A Wilson Family Tree
Notes for Adair W. Miller
Boston Globe, 17 Mar 2007:
Adair Miller, pilot, sailor, with a love of adventure
If he had stayed on in Tahiti, life might have been different for Adair Miller.
Perhaps he would have missed out flying DC-4s across the Atlantic during World War II or he might never have flown transcontinental trips as a TWA pilot.
"He was not a man to talk much about himself," said his son Dusty of Norwalk, Conn.
When he did talk, though, more than a hint of adventure came through in the stories of his early 20s. Mr. Miller, who was a pilot with TWA for nearly 30 years, died Feb. 10 in Berlin, Vt., in the home of one of his children. He was 94, and his health had been declining in the last few months.
"He was an outgoing, gregarious person, on his terms, not all the time, not flashy in any way," his son said. "If you got him going, on a boat or at a cocktail party, he could get a lot of people laughing and certainly enjoyed doing so."
Mr. Miller certainly had plenty of material.
One of five children, he was born in Munich. His father was a physician, and before World War I his parents often lived abroad. With the approach of war, they returned to the United States.
Growing up in New Rochelle, N.Y., Mr. Miller attended boarding schools, but it was never clear from family accounts and anecdotes from which or if he graduated, his son said.
But at 21, Mr. Miller set forth on a significant educational experience when he signed up in 1934 as a cadet on the full-rigged sailing ship the Joseph Conrad. The writer and adventurer Alan Villiers had renamed the ship, which formerly had been used to train sailors in Denmark, and recruited a crew of boys and young men to man the ship on a three-year, round-the-world voyage.
After the trip, Villiers wrote "The Cruise of the Conrad," an account that became a popular book in the late 1930s.
Mr. Miller, however, did not stay with the Conrad for the full journey. When the ship arrived in Tahiti, he decided to remain on the island.
"He liked it a lot," his son said with a chuckle.
Among the stories Mr. Miller told in later years was the tale of a Frenchman he met in a bar, who "invited him to his house and wound up inviting him to marry his daughter," his son said. Mr. Miller demurred, but stayed on the island, even cashing in at least one ticket his father had sent in hope of luring him home.
When he at last returned to New York City, Mr. Miller tried his hand at investment banking, a profession that seemed more than simply a hemisphere away from his life on Tahiti.
"It was probably a little too rigid for him, I would infer," his son said.
Mr. Miller turned to aviation, joining the Air Transport Command in 1941 and flying planes to Canada. He later flew DC-4 aircraft from South America to Africa and the Middle East during World War II.
After the war, he became a pilot for TWA's intercontinental division, his son said, and transferred to Boston in 1947, moving with his wife, Judith, to Andover. The two had met on a blind date during the war years.
"I think the story was that he was supposed to go out with her roommate, and the roommate wanted to go out with someone else on that day, so that's how they got together," their son said. She was still in college, and Mr. Miller "still was showing some of the flash of his early-, mid-20s."
In the last few years of flying for TWA, Mr. Miller began working with Turner Fisheries of Boston, using layover time on the West Coast to find restaurants that might want to import East Coast fish, his son said. Mr. Miller retired from the airline in 1972, when he was 60, then worked for more than a decade with Turner Fisheries as a sales representative, meeting with clients throughout the country.
Still enamored of the sea, Mr. Miller kept a 35-foot wooden yawl, the Monhegan II, at his summer home in Gloucester, where he was a member of the Eastern Point Yacht Club for 55 years.
A few months ago, Mr. Miller and his wife moved to Montpelier to be closer to their son, Conrad, who lives in nearby Berlin. Mr. Miller died at Conrad's home.
In addition to his wife and his sons Dusty and Conrad, Mr. Miller leaves another son, Bryan of Singapore; three granddaughters; and a grandson.
A memorial service will be announced.
The name on his death certificate is Adair Miller. Cause of death was prostate cancer. Died in Berlin, VT.
Note: Some of the information in these pages is uncertain. Please let me know of errors or omissions using the email link above. ...Mike Wilson
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