, is just one of the many worthy causes Harritte supports, ranging from the Camellia Garden Club of Greer to the city’s fire and police departments. Understandably, Harritte was a star in the 2008 tour, says Greer Museum director Joada Hiatt, both because her self-styled home is so unique and because Harritte is so well traveled. “We thought people would enjoy it. She’s a very, very smart woman,” Joada offers. “She’s very gracious and down to earth, but I can see she probably was very tough and no nonsense about her work.”

Even in cold weather, Harritte finds her design inspiration by working in her garden. She learned gardening from her mother (“She had twenty green thumbs,” Harritte laughs), and in the winter, evergreens and late-fall leaves caught in stone-bordered beds offer a cool serenity to her landscaping. She collects, dries, and presses flowers from her garden to create notecards, which she gives as holiday gifts. Holly branches, magnolia leaves, and pinecones found their way inside and have become showpieces on mantels and on the holiday table settings. “I prefer natural greens, live greens,” she says. “I just think they’re prettier.”

Nary a Christmas-décor item has spent time on a store shelf: Magnolia and pinecones collected from her yard sit on the mantel in her den. Another mantel holds hand-dried artichokes tucked into a wave of greenery. “I cut them and dried them and worked on them for hours,” she laughs. A wreath of dried hydrangea blooms and a red-rose floral arrangement sing from her dining room table, where she usually hosts an annual holiday gathering for her family.

“Christmas was always special,” she says. “My husband grew up in a family during the Depression, and they just didn’t do a lot during Christmas time.” So the two made the holiday a time of celebration and time with family, something she still tries to do though Gates died in 1993. When the two lived in Washington, they began hosting lavish holiday dinners of Indian curry, which she learned to make herself. The meal typically includes a dozen or so condiments, including two or three kinds of spicy-and-sweet chutneys and items ranging from sweet peppers to peanuts. She works to continue the tradition in Greer. Her breakfast room, a less formal dining area next to the kitchen, is set with curry, rice, and condiments. “Everyone fills up plates and goes into the living room to eat,” she says. “My family, they all love it.”

But as Harritte’s holidays take on an international flavor, she also throws in her own playful nods to childhood memories. A package-carrying Santa sits on a tall stool in the entranceway, just as an army of jaunty nutcrackers spreads throughout the bookshelves of her husband’s law library. Gates was, like Harritte, a collector, so the library is filled with walls of books and two antique guns from his collection—one from the Civil War and another from the Revolutionary War.

Harritte’s collections (not just her holiday ones) span the globe, including everything from copper Indian lunch boxes to colorful clay roosters from Mexico and Argentina, and Malaysian garden stools in the shape of elephants who hold their trunks up for good luck. “I especially like elephants,” she chuckles. In the picture-filled hallway on the main floor, curio cabinets hold miniature elephant carvings scattered amongst her other collections. “I collected them in different places—Taiwan, Afghanistan, Singapore, Thailand.”

And as she rests on a plush chair tucked in her downstairs den, she is nonplussed by what should be typical end-of-year, holiday fervor. Surrounded by soft touches—leather couches, tall cranes from Thailand, another tree decorated in white lights, not to mention Tiger the cat who hovers nearby, she says her home is the place she now loves the most. “I feel comfortable here. I enjoy my things and have a lot of memories.”