Wednesday, June 25, 2008

An Intriguing Photo Caption

I was reading about Nedra Harrison today. Okay, it was a photo caption. What I read was a photo caption, and yes, I consider that reading. It was a photo caption in THE COMPLETE TERRY AND THE PIRATES, vol. 3, from the same good people who brought you THE COMPLETE DICK TRACY, vol. 1. Who is Nedra Harrison, you ask? She modeled for comic strip artist Milton Caniff, and... Well, here. Here's part of the photo caption: "Nedra Harrison... also posed for Salvador Dali's 'Madonna of the Sea' and portrayed Lady Godiva at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During World War II, she earned her pilot's license and was a member of the prestigious Women's Air Force Service Pilots. She later became a respected pathologist and supervised the cytology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital." Wow! I find Nedra Harrison even more interesting than "the Broadway Gun Girl." She is some kind of real life Wonder Woman! I mean, can you imagine the credits for a TV show about Nedra Harrison? It would probably start with Ms. Harrison in her supermodel mode on a fashion runway during a photo shoot that is interrupted so she can jump in her plane and fly herself to the hospital, where she would run upstairs and save somebody's life. And you would be like, "No way!" Too outlandish, yes, that would be your conclusion. This couldn't be a real person. And oh how very wrong you would be. For there was such a person, according to the photo caption I just read. And her name was Nedra Harrison. Nedra Harrison! (Ironically - is that the word? - there won't be a picture accompanying this "post" because there aren't any photos of Nedra Harrison on the "internet," though I did find a practicing surgeon - a relative, perhaps, following her forebear's footsteps into the medical profession? - by that name in Scottsdale, Arizona. You know, there's precious little information about Nedra Harrison on the "internet" at all, really... there's more, in fact, in that photo caption! Well, there IS one "internet" photo of the "original" Nedra Harrison in a publicity shot for a San Francisco department store, but she is hard to see in it and you need the permission of the San Francisco public library to show it and frankly I'm just way too lazy to get permission for anything, ever.)