Pahrump
Valley Times
Nye County's Largest Circulation Newspaper
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Remembering Maya Miller 1915-2006
One of the drawbacks of Nevada's turbulent population is that its journalists often have little institutional memory to offer the public. It's difficult, for example, to fully tell the Yucca Mountain story without knowing 50 years of Nevada's relationship with the federal government on nuclear issues.
In 2002 I was working in a television newsroom when Howard Cannon died. He had been Nevada's most powerful U.S. senator, but almost no one in the newsroom knew his name. I had to fight to get an obituary on the air.
So I was pleased when the death of Maya Miller got some prominent attention. Even then, though, it did not adequately tell the tale of how she helped change Nevada.
Maya was the daughter of a Shell Oil executive, and as a result lived a very comfortable life on the oil stocks she inherited. That didn't keep her from working - her salary as an English instructor at the University of Nevada in 1946 was $800 - but it meant that she did not live with the difficulties many people do. That made many of her political activities all the more surprising.
For a long time she was a sort of society activist, involved with safe groups like the League of Women Voters, which she served as state president and a national board member. I remember reading an interview in which she explained how she ended up picketing the U.S. Census office in Reno in 1970 after a black women was denied a census taker's job. The League held a meeting, she said, and it was decided that one member could carry a picket sign. It seemed so delicate and polite.
But before the seventies were finished, she was one of Nevada's best known political activists, and many of her activities were not one bit polite. For one thing, she was arrested at that census protest and convicted of obstructing police and resisting arrest.
It seemed a turning point. She resigned from the board of the League of Women Voters when the group failed to oppose the Vietnam War. And she became deeply involved in the politics of welfare, lobbying at the Nevada Legislature for better treatment and more respect for welfare recipients to help them get off public assistance.
In this cause, Maya was aligning herself with one of the legislators' favorite targets, and it was a frustrating experience. It all came to a head with a well-known 1973 incident when legislators meeting with the welfare group had lunch brought in. They ate in front of the welfare group, which included some actual welfare recipients, and then offered the leavings to them. Maya grabbed the leftover hamburgers and fries and threw them on the floor.
You'd have thought she had thrown a bomb. Outrage filled the air. Legislators voted to bar her from the building unless she apologized. Faced with loss of her lobbying privileges, she gave one of the most grudging apologies ever penned: "I am sorry for the litter, but I cannot tell you I am sorry for my impatience or my sense of outrage at the violence Nevada does daily to its poor children. As I saw in the lounge on Friday watching men eat and talk while women listened and watched I was overwhelmed by the sense of those poor women's patience." The legislature never quite got over her. A couple of decades later I was passing a legislative security guard when the transceiver on his belt came alive: "Be aware - Maya Miller is in the building."
Later in the year at the Watergate hearings Maya's name showed up on one of Richard Nixon's enemies lists, used to target people for income tax audits and such unpleasantries. Soon afterward, one of Nevada's U.S. senators announced his retirement and she decided to run. (I was her press secretary.) Her insurgent, anti-Nixon candidacy was more successful than anyone expected and was within striking distance of a Democratic primary victory when Nixon resigned. Her poll rankings started falling and she lost, but even then she took 30 percent of the vote.
A few days after that election Maya and her daughter Kit traveled to a hearing in Germantown, Maryland, where they testified against storage of nuclear waste in Nevada - a wholly unremarkable stance today, but near-heresy then. One outcome of her senate campaign was the state's first anti-nuclear political group, Citizen Alert, founded by two of her volunteers.
Maya became a leader of the national women's movement, defeated Nevada's lone U.S. Representative in an election for chair of the Nevada delegation at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, traveled the world working for peace in places like Guatamala and Iraq. She personally provided seed money for dozens of Nevada election campaigns by women, changing the face of state politics both literally and figuratively.
I remember the last couple of times I saw her. One was at a memorial to her son, a Parkinson's sufferer who went swimming on the Titabaisseess River and was never seen again. She was desolate.
But not long after that, I also saw her in front of the Nevada capitol building, in the first rank of a huge crowd protesting against the war in Iraq. She never gave up.
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Maya Miller, a political activist who helped found the Women's Campaign Fund that sponsors female candidates seeking political office and who once ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator from Nevada, has died. She was 90.
Miller died Wednesday at her home in Washoe Valley in northern Nevada
of natural causes, her daughter, Kit, said.
She ran for the Senate in 1974, primarily to break through the male stronghold,
she later said.
"Maya wasn't a real politician. She was an outside agitator fighting the powers that be," Kit Miller said. "She ran for the Senate because she felt the cause was right."
During the Vietnam War era, Miller became a peace activist who made large-enough financial contributions to the antiwar movement to get her name on President Nixon's "enemies list."
Miller was a member of the national board of the League of Women's Voters in the late 1960s but resigned in protest when the group voted down a resolution on ending U.S. involvement in the conflict.
In 1991 at the start of the Persian Gulf War she joined members of Madre, an international women's human rights group, to deliver about $100,000 in infant formula and medical supplies to Iraq. Then in her 70s, she drove a supply truck part of the way from Jordan to Baghdad.
"Maya was most comfortable and happiest fighting for the underdog," her daughter said.
Miller's concern for the environment led her to co-found the Foresta Institute for Ocean and Mountain Studies, a nonprofit organization that included a summer camp for the study of ecology, in 1960.
She also helped in efforts to create Lake Tahoe State Park in Nevada.
Born in Los Angeles on June 29, 1915, she graduated from Principia College in Elsah, Ill., and earned a master's in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
She married Richard Miller, an oil engineer, and they moved to Nevada in about 1950. The couple had two children, Kit and Eric, before divorcing.
In 2000, Miller was honored by the Nevada Women's Lobby, a nonpartisan coalition that promotes equal rights for women, when it established the Maya Miller Egalitarian Award and presented her the first one.
In addition to her daughter, Miller is survived by her former husband
and three grandchildren.
Obituaries in the News By The Associated Press
Maya Miller
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) _ Maya Miller, a philanthropist who championed women's rights along with many environmental, liberal and progressive causes for decades, died Wednesday at her Washoe Valley ranch home. She was 90.
Miller had been in failing health for several months, and her condition had worsened as a result of a fall in early May.
"She had compassion for everyone, especially for the people who have it the roughest -- women and children," said her daughter, Kit Miller. "They were her No. 1 priority."
Miller lived simply at her ranch, donating millions of dollars of her inherited wealth to both state and national groups.
Miller's activism won her a spot on then-President Nixon's "enemies list" during the Vietnam War era. A board member of the national League of Women Voters, she resigned when the league voted down an anti-war resolution in 1969.
Miller also was a founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Women's Campaign Fund and an early backer of Emily's List, which supports women candidates in national races. She ran for U.S. Senate herself in 1974, losing in the primary to now-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
In 1991, Miller was among several women who broke a U.S. embargo and trucked about $100,000 worth of medicine and food to Iraqi women and children. She helped drive one of the trucks from Jordan into Baghdad.
Miller was raised in Southern California and moved to Nevada in the early 1950s. She had a master's degree in English literature from Cornell and did doctoral work at Stanford.