Chief

Edwin Lee Miller MD, my paternal grandfather was a most remarkable man. Though I knew him only briefly, he had a profound influence on the man I was to become. Intimates called him Lee, everyone called him Chief.

E. Lee Miller was born in Norborne, Missouri (Carroll County), just north of the Missouri River and not far from a new Kansas City. Like many others along the Missouri river, his family had migrated west from Virginia with a stop in Kentucky. His father, Stonewall Miller, was a prosperous farmer. From just west of St. Louis to the Kansas Border, Missouri was settled by immigrants from former slave holding states, while the northern part of the state was settled by "free state" immigrants. The rugged Ozarks to the south was settled by people who simply wanted to be left alone.

Lee went to the University of Missouri, where he joined the Beta Theta Pi social fraternity. He played football in those distant days when padding was minimal and the players wore neither numbers, nor, it seems, helmets. He was twice captain of the team, the only man in the history of the school to have been so honored. His interest in football and the university never waned and he made what was then the long drive to Columbia from Kansas City to see his team play football until the end of his life.

At the University he met and married Faith Pearse, a Kansas Citian and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It was a match made in heaven. Lee Miller was admitted to Harvard Medical School in the exciting days after the Flexner Report, when medicine turned from a trade to a true profession. The two of them soaked up Boston's very different culture, and he used to say that "it took him twenty years to get over having gone to Harvard". While there he purchased, for the grand sum of six dollars, a walnut desk; not a roll-top but a fold-down top with cubbies for everything, and a "secret chamber" for his microscope. I had that desk for medical school and many years after, and now it resides with my son John.

(much more to come)