Del Harmer drew pictures all her life, but she didn’t go into high gear until she was 60.
Harmer, who died Nov. 11 at age 90, loved doing portraits or people in any situation: a man with a donkey in Greece, a bike race, people walking around in Grenada or the ex-boyfriends of her daughter Sara.
When her son, Harold Jr., was a toddler, she drew his portrait and sent it to her husband, Harold Harmer Sr., who was in the Army and stationed in London.
“She was very talented,” said her daughter C.L. Harmer of Denver.
She also was shy and modest. When her husband would show friends her pictures at a dinner party, Del Harmer would say, “Harold, stop that,” Sara Harmer said.
Sara Harmer, the youngest of five children, said her mother would take her to art stores “and let me get anything I wanted. But at a toy store, she wouldn’t let me do that.”
It took. Sara Harmer paints glass and makes jewelry.
In addition to her painting, Harmer managed the real estate investment business she and her husband started. “We finally got her to retire in January,” C.L. Harmer said.
Harmer “was fiercely independent and totally self-reliant,” said her daughter Pamela Korbel of Washington, D.C.
“She painted away with great self-discipline and took weekly art classes.”
She had to give up painting several years ago because of macular degeneration. It was “a cruel condition for someone who derived so much pleasure from the visual arts,” Korbel said.
Reared in a foster home, with an “unstable” childhood, she was determined that the lives of her children would be different, C.L. Harmer said. “She was the rock in our family.”
A lover of the symphony, musicals, ballet and plays, Harmer made sure her children studied at least one musical instrument, Sara Harmer said.
Though she could be stern, Harmer had a sometimes surprising sense of humor. She taught her children to drive in a cemetery, saying, “You won’t kill anyone there,” Sara Harmer said.
Delzorah Louise Dawkins was born in New Orleans on Nov. 23, 1916, and moved to Denver in 1931.
She had to drop out of high school in order to earn a living, which she did at the former Mountain Bell. Despite her shyness, she called the president of the company, said she wanted a job, got an interview with him and was hired, C.L. Harmer said.
She met Harold Harmer through mutual friends, and they married in 1941. He died in 1981.
In addition to her daughters and son, she is survived by another daughter, Diane C. Kullman of Santa Fe; six grandchildren; and her brother, Albert B. Dawkins of Firestone.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
