TRIBUTE TO OLIVER B. MILLER

WARNING: THIS IS VERY FAMILY ORIENTED, probably pretty boring for others.

I have been meaning to write about Oliver Miller for a long time in the spirit in which I started this blog—to provide some insight into my life, especially as that life was different or unique in terms of today. Everyone’s life is unique when the people they touch are taken into account, and Oliver was one of those unique influences to me.

Oliver’s wife, Jenny was my paternal grandfather’s younger sister. An attractive, energetic and pleasant woman who raised two daughters, Carol who lived in Valentine and Doris who married Ralph Ekwall. Doris was a character, actually she suffered from some emotional illnesses over the years, owned racehorses and her husband, Ralph, was a genuine gentleman. The “attractive” reference is significant. Looking back at those old pictures, we are not a family that made it on looks. The current Emma is a beautiful girl (see below) but definitely an outlier.

Oliver was, by any measure, a highly-talented man in various realms involving things mechanical. He was a mechanic by trade in St. Edward before he took a job with Loup River Power, the Depression Era project that built a canal and a hydro plant to serve the Columbus area. A great photographer, he set up his own dark room in his basement along with a fairly sophisticated shop where he would purchase a gun barrel and then manufacture the rest of the parts for a rifle. That basement had a unique, to me, smell. They had natural gas in Columbus, and they had gas appliances (furnace? Water heater?). The smell was new to me, it was only years later that I learned the compound responsible was ethyl mercaptan used as the odorant in natural gas.

He was responsible, despite only an eighth-grade education, for developing and fabricating many of the dredge parts that were used to remove the sand from the settling basins at the Loup Headgates where the Canal started. The Loup River descended out of the Sandhills at a strong current and carried a lot of sand. Before it could be slowed and diverted via the canal, the sand had to be minimized so that the canal would not fill with silt immediately; ergo, huge sand piles.

Just in the last 20 years, nearly a century after the canal was conceived, the sand has become quite valuable and is being loaded and shipped around the country for various purposes including glass and other industrial products and sand for the oil frac process.

Mentioning my paternal grandfather, Homer’s siblings, his oldest sister was named Emma. That first name has become pretty common in the family, my grandniece/god daughter is Emma and she was born on November 5, 1999, the same day my paternal grandmother, Emma, was born in 1886. Now, gets a bit tricky: my grandmother’s maiden name was Emma Martenson, and when she married, she became Emma Peterson. Homer’s sister was Emma Peterson and when she married, she became Emma Martenson. (The spellings may be different, they were pretty cavalier about that back in the day. The current relatives in Sweden spell it Mårtensson). Well, that got off track.

Come holidays, Jenny would cook and Oliver would hold court. He knew a lot of stuff, was very well read and the discussions were fascinating covering topics from aviation to guns to his favorite, automobiles. It was the dawn of the jet age in aviation, so I learned the basic principles of a ram jet engine, and it was a time of rapid development in the auto industry. I have no idea how much of my education came from those discussions, but it had to be a lot. I remember in particular a discussion about the basic principles of a diesel engine, a topic I reviewed with my brother when he was in high school, so I was no older than 11.

We always had to cut the day short in those holiday visits as we had to get home to milk. Sixty-five years later, I can vividly remember that house, the people and the discussions.