Photo Album
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The Compass
The compass belonged to my father, Joseph "Joe" Miller (1931–2019), and to his father before him. Dad wasn't a man of many words, but he never went anywhere without it. He told me the brass had gone smooth from three generations of thumbs — his father used it surveying rail lines through the Colorado Rockies in the 1950s.
The Photographs
The photographs in this box are from Dad's early years — a skinny kid on the porch of the farmhouse where he grew up, one in his Boy Scout uniform at thirteen, another of him and his brothers the summer they built a raft for the lake behind their house. He used to say he could still smell the pine and lake water just looking at them.
The Letters
The letters are the ones Dad and my mother, Ruth, wrote each other in the summer of 1958, the year he worked a fire lookout in Montana, before they married. He kept every one of hers; she kept every one of his.
The Journal
The journal was his last one, mostly empty. He started it the year he retired, in 1996, meaning to write down the stories he used to tell us at dinner. He only got a few pages in — part of why I'm writing this now, in 2026. Some stories don't get told unless someone decides to tell them.
Our family was blessed to have such a caring, loving father and husband.