First Word #1 - Keeping the Stories Alive

This was the first “First Word” published in the Boulder Genealogical Society Quarterly in February 2006.

The First Word:
Karl H. Miller, 1922-2005, Keeping the Stories Alive
by Cari A. Taplin

As your new Quarterly editor, it is my duty (or privilege) to tell you a little bit about myself. I want to use this first column to tell you about the beginnings of my interest in genealogy.

When I was growing up I had the best grandpa in the world, Karl Harold Miller. He was kind, hardworking and caring. He was a joker and a story teller. He liked a good laugh; and he liked remembering the things that made him laugh; and he liked sharing them. I heard stories of when he was young, the friends he had, the things he did. It was a magical world so different from the world we live in today. He told of the time he quit high school to start working. He worked on his grandpa’s farm, drove a school bus (without being certified), drove a gasoline truck, was a substitute mail man and later drove a cement truck until he retired in 1983. When he was young he drove a motorcycle, a 1940s Harley-Davidson.

He told of meeting my grandma and how he wouldn’t take her for a ride on his motorcycle because it needed a new tire. This was during “the War” (World War II) and rubber was scarce. So he had to order a tire and wait for a few months. I’m guessing that grandma really wanted a ride for that to be an important memory for him! This story shows his dedication to safety.

My grandpa always taught us safety. Being safe around bonfires, tractors, power tools, boats, on ice, while using knives, how to walk with scissors (carry them by the points with the points aimed away from you). He told of his grandmother Carrie, who tripped while carrying scissors and put out one of her eyes. In every photo of her he showed me, she is wearing dark glasses which he attributed to her eye injury. So we got a lot of lectures about being safe and it has stuck with me.

Probably the most interesting and recognizable feature of my grandpa was his limp. When he was nine years old he broke his hip. That’s all he would tell us about it for the longest time. I was an adult before I got the whole story and even then he was hesitant to tell me about it. But one day I asked him how it happened and he finally relented.

He told me how he and his brother Jim would climb up the corn crib and then race down. He said you could go really fast if you let go of the step you were holding on to and grab the next as you fell, rather than use your feet to go down. Well, one time he missed the next handhold, fell to the bottom, and broke his hip. In that time (early 1930s) the best medical care they could offer was to just straighten it out as best they could and put a half body cast on him until it healed. He had to stay in bed for a long time, many weeks if I remember the story correctly. An x-ray taken later in his life showed that the ball and socket of the hip joint had fused together and had become just one piece of bone. I find that story so interesting because of his talks on safety. Did he get such strong convictions about safety because of this incident? I’m betting so.

I heard all of these stories before I began what I call “serious genealogy.” It was shortly before I began my journey as a genealogist my grandpa suffered the first of several strokes that would eventually end his life. I didn’t realize how important these stories would be to me and to my research until it was too late to ask him even more questions.