By Danny Miller
“NEVER BETTER!”
I’m sure that anyone in this room who spoke to my dad, Peter Miller, over the last several decades heard this response in his booming baritone whenever they asked him how he was doing. And it was the same whether he was sitting at home at his desk or struggling in the hospital during one of his illnesses or after a bad fall. For someone who had to endure so many health challenges over the last quarter century, my father’s “positive mental attitude,” or PMA as he called it thanks to his good friend W. Clement Stone, was pretty damn impressive. And the thing is, it was real. He was so concerned about how his condition would affect others that he developed a selfless ability to put his own pain and misery aside as best he could in order to avoid worrying others or making them feel bad.
On the other hand, this serenity in the face of hardship did NOT apply to anything that might befall his children. Throughout our lives, if my brother, sister, or I would complain of a light headache or stub a toe and God forbid he heard us say “Ouch!”, we could expect my dad to circle around us in terror and offer to get a medevac helicopter to transport us to Northwestern Hospital. I remember all sorts of minor illnesses or injuries being greeted with the panicked refrain, “We need to call Dave Marcus!” his beloved friend and uncle to one of his BFFs Sam Bobrick, until we finally started questioning it as we got older. “Dad, Dave Marcus is a DENTIST, there’s nothing wrong with our teeth!” It got so crazy that we sometimes avoided telling him when things really WERE wrong with us or our children because we just couldn’t deal with his anguish in that moment. But most of the time, his unbridled concern helped get us through our own troubles with the sheer intensity of his love.
I’ve known many people who’ve had really challenging relationships with their parents and were scarred by their family dynamic. You can imagine how my friends coming from difficult childhoods would roll their eyes when I would try to join in their complaints. “Ugh, I hear you, my dad is SO annoying, he loves us SO much and thinks we’re SO great!”
When I left Chicago and moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, my father threw his children an “Accomplishments Party” where he gathered everyone he knew to tell them how perfect and special his three children were. Vomit, right? For a while I thought maybe I made up this event as a symbol of my dad’s over-the-top kvelling for his children, it couldn’t really have happened, could it? But then, a few years ago, I actually found a copy of the invitation. There it was in bold-faced Helvetica: “Celebrating the accomplishments of my children!” Oy. But even then, when we were mortified by this kind of undeserved attention, we always sighed and said, “Well, we’ll miss it when he’s gone,” and boy, will we ever.
And it wasn’t just his children whose accomplishments he wanted to celebrate, it was everyone he cared about including so many people in this room. I don’t remember a single snide comment or a shred of envy or jealousy in his constant kvelling over the people he cared about. I honestly don’t know anyone else with this kind of pure and selfless appreciation of others, it was really something to see. I mean, he had his neuroses, trust me, but what incredible love he had for the people in his life.
Becoming such a great dad and loving human was not a given if you look at his tough childhood. My father was born into poverty in Chicago at the height of the Great Depression and had very few positive male role models around him other than his older brother Willie. He didn’t know his father at all, and his mother, who he loved, suffered from mental health problems. She was ultimately institutionalized when my father was 14 years old. At that point he went to live with his now married brother, but my father never forgot his poverty-ridden childhood or the times when he and his mother were put out onto the street, often taken in by his aunt, the mother of his wonderful cousins, Betty and Judy. To help out at home, my father started working at a very young age and I always loved talking with him about his many jobs as a boy from candling eggs to see if they were fertilized to serving customers pickled herring which required him to plunge his arm into large barrels even though he was deathly allergic to all forms of fish and seafood, to working as a short order cook at the Walgreen’s on State Street and ushering at the nearby Roosevelt Theater where he once got to escort child star Claude Jarman, Jr. into the theater for the 1946 Chicago premiere of his MGM film, The Yearling.
I have hours and hours of my father’s stories on tape, which I cherish, and one day you may be able to read everything in my father’s gazillion-page memoir that he’s been working on for ages. His partner in crime in that work for the past two and a half years, Teresa, probably knows more about some of the people in this room than anyone else here. Though hired by my sister to help my dad with his work projects and his book, Teresa quickly surpassed those responsibilities and became an honorary member of the family, especially during this last challenging year — she’s even on the “siblings” text thread that my brother, sister, and I have. You’re stuck with us, Teresa, whether you like it or not. Feel free to sell all those secrets to the highest bidder.
My father had wonderful live-in caregivers over the past year, Ramon and Marner, who gave him such loving care at a time when he needed it the most. Being my dad, he also had a great relationship with so many of the doctors, nurses, and physical therapists he had to deal with, even though we often had to kick him under the table when he would say things to the female medical staff such as “Does your husband know how lucky he is?” in his not-so-subtle attempts to find out if they were married. Oy.
