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Banner file photo
Harriet Miller |
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Harriet Miller, 67
Wellfleet resident was former Fulbright Scholar
Harriet Diane Miller, 67, died of breast cancer on Wednesday, Feb. 8, at her home on Aaron Rich Road in South Wellfleet.
A member of the Wellfleet Planning Board since 2004, Ms. Miller was active in many Outer Cape civic committees and cultural activities. She served on the Lower Cape Planning and Development Roundtable and served on the Local Housing Partnership. She was a Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater volunteer, an avid walker and conservationist, a poet and essayist, and a regular participant in writing groups and workshops in Wellfleet and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Ms. Miller taught sociology for 30 years at Framingham State College, from which she retired in 1998. For the last 11 years of her tenure she chaired the college’s sociology department. She was also an active supporter of the Framingham Women’s Health Center. A 1994 sabbatical took her to Trinidad, where she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and visiting lecturer at the University of the West Indies.
Ms. Miller was born in Teaneck, N.J., where her parents, the late Abe and Ruth (Merzon) Miller, ran a newspaper home delivery business. They were active members of the American Communist Party until the Red Scare in the early 1950s. After their deaths Ms. Miller described their struggles in a memoir titled “The Daily Workers.”
She was a graduate of Teaneck High School and the University of Delaware and later received a master’s degree at Boston University and a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University. Her doctoral research was a historical and sociological analysis of Massachusetts laws on “Stubborn and Disobedient Children,” later called “Children in Need of Services.” She became an advocate for more humane treatment of children in the court system.
Starting in the early 1960s, Ms. Miller vacationed every summer in Wellfleet and became increasingly attached to the town. At retirement she became a full-time Wellfleet resident, sharing her home with her long-time partner Bob Morse and writing poems, short stories and memoirs.
Her interest in land use planning and conservation was sparked by the discovery that a developer, trying to get approval for a land-locked lot, had submitted a plan in her name, but without her knowledge, to the Wellfleet Planning Board. The land in question, adjacent to her own property, eventually became part of the Fox Island Marsh Conservation Area, partly through her efforts.
Miller’s essays and short stories appeared in several magazines and newspapers and she was a frequent guest on “The Poet’s Corner” on WOMR-FM radio in Provincetown. In 2002 a book of her poems titled “A New Place for the Dead” was published.
Many of her essays and poems dealt with her experiences with breast cancer, which was first diagnosed in April 1992, and the resulting lymphedema, which contributed to the eventual loss of use of her left arm. In the last years of her life she drew pleasure from her flower garden, watching the birds and Stanley Kunitz’s poems.
She is survived by one son, John Skillern of Framingham and Wellfleet, and his partner, Patricia Boyer; two brothers, Daniel Miller of Reston, Va., and Edward Miller of Wellfleet; and nine nieces and nephews. Her younger son, Robert Skillern, died in 1983.
She was grateful to Helping Our Women of Provincetown and its Cancer Support Group, and later to Hospice of Cape Cod and to her friends and family, who made it possible for her to spend her last days peacefully at the home she loved.
A memorial service and celebration of Harriet’s life will take place at noon on Sunday, March 5, at the Wellfleet Public Library. Gifts in her memory may be sent to the Wellfleet Library Fund, 55 West Main St., Wellfleet, MA 02667.
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Jacob ‘Jake’ E. Bruinooge, 70
Florence Louise (Enos) Burch, 87
Nancy (Ramey) Demarest, 76
Mary A. (Segura) Deschene, 83
John E. Dunham, 74
Edward McGuinness, 73
Alfred ‘Fred’ Frederick Palmieri, 84
Dorothy Earle Rose, 93
Timothy E. Silvia, 40
Dorothy G. Thimas, 85
Loring A. Ventura, 94
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Feb 16th, 2006