Eileen (Hird) Miller

Sundre

1903-

Description

Life and Work

Eileen Margaret Miller was born in Toronto, Ontario on October 15, 1903, the eldest of Annie Melville and Edgar Maxwell Hird's family of two daughters and two sons. Although the family experienced a roller coaster of prosperity and destitution, Eileen's childhood and adolescence coincided with a prosperous period. She remembers it as a happy, pampered time. Books were a big part of Eileen's childhood. When an aunt taught her to read before she went to school, she read anything she could get a hold of, from Beatrix Potter and Mark Twain to Dickens. The Wizard of Oz was one other favourites and she was always delighted to find the latest Oz book under the Christmas tree.

Eileen took her elementary schooling in Toronto. The family then moved to a large house in a good district of Montreal, where her father ran a wholesale dry goods business and employed a cook, a nanny for the younger children, and a chauffeur for his Buick. Eileen attended high school in the Westmount district of Montreal and spent her summers at a cottage on Lake Ontario where she swam, canoed and explored.

Her school was very exceptional for the time and Eileen, who was curious about everything, learned easily. She often stopped at the public library on her way home from school to borrow and devour all kinds of books.

After completing high school, she enrolled in the Arts program at McGill. Her first year at university was a wonderful time of learning, boyfriends, dances and parties, but one year of University was all Eileen managed before her father's business went bankrupt. Luckily, she was able to convert her summer job at Sun Life Insurance into full time employment. One summer, she discovered a former high school classmate, Chan Miller, working in her office building while he earned his medical degree at McGill.

Eileen and Chan, 1932Eileen remembers her days at Sun Life as a "happy times mostly," although she had to face the reality of living on $55.00 per month. She managed, with the help of the free lunch employees received at Sun Life, by sharing an apartment with various girl friends and sewing her own clothes. Chan and Eileen became "more or less committed to each other" for the seven years it took Chan to complete his medical and surgical training. Clerical work, which Eileen found very repetitive and boring, nursing or teaching, which were the only employment options for women at that time, did not appeal to Eileen as a career. As she and Chan grew more serious, she pictured herself as "the helpful wife of a doctor, a social leader of some small community and the mother of a brood of children, little realizing the reality of life in a small town with primitive living conditions and no fixed income. Eileen and Chan were married January 16, 1931 in Toronto. By then the Great Depression was underway and there were no jobs, so they decided to try their luck in western Canada.

After Chan found a job in Alberta, Eileen joined him in Clyde. There was no money in the country, but people helped each other out. Chan's family in Edmonton, loaned the young couple furniture and other necessities when the going got rough. Although they never lacked for food in the farming community, it was difficult to find the money to keep their car running or pay the druggist and the rent.

Eileen and Chan's 50th AnniversaryEileen found her life as a Doctor's wife involved lots of cleaning up messes and doing laundry. Keeping those awful white cotton coats presentable was a chore. She soon discovered that Chan was impractical about money, being unconcerned about household finances and billing patients for his services - a hard adjustment for a Scottish Presbyterian girl to accept. Over the years she made several attempts to keep the accounts in order but her efforts were usually unsuccessful because Chan kept everything in his head rather than writing it down. She did help out when she was needed, answered the phone and tried to keep track of Chan as his duties took him over a large territory twenty-four hours a day. There were no fixed office hours, so Eileen needed to be able to tell people where to find the doctor. Eileen found that particularly difficult the first year the Millers were in Clyde when five expectant mothers, all in different places, were due to deliver at about the same time. On the Tuesday before Christmas, the telephone went wild as all five babies prepared to enter the world. The last delivery was twin boys at the Westlock Hospital, 20 miles west of Clyde. The mother, said Chan, could have them as she couldn't cope with a family of five boys under six years of age.

Being the "social leader of some small community" did not work out quite the way Eileen pictured it. In fact, she found some aspects of living in a small community quite trying. In the city she had been used to mobs of people who were strangers and was not prepared for everyone in the community being so involved in everyone else's business. She was appalled when a neighbor asked her if the doctor was ill because he spent so much time in the backhouse. Small town etiquette was somewhat different from what Eileen was used to as well. For her first tea party, she was expecting people to come about 3:30 p.m. and hadn't begun to get things ready when her guests arrived at 1:00 p.m. They stayed and stayed, fascinated by what was going on in Chan's office on the other side of the partition.

