Jim Miller 1947-2016

First, thanks to my Knox classmates of long ago who publicly and privately expressed appreciation for my recent reminiscences here.  (There are more to come.)  I wouldn't exaggerate my feats of memory, however.  I had the program to What's Happening, Baby Jesus? to prod recollections, for example, and as a columnist I was given a full set of Knox Students on more permanent paper.  I still have them for a couple of those years, as well as other source documents.  In my years of paid writing I learned to hoard information, and make use of it. Though from that long ago, what's survived is more serendipity than system.

But one of those messages from classmates also contained sad news.  Chip Evans wrote that he'd recently discovered that our classmate Jim Miller passed away a couple of summers ago.  I'd mentioned articles Jim had written for the Student in 1968 about prospects in Canada for draft resistors.  He wrote other pieces on the Vietnam war as well.

Jim was my second roommate in Anderson House, either my first or second year, or perhaps parts of both.  We started as freshmen on the third floor with different roommates, the top floor of that storied Victorian Gothic house on West Tompkins St. (I would say it was a magical house, but Rod Barker might accuse me of stealing the word again.)  I still dream about some version of Anderson House as a perennial refuge.  In reality it's been gone for decades, one of my two old homes demolished in the expansion of the college.

I was assigned to the room that included the turret in front on the right (you can see the room but not the top of the turret in this photo that Chip sent me. He was also in Anderson House in those years.) The room was actually two small rooms--a rectangular room with the beds (and no 90 degree angles at all, anywhere) and the round turret room, with the desks.

John Heyer was my roommate.  On the day we first arrived, his father and mine were sitting in the two chairs in the turret room when a photographer flashed in and out.  In that year's yearbook the photo appeared, with John's father identified as a father, and my father as a student.  It's the closest he ever came to being in college.  As for John, I principally remember him rushing in after class every day, and playing "Louie, Louie" on the phonograph.

Eventually many of us hung out in the wood-dark common area on the third floor around the staircase, in the middle of the broken rows of attic rooms.  Someone there once noted that we were the misfits that the college stashed as far as they could from everyone else.  He noted that we included two Jewish students, a few Catholics, perhaps the only African American student on campus (who had the floor's only single room--just a little larger than a broom closet) and three students with Polish last names.  Among others.  I was just learning about such distinctions, so I remembered.

Ted Szotkowski of Chicago lived in the room next to mine, with Ron Haas of Racine, Wisconsin, a romantic place name to me then.  Ted taught me a simple finger picking style on guitar that I still use, with additions. (Don't think twice, it's alright.)  Ted had his acceptance letter to Harvard mounted on the wall, and would sometimes recline on his bed staring at it. I was even more impressed that his high school had a daily newspaper. Once Ted was out in the common area typing a paper, and someone complained about the noise.  Ted promised he'd wear gloves.

On the other side of this common area was Jim Miller and his roommate, Arnie Shankman. Jim was often among us, and though Arnie was pretty studious, he couldn't resist coming out there when he heard us laughing.  Arnie passed away in 1983, only 37, but with a long list of publications and accomplishments at Winthrop College in South Carolina, a commitment to diversity and understanding, and an academic career that included studies at Harvard.  He'd also had several articles in the Knox Student, but on more academic matters.  He was particularly interested in libraries.  (The above link will take you to a reminiscence from a post-Knox friend.)

Also on the third floor were Tim Zijewski and Ron Zaba.  One thing almost all of us had in common, we discovered, was that we were the first in our families to go to college. We were all almost always broke.  Ron once wrote a check for the last 48 cents in his account (as I noted in a letter home.)

I don't know what may have merited Jim's presence among the misfits, except that he appears to have been a year younger than most of us.  Once we started rooming together I discovered his pride--somewhat ironic but very enthusiastic pride--in both sides of his heritage.  He divided the year in half: for the first half he was Czech, the second he was Scottish.  He even constructed little shrines in our room extolling each nationality in turn as the greatest on Earth, and paid homage to it first thing upon returning from classes.

thanks to Chip Evans for photo,
probably Jim's high school portrait

Jim at that time was high-spirited, mischievous and kind.  I didn't make it home to Pennsylvania over every vacation, and Jim invited me to spend one break with him and his family in Berwyn, Illinois.  It was my first (but not last) experience with the Chicago suburbs. I wound up being persuaded to serve as his younger sister Billie's date for a high school dance, for which Jim had already been drafted as a chaperone.

 It was odd to be self-consciously a college guy at a huge suburban high school (Morton West, if I'm not mistaken), so it was a slightly surreal but surprisingly pleasant evening.  I don't know if my presence impressed her classmates but I do remember making an effort to be attentive, without raising her brother's ire.  Billie was sweet and made me hot chocolate when we returned.

Jim and I mostly parted ways after sophomore year, though I recall a moment that must have been graduation weekend when I ran into him outside the dining halls in the student union, in the company of a pretty, very late 1960s-looking young woman.  It turned out to be Billie.  The three of us shared a delighted laugh about it all.

After our time at Anderson House, Jim roomed with Chip Evans, and was on the swim team with him.  According to information Jim's younger brother Jerry provided to Chip, Jim went on to teach English in Japan, and later worked in southern California and Chicago, where he returned in the early years of this century to care for his ailing mother, then in her 90s.  He continued swimming competitively (Chip wrote that he last saw Jim at a masters swimming meet in the 1990s) and according to Jerry, he returned to the pool regularly until a few months before his death in July of 2016.