Marty Miller: A Family Story

By Doris A. Fuller

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9781669814344

Doris A. Fuller

Martin Perry Miller was born in 1923, into extreme poverty, raised in a Hebrew orphanage, abused, underfed, and unloved. Yet his life story reflects perseverance, courage, honor and love. In World War II, he was “equal to other men for the first time.” Leading a battalion, he stepped on a land mine, spending two years in hospitals. He finished at Fitzsimmons hospital in Colorado, attending Denver University and DU Law School on the GI bill. There he met the lovely young Edie Stern in 1948, married in 1950, and raised four children and 13 grandchildren near their family home in Littleton, CO. Marty became a brilliant, incisive lawyer, and an ardent family man. A Democrat who ran in a conservative Republican district, he became the youngest district judge in CO history. He later won the District Attorney race, and ran for Lt. Governor and U.S. Senate.

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Copyright © 2008 by Miller Family Partnership.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 03/01/2022

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CONTENTS

Introduction: A note from the author

Chapters

1. Secrets and Guesses—The early years

2. A Home Boy—the school years

3. In Between—high school graduation to Army years

4. Lieutenant Miller—the early twenties

5. Enter Edie—wife and partner

6. Life with Marty—the family years

7. Colorado’s kind of Democrat—the political years

8. Martin P. Miller, esq.—a lifetime in law

Conclusion: The Miller Legacy

Appendices

A. Family Chronology

B. Offices, honors, and awards

C. Higher Education

D. Eighth birthday celebrations of children and grandchildren

E. Remembering Grandpa—grandchild memories of Marty

F. Secondary Sources

Now Have a Doughnut

by Grandaughter Alex Miller Eurich age 1

0

DEDICATION

for the Martin P. Miller family

No Longer Alone

Grandpa, an orphan, he was all alone.

No food nor clothes nor mom to give pity.

Beat up by older boys, so he was prone

To escape from there to New York City.

A typewriter he taught himself to use,

Became a court typist to earn his meal.

But fighting battles he did not refuse,

Stepped on a land mine, took two years to heal.

To law school on the military bill;

Met Grandma, and they made a dashing pair!

Four children, they made fun chaos, and still

There is more as each child adds to the lair.

No longer alone, without food or clothes—

No longer is Grandpa a child with woes.

By Granddaughter, Abby Miller Eurich age 10

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

B Y THE TIME this book was written in the early 21 st century, a childhood like Martin Perry Miller’s had become the makings of a criminal defense.

Born into extreme poverty, totally abandoned by his father, institutionalized by his mother, reared in a paramilitary setting where he was abused, underfed, and unloved, Marty Miller grew up with all the strikes against him that were cited routinely as the mitigating circumstances for lives gone bad.

Yet Marty Miller’s life went good by virtually every measure of success. Even with the additional hardship of significant war injuries that resulted in two years of hospitalization, Marty managed to graduate from college Phi Beta Kappa, work his way through law school, be elected the youngest judge in Colorado history, become the first district attorney in one of the state’s largest counties, marry for life to a woman who was brilliant and accomplished in her own right, father four extraordinary children, become grandfather to a baker’s dozen of equally extraordinary grandchildren, and practice law into his early eighties.

Marty Miller: A Family Story was commissioned by Marty’s children in 2006 in hopes of preserving his story as a record for themselves and an inspiration for their children and for Miller generations yet to come. The resulting story was assembled from a multitude of primary and secondary sources:

◆ birth, immigration, military, census, and other public records;

◆ interviews of Marty conducted by his daughters in the 1990s and early 2000s;

◆ interviews of Marty and his wife Edythe Edie Stern Miller conducted by the author in early 2006 and conversations with all four of his children, their spouses and children, other family members, friends, and former associates;

◆ original essays, correspondence, and journal entries by Marty, his children, and his grandchildren;

◆ contemporaneous newspaper reports dating from the early 1950s; and

◆ other contemporaneous and historical published materials.

Whenever possible, text from source materials is quoted verbatim, but nominal editing has been performed for clarity and brevity. Attribution is widely used, and all sources used in the preparation of this book are listed in Appendix G.

Thorough as these efforts strove to be, some gaps and contradictions in Marty’s story proved irremediable. Marty was all his life an incurable raconteur, a talent that resulted in some family legends where literal reporting may have shaded unnoticed into storytelling hyperbole. On some subjects, so many years had elapsed between events and the biography project that details were irretrievably lost. Likewise, the memories of different family members conflicted at times, sometimes beyond reconciliation. Additionally, by his early eighties when this project was started, elements of Marty’s life had been retold so many times within the family that some details had taken on a mythic quality not always easily parted with unvarnished facts.

