Searching for Ms. Miller

I HATE ASKING FOR HELP — SO MUCH SO THAT I’D SOONER SPEND an hour draining my phone battery than stop someone on the street for directions. Which is why it’s rich that I recently found myself posting to the community Facebook pages of a tiny town I’d never visited, begging total strangers for leads in solving a mystery that had haunted me for four years.

The object of my fixation was a writer and musician named Ruth Scott Miller, whose name surfaced again and again in research I’d been doing on the history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Based on what I could gather from digitized clippings, Miller found her way to Chicago in the 1910s feature on new literary talent, alongside another up-and-comer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1920, Miller abandoned a promising career as a concert violinist to become the classical music critic of the — the first woman to fill that role, at a time when it was nearly unheard of for women to write under their own bylines outside the society section.