Pearl Miller, age 107, passed away on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at the Emogene Dolin Jones Hospice House. Pearl was born in Beaver, WV, and in 1929 moved to Huntington to attend Marshall College (now Marshall University). At that time, Pearl was the youngest student (age 15) on campus. She completed two years, and then married Elmer Miller. Elmer passed in 1995. Together they raised five children, Mary Lue Light, Anna Louise Miller-Tiedeman, Donna Kay Swanson, Sharon Lee Smith, and James Elmer Miller, each very successful adults. That one sentence tells the story of her life, the many meals she fixed, close to 60,000, the hours she spent laboring with her children, their needs, and challenges during about 8,000 days, and 96,000 hours in which she orchestrated five different personalities, each with his or her own mindset, yet not raising her voice or speaking a disparaging word to any one of them. Now that takes a woman of extraordinary personal development.
In addition, she made all their clothes, she spent countless days chauffeuring each one to school, college, and work. She sat up endless nights when one was sick and often vomiting, then listening to their adolescent and adult problems, while attending carefully to their nutrition, buying 12 quarts of milk every other day during their growing years, seeing that all five children had play clothes, going downtown clothes, and Sunday clothes. Yes, we used to care how we looked outside the home.
Pearl worked in many vacation-Bible schools at 20th Street Baptist Church, where she was a long time member, taught several Sunday School classes starting at age 16, and worked in the church cradle­roll (an in-church child-care program) and delivered many devotions to her women's groups, all of this pointing to a woman of great substance, a woman who felt centered in her life and a woman who loved life as it was, while holding out hope for a better tomorrow. In 2017, Pearl's memoir, Moonshine Memories and Staggering Cows: Tales from Raleigh County was published and is now available on Amazon.com. The proceeds from this book will provide scholarships to lower-income young women in McDowell County, a place where the missionary, Leota Campbell, spent her life helping those less fortunate. Pearl left her legacy in her five children and in her memoir.
You could say that Pearl, like the Biblical Paul, ran the race and kept the faith. In looking back she says she wouldn't change anything, not that it was all rosy, but she looked at the harder side of life as an opportunity to learn. Neither Pearl nor her mother needed to read self-help books to learn this. It was just what they did. And so it was…. Funeral services will be conducted 2:00 pm Monday, October 25, 2021 at Chapman's Mortuary with Pastor Don Walker officiating. Burial will be in White Chapel Memorial Gardens, Barboursville. Friends may visit after 1:00 pm Monday at Chapman's Mortuary.