Richard Charles Harmon was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1952. When he was six years old, his family moved to the West Coast. In 1975, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, San Diego. He attended Columbia University in New York, then transferred back to UCSD. A few years later, he left graduate school and began working in publishing in Southern California. In the early 1980s, he began working in the UCLA oral history program. In 1984, he became an oral historian at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, and the next year, he also became the editor of Oregon Historical Quarterly, the historical society's journal. For a year, he held both positions, and he served as editor of OHQ until 1999.

Harmon was married twice. He and Candice Gaucher married in 1975, then divorced in 1985. He remarried, to Jane Malarkey, in 1990. Harmon died in 2004.

Sources: Information provided by Harmon in an oral history interview, SR 2531, held by the Oregon Historical Society Research Library; vital records on Ancestry.com.