Perhaps most regrettably, by the time this book was written, Marty was not able to remember clearly who or what had nursed the drive and vision that enabled him to build such an exemplary life from such poor circumstances, and none of the historical record had captured these insights. In Deja Views of an Aging Orphan: Growing Up in the Hebrew National Orphan Home, fellow orphan Sam George Arcus wrote about Marty, One felt like asking: ‘What makes Marty run?’ Arcus’s response was boundless energy, but there’s no record of Marty’s own answer. Perhaps some future young Miller will be moved to pick up where this account leaves off and seek a more complete answer to this or fill in more of the countless biographical details that remain missing.

Until then, this book represents the most complete and accurate narrative account possible of Martin P. Miller’s life story, and I am honored to have been chosen to tell it

Doris A. Fuller

Sandpoint, Idaho

April, 2007

CHAPTER 1

SECRETS AND GUESSES—

The early years

T HE YEAR WAS 1923. Or perhaps 1924.

There were forty-eight united states, and Warren Harding—or perhaps Calvin Coolidge—was their president. It had been less than five years since women had won the right to vote and only a decade since Americans began paying income taxes. Prohibition was in effect, though with little effect on the flow of alcohol lubricating the afterglow of the war to end all wars and its resulting financial boom.

Into this world, a woman who called herself Gussie Miller gave birth to a healthy baby boy in the charity ward of Pennsylvania Hospital at Eighth and Spruce streets in Philadelphia. She named her son Martin—known lifelong as Marty—but little more is known about his arrival. No birth certificate or baby book records his length, weight, or birth hour, and though he always celebrated his birthday on January 4, he was never entirely sure the date was correct. For a time, he believed his birth year was 1924, but birth and census records indicate it was most likely 1923.

Most absent from the records and Marty Miller’s life was a father. Though Gussie Miller lived to be in her seventies and spent the last six months of her life in Denver near her son, she disclosed only that his father’s name was Miller and that he abandoned the two of them when Marty was about six months old. She never revealed a single vital statistic about the man she claimed was her husband, and no family lore was passed down through her extended family to confirm name or supply nationality, career, social status, or any other details. The only recorded trace of him appears in the 1930 federal census records, which list Martin Miller as seven years old and his father’s country of origin as Russia. Why he left Gussie and their son, whether he went on to produce children who would have been Marty’s half-siblings, where he lived and died—these and a thousand other questions remain the secrets of time and relatives long since dead.

Nobody ever talked, nobody ever knew, says Myrtle Meadow, who married into Marty’s extended maternal family when he was a young teenager and Gussie was probably in early middle age. Nobody even knew whether she’d ever been married. It was a mystery. My husband (Gussie’s nephew) and I would discuss, ‘Exactly what did happen there?’ but we had no answers. Nobody ever did. Kenneth Kleinrock, another distant relative who grew up around Gussie, says, Marty’s father had just disappeared, and Gussie never said a word. It was probably a topic of some shame or derision.

Marty himself says he made an effort to locate, or at least identify, his father in the 1940s but was unsuccessful and never tried again. He was much too busy constructing a new life to reconstruct the old one, his wife Edythe Edie Stern Miller would say many years later.

What is known with certainty is that at some time in Marty’s infancy or toddlerhood, Gussie moved with her son to New York City and surrendered him in infancy or toddlerhood to a Jewish orphanage in Manhattan. No man again took the role of husband or lover in Gussie’s life, and relatives who knew her well say her social world never extended beyond her sisters and their families to include friends. She remained a presence in Marty’s life until her death in the 1970s—visiting him at the orphanage, sending him packages in the Army, attending his wedding, traveling to Colorado to visit him and his growing family, and spending the final months of her life in a residential care facility in Denver, Colorado, finally to be buried in Littleton Cemetery in Littleton, Colorado. But Gussie Miller forever dwelt at the border of Marty’s life, a shadow mother whose abandonment remained forever incomprehensible.

I didn’t know her, he would say many years later.

THE WEISS (MAYBE) FAMILY

Kenneth Kleinrock (nee Richter) is a cousin twice removed from Marty Miller, and he did know Gussie Miller.

As a child, Ken spent countless hours in the care of his great-great aunt Gussie after his own mother, Estelle Meadow Richter, was widowed and went to work to support her young family. Estelle later married Stanley Kleinrock, who adopted Ken and his older brother born Randolph Martin Richter (called Randy), but Gussie continued to baby-sit the two boys and, later, their half-brother, Seth Kleinrock. Nearly all of what is known about Marty’s maternal forebears comes from this distant cousin, supplemented by the recollections of his aunt, Myrtle Meadow, who was married to Estelle’s brother, Morton.

Gussie and I were very close, says Kleinrock, dean of admissions at the New York University law school when he was interviewed in 2006. Because I had no grandmother, she was like my grandmother. Probably because of the situation with her own child—having to give him up—and because she loved my mother, she became a part of our family. Even my stepfather’s family absolutely adored her.

