I was standing at a downtown street corner in Springfield, shivering in the cold January air, as I waited for the bus. I blew on my hands, trying to keep them warm. Suddenly I was aware of two older ladies who were standing across the street from me, engaged in an earnest debate. Scraps of their conversation floated over to me. “No, she isn’t!” “Yes, she is!” I soon realized that they were pointing and gesturing at me as they argued. And then one of them became so vehement in her response that the words sounded quite clearly, “That’s Bill Miller’s daughter!”
I cringed, wishing that my too-tall, skinny 14-year-old self could just disappear. There it was again! Someone was referring to me as “Bill Miller’s daughter!” I wanted to crawl into a hole.
Ever since I could remember, my dad seemed to me to be a larger-than-life figure, practically a living legend in Springfield. His voice boomed from our radio, day and night, and his image often flickered across the screen of our TV set, when it was tuned to the local channel. He popped up on stages regularly at various county fairs and at the Illinois State Fair, emceeing grandstand shows featuring stars that I idolized. “There goes Bill Miller’s daughter!” were the words I most often heard during my growing-up years.
Once, when I was nine, I landed in the hospital with bronchial asthma. I was desperately lonely, as I lay curled up in bed, my transistor radio held tightly to my ear. My dad couldn’t visit me as often as he’d like, but I could listen to his voice over the radio, and that gave me comfort. When I was about to be discharged, the pediatrics nurses were all atwitter. They all seemed to be gathering at my bedside, waiting for my father to come pick me up. One of them even asked me, “Do you think you could get his autograph for me?”
“Bill Miller” was not, in fact, his real name. It was his WTAX “radio” name, which he’d chosen to replace his own rather unwieldy moniker, “Alvin William Pistorius.” (The station manager had quipped that, by the time my dad could say his whole name on the air, the time allotted for the newscast would be over.) So now he was known as “Bill Miller,” and my mother, who’d changed her name to “Pistorius” when she’d married my dad, now found herself with a different last name than her husband. It made it difficult when we went to pick up dry cleaning, or pictures from the Photo Finishing Shop. We never knew if my dad had left them under the name “Miller” or “Pistorius.” Once I took our little Cairn terrier to the vet, and the receptionist couldn’t find his records. It seemed that Spunky was a “Miller.”
I was proud of my father, proud to the very core of my being. I was awed when he went to Washington, D.C. to meet President Kennedy, and was excited when he won the Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting, as well as 20 Associated Press awards for radio reporting. I was especially thrilled when he won the INBA’s Illinoisan of the Year Award. Most of all, I enjoyed the “perks” that came with having a locally famous radio personality for a father. I was able to attend U.S. political conventions and sessions of the Illinois legislature, meet U.S. presidents and rock stars, and sit, front and center, in the press box, at State Fair grandstand shows.
My dad seemed to know everyone in the city, and everyone seemed to know him. Sometimes I felt a bit lost in the shuffle.
Now he is gone. The man who spent half his lifetime striving to give fair, unbiased reporting to a whole generation of Illinoisans, and then spent the next half of his life teaching scores of other journalists to do the same in the Public Affairs Reporting program at Sangamon State University, has left the airwaves forever. But he left behind quite a legacy, and part of him lives on in every news story written and every news broadcast aired by graduates of his program.
He taught me many things, mostly by example. Throughout his six-year battle with cancer, he never lost his spirit, courage, or sense of humor. To the end, he was laughing, joking, making light of his foe.
How proud I am now to be “Bill Miller’s daughter.”
Nancy Pistorius is a freelance writer in Lawrence, Kan. Her
father, Bill Miller, died on Nov. 10 in The Woodlands, Texas. Memorial services
will be held in Springfield from 3 p.m.-7 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 30, at Kirlin
& Egan Funeral Home, and a funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. on Monday,
Dec. 1, at Christ the King Church.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2003.
