Village Squire, 1979-05, Page 5k wiite his autobiography. chances are in
years to come, someone's going to be searching into his past of
fascinating Canadians of other times.
Mr. Miller is as close as one comes to a 20th century
Renaissance Man. Bring up a topic and he can likely talk for 20
minutes, amazing you with the assorted facts he has come up
with over the years. His interests have varied widely. The only
constant in his many careers is his need to write, to express
himself on paper. He has had six careers, all shared at the same
time with his drive to write. It's as a writer of such books, as The
Donnellys Must Die. Death to the Donnellys and his latest
Twenty Mortal Murders that he has achieved widest recognition.
Perhaps the most startling of his career changes came when he
chose to go into the ministry at age 52. Asked how he came to
make the decision he says quietly that he didn't make any
decision.
"Quite frankly. when a thing like this happens you try to work
out a logical reason and I did for a couple of months. I was a sort
of a nine -days wonder in the media field and I tried to work out
all kinds of reasons why". The realization that there was no
logical reason came one day when he was being interviewed by
his old friend Paul Soles on Take Thirty on C.B.C. television. He
was asked the question again and he said that with Paul he had
to be honest: that he didn't know. He still doesn't know.
"It wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. I was glad to
leave the parish ministry behind, because my background was
being a counsellor so 1 have counselled, that's been my major
work in the ministry and this can become a very wearying
experience. You know you face the same kinds of human
problems that one is inclined to categorize them. This is this type
of situation; this is alcholism; this is something else. But you
must never let this get in the way of your helping these people
because while the situation can be categorized, these are
individuals. Every individual case is individual. And there comes
a time when you face so many cases of alcoholism that your mind
sort of goes blank. You finally lose the degree of empathy which
you must have.
"You see I've worked in social work but I'm very critical of the
profession. because it seems to me they've wandered a long.
long way from the original inspiration. How do social work
organizations operate? They have office hours. If you have a
problem you go to them and you're given a hour and a half or
whatever it might be and you go away again. Rarely will this kind
of approach work. So that the statement has been made. and
although I don't buy it entirely I must confess there is a certain
amount of truth in it, that the social work agencies are engaged
in the business of perpetuating the agencies, rather than dealing
with the case of the individual.
"There is now. of course, I believe they call it the wholistic
approach to the problem where you deal with the person, the
total person and I think that was one reason why 1 began to think
in deeper terms. in helping people and realized I had to deal with
not only the physical but also the spiritual."
Mr. Miller says he came to realize that the spiritual is where
people live. It is important to deal with that part of man that from
the cradle to the grave yearns for the transcendental, he says:
the thing this is outside of himself but is the cause of his being.
The thing that directs the cosmos.
These aren't unusual words coming from an Anglican church
minister but they are strange coming from a man who says he
was a practicing agnostic for 40 years before he made his
sudden, inexplicable decision to become a minister. He says he
worked at his agnosticism, worked at it to such an extent that he
finally convinced himself of the opposite.
The world of professional writers is not particularly a good
recruiting ground for the ministry. Agnosticism is high among
20th century writers. Orlo Miller has been a professional writer
for 46 years. In December 1932, he chuckles, some poor
misbegotten, misguided editor paid him 10 dollars for a story
and that committed him.
"And I didn't frame the ten bucks because I had to use it," he
laughs. From that time on he has continued writing. despite
carrying on six different careers. He describes it as being a
part-time something else six times but a full-time writer always.
He began in chemistry, as a analytical chemist. He was also, to
his knowledge the first full-time professional genealogist in
Ontario. There were two others who worked at tracing the
ancestry of people part time but he worked full time at it, he
says, for the great sum of 50 cents a hour. He's still interested
but now only as an interested individual and will be the banquet
speaker at the meeting of the Ontario Genealogical Society in
London in May speaking, he chuckles. on the subject of
pioneering in genealogy.
He says he finds the growth in genealogy astounding because
when he began there were only a few people interested in family
histories, mainly amateurs interested in the field and they were
almost without exception kooks. the lunatic fringe. Today the
membership of the Ontario Genealogical Society is over 1200.
They are working in a very professional way. Today's
geneologist have so much information to work with right at their
fingertips, he says. In his day in the 1930's if you wanted to find
out birthdates and death dates, you infested the cemeteries and
he did, to the point that suspicious people warned his future
wife Maridon against marrying him; that he was a ghoul.
Today whole groups of people go in and photograph
tombstones and such and it's a socially acceptable thing to do.
Today's genealogists have a lot of information easily available
that the early genealogists dug up for them.
He credits the change in attitude to genealogy first of all to
the Canadian Centennial in 1967, which surprised him. Although
he supported government attempts to get people interested in
Canadian history in 1967, he was dubious about its success. But
people did get interested in history and into digging into their
own background. The movement was already gaining
momentum when the huge success of the book and television
series Roots by Alex Haley sent people scrambling madly to find
out their own family history. Things have changed so much, he
says. that the agencies in Europe that handle searching for
ancestors over there have been swamped with demands, have
increased their rates and have long waiting lists to the point
where some simple queries can take up to two or three years to
get an answer.
His work in the media started in the backshop of a newspaper
as a printers devil. He worked his way out of the printshop, like a
Horatio Alger hero, and into the editorial department. He stayed
in the newspaper game until he felt he had learned all he could.
He covered every beat there was to cover. he recalls, from the
military beat which he hated to the university beat which he
found a lot of fun. He was night telegraph editor and assistant
city editor. He also became an early expert in microfilm, making
the London Free Press the first in the world to have all it files on
microfilm.
Along the way he was also an expert in plastics and was
offered a job with Monsanto to become their chief public
relations man, an offer he turned down.
He went to work as a freelancer for C.B.C. radio in late 1944.
He was national broadcaster for the Farm Radio Forum from
1945 to 1951.
"This was a wild program." he recalls. "We originated our
program in a different Canadian or American city every Monday
night, so you were on the move. I think I made 28 odd trips
across Canada from coast to coast which was a source of
satisfaction to me. The major problem with the present bugbear
with Canadian unity, Canadian identity is a lot of crap, frankly.
All it means is Canadians don't know their country. They don't
realize that these are five nations under one roof. It's an offence
against geography, and from the Great Lakes west all lines run
north and south. not east and west. And yet here a nation has
been created against geography; but in line with climate.
The pitch I'm trying to sell people these days is quite simply this:
that we are a northern nation and until we get that through our
thick skulls, no such thing as identity or unity is possible. Our
true relationship is with Scanadanavia and Russia. not with the
United States of America. And when we try to act like Americans
May 1979, Village Squire 3