That my father loved women was no secret to anyone. His love for, and dare I say obsession with our mom, Judy, was one for the books. They were practically kids when they met by chance during my mother’s spring break from her freshman year of college and they were married four months later, in spite of the many objections that you can read about in his book, with my brother being born nine months after that when my mom was still 19. Though the marriage ultimately ended in divorce, and not a very pretty one, my father never really let go of his love for our mother, and he was one of the main speakers at her funeral in 1999. But they never did get back together. My dad lived for many years with the wonderful Marilyn Roberts, and then, later, had a relationship with Ellen Kahn. Though much older by then and dealing with his blindness and many other health problems, my dad and Ellen had a very active life in…cough…all ways, something they weren’t shy about sharing with the three of us causing us to put our fingers in our ears and sing, “La la la la la la!”
I don’t even know how to talk about the care that my brother, Bruce Miller, and sister, Susan Miller Tweedy, gave to my dad on a daily basis during his final decades. It was extensive and truly life-lengthening. In addition to his constant companionship, Bruce was basically my father’s business partner for many years, taking him to meetings, doing constant research, and participating in many activities related to all of my father’s inventions and late-in-life ideas (how many of you here heard about his plan related to manhole covers?). My dad really WAS a brilliant, innovative thinker but God love Bruce for bearing some of the, shall we say, white lies that he had to hear on a daily basis. “Uh, let me have my marketing people contact our accounting department and get back to you.” Oy.
My sister Sue handled every detail related to my father’s needs for so many years, from doctor’s visits, drugs, and equipment to taking him to his weekly Yiddish group which he loved and providing his daily meals. I honestly don’t know how my dad could have survived a day without her, this all the while she was dealing with her own health issues. The entire Tweedy family gave my father constant love and attention. Jeff had a special bond with my dad and was able to talk him off many a ledge when things got bad. Their children, Spencer and Sammy, were there for my dad with immense love, always ready for a conversation or massage, laughing at his jokes no matter how many times they heard them — although they really were funny, he was a fantastic joke teller. My dad became a beloved character on the family’s Instagram-Live “Tweedy Show” during the pandemic, sometimes appearing in person but usually via their Alexa device where he was lovingly named “Pedrobot.” He gained his own fanbase during those years of people around the world who came to learn what all of us already knew — what an amazing mensch he was.
My family in California was farther away but loved him with the same fervor. My wife Kendall couldn’t get enough of my father’s stories and he was only too happy to oblige. Léah was my dad’s first grandchild and he loved following their every move, including to rabbinical school. He was so bummed to miss Léah’s wedding last week to Rachmiel in Philadelphia, and I can only imagine the very long speech he would have made celebrating Léah’s achievements and what a fantastic person they are. My son Charles had his own special relationship with his Zaid and they often spoke Spanish together.
Charles is watching today on livestream, as are Kendall and my mother-in-law Betsy who loved him so much. Kendall and Charles would often call my dad from the car on their way home from school in Los Angeles, and — well out of earshot of my groaning judgment, would ask my dad to tell them the dirtiest jokes he could think of. Charles couldn’t wait to come home and regale me with these off-color tales at which point I’d laugh and say, “PLEASE don’t repeat any part of that at school!”
As you all know, my father was blind for the last 25 years of his life. While he never learned Braille or any of the other helpful tools for blind people, it was pretty remarkable to see how well he adapted to such a big blow. For decades, whenever we were visiting and we’d go to his house to pick him up for dinner, I’d see him bounding down the stairs to greet us, always meticulously dressed better than I could ever hope to be, perfectly coordinated in every way. I never understood how he did all that, blind and on his own in that huge house. And again, he rarely complained about the challenges of his blindness, he just accepted it like he did everything else.
Things got much tougher over the past year when he could no longer walk and needed around-the-clock care, but he still complained less than most people would in that situation and was always ready with his booming “Never better!” As his body broke down in the end and he left this world, we talked about the people he would soon be able to see: his mother Jeanette, his brothers, Willie and Marvin, his best friends since childhood, Sam Bobrick and Merwin Lichtenstein, and so many other people he loved who have left us, including, yes, my mother who I’m sure had a few comments about certain passages in his memoir!
Coming from the kind of childhood he had with all the fear that poverty can bring, I can understand why my father was so concerned about earning money throughout his life. He was forever in search of his first million which never really came, despite the fact that he was quite successful in his career. It pained us to see his anxiety in recent years over the fact that he wouldn’t be leaving some crazy amount of money for his children. He always had a scheme to make that fortune right up until the very end, but we hated to see him berate himself about his lack of millions.
“Do you think we care about that AT ALL?” we’d repeat over and over until we were blue in the face. “Don’t you know how lucky we all feel to have you as a dad? What you gave us is a billion times more important than any large inheritance would be!”
I so hope my dad can see all the moving, heartfelt comments about him that we’ve received in the days since his death. As I kept telling him would be the case, not a single one mentioned how much money he had or didn’t have in the bank, all people could talk about was what a great man he was and how special he made them feel. As a loving parent and human being, my father was simply beyond reproach — I mean, other than leaving me at home when the rest of the family went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair (okay, I mentioned that to my mother on her deathbed, I had to mention it here!). But seriously, my father was the richest man I knew, in all the ways that count. He reminded me of the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” who was measured not only by how much he loved, but by how much he was loved by others. We love you, Dad, and we always will. And we promise that we’ll always be… “never better!”