Gussie was the sister of Ken’s great-great grandmother, who was believed to have been named Anna and who immigrated to this country as a young mother under the name Anna Boyarsky (later changed to Bayer). Both Anna and the daughter who grew up to become Ken’s grandmother (Celia Bayer Meadow) died before Ken was born, but his aunt Myrtle Meadow remembers Celia as an absolute treasure.

She was such a sweet lady, Myrtle said in an interview in her Laguna Hills, California, home. She had these dancing blue eyes. When Myrtle knew Anna, her name was Boyarsky, but she adds, She had a number of husbands.

Both Myrtle and Ken Kleinrock clearly remember Gussie and Anna’s other two sisters: Sophie and Handchie.

Kleinrock characterizes Sophie as a hot pistol—short on stature, long on personality, and absolutely sweet as sugar—a characterization Myrtle Meadow echoes. Sophie was different from the other sisters, more friendly, Myrtle says. Marty’s wife Edie says Sophie always seemed to be her husband’s favorite aunt. In his enlistment documents, he designated that his aunt Sophie Turner at 1295 Morris Avenue in the Bronx, New York, be notified in the event of an emergency and become his beneficiary if his mother did not survive him. Sophie’s husband at the time is believed to have been Jack Turner, but she later married a Jack Silverman and possibly others, including a man whose first name was Sol or Saul. Sophie’s daughter—born Irma Turner but later Irma Estes—settled in upstate New York.

Handchie—probably a nickname for Hannah—never married or had children and supported herself as a door-to-door peddler of lady’s stockings, underwear, and other goods. She gave me aprons, Edie recalled. I may still have some of them. Handchie regularly joined Gussie in baby-sitting the Kleinrock boys, but Ken and his aunt say the two sisters didn’t get along well and—though poor and single—always lived separately and alone. They couldn’t live with each other or without each other, Kleinrock says.

The aunts, as they were collectively dubbed by his family, all indicated they had emigrated from an area of western Russia near Minsk but never disclosed when, why, or at what ages they had left their homeland. Even the family name of the four women remains a matter of speculation. Because Handchie never married and used the name Weiss, Kleinrock says the New York relatives assumed the aunts shared a maiden name of Weiss or some derivative. Gussie always maintained she had been married to Marty’s father and gave her son the name Miller, but in the correspondence Kleinrock handled for his great-great aunt—who never learned to read or write—she also used the name Weisberg. Marty himself listed Weisberg as his mother’s maiden name on a 1987 credit application, while the U.S. Census Bureau in 1930 recorded her as Weyberg. In his eighties, Marty also recalled his mother saying Weisband or Weisbad had been her maiden name.

Unable to read or write in their native languages—much less in the English of their adopted homeland—it is likely that, like countless illiterate immigrants—Gussie and her sisters were given names at Ellis Island based on the ear, experience, and whim of whatever immigration officer each one happened to draw.¹ If they immigrated at different times—or stood in different lines and were processed by different officers—it is possible that each sister was recorded in the immigration records with a different surname from the others. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that a search of immigration records for the Weiss or Weisberg or Weyberg sisters produces no good matches for any of Marty’s ancestors. One Ellis Island record exists of a Gussie Weiss who immigrated to Philadelphia, but the woman arrived in October 1923, ten months after county records indicate Marty was born there, and she is listed as Hungarian, not Russian. A Fanny (close to Hannah) and a Sophie Weiss appear on ship manifests in November, 1905, but both of these immigrants were young—eleven months and three years respectively—and unlikely to have been the girls who arrived in America without parents.²

However, Gussie did elaborate to her great-great nephew on her given name. Ken Kleinrock remembers teasing her that nobody is given the name ‘Gussie,’ which prompted his distant aunt to disclose that her real name was Gittel, a common Russian girl’s name. She told him she was one of ten children, most of whom had stayed behind in Russia with their parents. Ken also can remember Gussie alluding to her father being the rabbi for a larger community of several towns but never knew whether the story was truth or embellishment. Because the four girls emigrated without parents, it was assumed the aunts left their homeland after early childhood and, because Anna is known to have arrived with children, that at least one of the sisters was already in adulthood.

Family histories were not well-recorded events, Kleinrock says of the sketchy nature of the family’s known background. When I would ask Gussie how old she was, she never knew. She didn’t know how old her sisters were. They had no birth certificates, no records. It was all guesswork. They didn’t read or write so they didn’t know how their names were spelled. The family might have come over in waves, but they never talked about it. Kleinrock believed their silence grew in part from a distaste for looking backward to the past that had driven them to leave Russia in the first place.

They just never talked about the other side, he says of the three sisters still alive in his childhood. I think that part of their past wasn’t so wonderful, and they didn’t want to talk about it. And Gussie was very private. She lived day to day without looking back.

Years later, Edie Miller tried to quiz her mother-in-law for more information but got no further