Dwight Miller died this week. He was my high school history teacher and tennis coach. The latter is a quite charitable characterization of our relationship. I played tennis one year in high school and did not letter!
Mr. Miller coached everything at Seventy-first High School, and was a Fayetteville, North Carolina legend. Looking back, he reminds me of Chris Farley in that he was a really big guy, but surprisingly athletic. You did not want to play doubles against him. When he only had half the court to cover, he would make you pay with his deft wielding of a tennis racket.
Class with Mr. Miller was the same every day. He had his notes and his vocabulary words. He would read them to us in his booming baritone voice. It was not pedagogically stylish, but extraordinarily efficient. Coming from an extremely low level of knowledge, I probably absorbed more information in that American History than any other class I've ever taken. Plus, we learned a whole lot about the St. Louis Cardinals, who either won the World Series that year or were defending champs.
I have to give him credit: Mr. Miller had the best-ever State-Carolina insult. When he learned I was a State fan he exclaimed, "Good Lord! Don't you know that you have to drive by Dix Hill and Central Prison to get to State?" It's true.
Mr. Miller was a WWII vet and spent many months in a German POW camp. When he first began teaching at Seventy-first someone commented on his unusually small teeth. He said, "The Germans filed them down during the war." It was a joke, but it became an urban legend in our school. Every year he'd get asked about it, and every year he'd have to rebut his own rumor. "Do you think I'd be driving a VW today if they'd filed my teeth down?" he asked.
His stories about the war were humorous and tragic. He got cornered by a German soldier, and Mr. Miller made up a great big story--"Hadn't he heard? The Russians have overrun Warsaw. The war's about done. Come with me and you can sit out the rest of it in peace." He just about had him convinced, but then the soldier's superior officer showed up, and it was Mr. Miller who cooled his jets for the rest of the war.
He got to know one German guard pretty well. I can't remember the details of the story, but he persuaded the guard to do them a favor. It was discovered, and the guard was transferred to the Russian front and killed in action. Mr. Miller told our class that he regretted it to this day.
At the end, the German garrison up and fled the town, leaving the American POWs unguarded. By this time, Mr. Miller and his fellow POWs had made friends with the German villagers, so they just hung out in the town rather than going off looking to join up with Allied troops. They figured that that was better than reporting for duty and getting deloused. Eventually, they were "liberated."
Apparently, Mr. Miller was still coaching tennis when he died this week. There are innumerable people who will miss him. But, as brother John reminded me in an email, some of us will always be able to hear in our heads "PEEDEN! ROBERT PEEDEN!!" booming over the Seventy-first tennis courts.
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