I want to introduce you to someone today.
You will never meet her, because she died last week. Her obituary says she died unexpectedly at the age of 66.
If you have appreciated my work on the radio at any point over the last 33 years at all, she deserves about as much credit as any human being outside of my family for making it happen.
Her name was Nancy Miller.
She grew up in Rochester—graduated from there. She got her teaching degree at Butler.
If her name rings a bell, it might be because she was a teacher for three years at Warsaw Community High School in the early 1980’s.
Then she did a really odd thing: she took an English teaching job at Argos High School.
That’s my Argos.
Not too many teachers go from a school of that size to a school that small. It generally means a pay cut, and no one goes looking for that.
She directed a few musicals there, but most of her impact on students was as an English and literature teacher.
She was my English teacher.
She loved sports.
In her first day in our class, she made it quite clear that the Purdue Boilermakers and the Chicago Cubs were the loves of her sports life.
We were going to get along just fine, and we did.
She knew all about my dream of being on the radio.
So, in the middle of my senior year, when all of friends were taking days off from school to visit colleges and make their final decisions on where they were going, I stayed home because “I couldn’t miss practice.” I look back on it and wish I had that to do over again.
I applied to several schools, but Butler was the one I really wanted. They had two radio stations on campus that were student operated. One had a signal that barely covered campus, and the other was almost as powerful as WRSW.
It gave a kid like me, who had never been on the radio before, a chance to make mistakes and work stuff out without worrying about making a fool of myself.
But the leadership of the Radio/TV Department at Butler was not convinced.
They didn’t believe I had what it took to make it in radio, and I totally understood where they were coming from.
My voice was very high pitched and squeaky, and that was in a time when that kind of voice didn’t make it anywhere in that business.
They politely rejected my request to join them.
Mrs. Miller got involved.
She got on the phone and made a phone call. I don’t know who exactly she talked to or what was said, and I can only imagine the tone of the caller—gentle but convincing.
All I know of what happened is this: I got a second letter. This one said that there was, in fact, a space available in the program for me.
And so I went to Butler for orientation week, having never even been on campus before. I had to ask for directions to Ross Hall.
I had no idea what I was doing.
But 39 years later, here I am.
She heard me broadcast games and each morning on the radio. She knew that her investment in me had paid off. She knew.
As a matter of fact, the last time I saw her face-to-face was on the station’s Cubs bus trip. She didn’t tell me she was going. She even had her husband sign her up to maintain the surprise. I had no idea until she got on the bus.
Is there someone in your life that you can invest in?
Is there someone near you that could benefit from just an encouraging word?
Is there someone you know that needs to know that someone outside of their family believes in them?
I am willing to bet that there is, and in the time it took for Nancy Miller to make that phone call for me, you could change someone’s life the way she did mine.
And by helping that person and changing the course of their lives, think of all the people who will also be affected by it for generations to come.
They laid Nancy Jo Miller to rest today. May her spirit live on in me and others like me that she helped.