Many years ago, he already was saying that the intellectual life was in trouble. ![]() Miller calls himself an old-fashioned academic, brought up by his mother-”She was a Lithuanian peasant who spoke 12 languages”-and his teachers in the the rigors of precise, disciplined thinking. “Why do they send someone who has never seen me?” “Demonstrations of physics, that’s been my business for 50 years,” he said. The reporter, who is 48, passed the age test, but Miller was angry when the reporter confessed he had never seen him in the classroom or on television. He asked the reporter how old he was before he would see him, saying he does not talk to young people because they don’t know who he is. Miller told a reporter that he never has been “a kindly old man,” and he did his best to prove it. He said the trip was cut short when he became “violently ill.” He said his leukemia was diagnosed early last month after he returned from what was supposed to be a three-month trip to Australia, where he has become a celebrity over a 25-year period of lecturing, appearing on television, publishing books and even doing splashy advertisements for a candy company. “But I can still stir to the bird on the wing-to the gurgle of a brook-to the rain in my face. “The outlook is disquieting and the uncertainty a burden-a halt to my pace and a finality athwart my way of life. Last December, after another attack, he wrote a letter to friends, reporting that he was feeling “the usual ravages of the flesh.” Some interpreted it as a goodby. Miller, who was a professor at El Camino College for 22 years, nearly died after a heart attack in 1964. ![]() He made 40 appearances on the Mickey Mouse Club and did a series of Walt Disney children’s records on great scientists. See, I’m a skinny old man.”īy his own calculation, Miller, 78, has given 1,459 lectures around the world, been on television with the likes of Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, written eight books, and published more than 300 papers in professional journals. “I pray for it every hour since leukemia is fatal and my heart is not right. “I’m gravely ill and I’m waiting for death,” he said, in precise, measured tones. Professor Wonderful-the name that still sticks to Miller from his days on television’s “Mickey Mouse Club” in the 1950s-is dying.
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