The Millers soon found it more convenient to move to Westlock where Chan treated his surgery patients. Westlock provided them with better living quarters and more social life. Both were soon curling and playing Bridge. Although there was no library, Eileen was able to indulge her love of reading by joining a book club. However, life in Westlock brought more cleaning and more laundry without the luxury of a washing machine and only a wood stove on which to heat water. The Depression still raged and although he travelled the countryside on calls 24 hours a day, the doctor was the last to be paid and then only in vegetables or small dribbles of cash.

When Wembley advertised for a doctor, Chan and Eileen thought they would try pioneering in the then fairly primitive Peace River country. There were roads of a sort, but during the Miller's first winter at Wembley, the road between Wembley and Grande Prairie was closed by snow for six weeks, limiting travel to and from the Grande Prairie Hospital to the very uncertain train or a team of mules.

On September 29, 1938, a daughter, Margaret, was born. At the beginning of World War II, Chan was asked to move to Beaverlodge when the doctor there joined the army. Since it was more central to the huge territory he covered, Chan agreed. In 1941, at the time of the Japanese bombing of the American base at Pearl Harbour, Chan joined the army. While he took his basic training in Barrie, Ontario Eileen and Margaret visited Toronto.

After Chan's discharge in 1943, the Millers came back west to Mountain Park, a company town, which was the site of a mine that supplied wartime industries with steam coal. When she wasn't caring for Margaret and son John, born February 27, 1943, Eileen was either stoking or poking the coal fired cook stove or scrubbing coal dust off walls and floors. She remembers several times looking up from her chores to see a white horse standing in her kitchen. Horses, which had been used in the mine, were turned loose to fend for themselves when automation came to the mines. After one horse learned how to open doors, it made the rounds from kitchen to kitchen begging for food.

From Mountain Park, the Millers moved to Sylvan Lake. The journey by crowded train in wartime with a four year old and a tiny baby was traumatic. Sylvan Lake was a good place to bring up children, even though on weekends thousands of airmen poured in from their camps at Penhold and Bowden. Many of the airmen's families lived in cottages along the lake. After the European war ended, when authorities became concerned about sea rescue in the Pacific, pontoon planes carried out practice rescues on Sylvan Lake much to the interest of the townspeople.

After the war, there wasn't much need for a doctor at the lake so in 1946, the family moved to Cereal. It was not a happy move. Eileen remembers the dying town as being "like a gap-toothed mouth with streets of basement holes where houses had been moved out". Most people in the dried out area were living on a kind of relief paid for not growing crops. A lot of them seemed a bit warped by the system and the eternal struggle to survive. They were trying to keep an old, small, rundown hospital operating in competition with a new larger facility in the viable town of Oyen. Fuel was expensive and so was often stolen. Margaret's wagon and tricycle, coveted by the neighbors children, turned up broken or went missing. The family was glad to leave Cereal a year later for Sundre.

Eileen and her husband liked challenges and there were some tough ones in Sundre. Chan faced some opposition in his medical practice and the family had great difficulty finding somewhere to live. They spent the first summer in a tent beside the river, which the children thoroughly enjoyed, and the winter in a two room shack without electricity, which no one enjoyed. By the second year, they had found a suitable home, made friends and began to fit into the town.

Besides looking after her growing children and helping Chan, Eileen Joined the Women's Institute and the Ladies Aid to the United Church. With a $5.00 donation, an Institute Committee comprised of Eileen, Alice Hayes and Clara Bramley Davidson started a library, which became a consuming interest for Eileen and used up large amounts of her time.

Eileen's Graduation photograph, head shot wearing graduation cap - 1968When the family realized they were financially unable to send John to University, Eileen decided to become a teacher. She borrowed money, received a $300.00 bursary from the County of Mountain View, took a year of training and began teaching 34 grade twos in the United Church basement in Sundre. She progressed through correspondence courses from Queens, summer schools in Edmonton and night classes in Calgary until she earned her Bachelor of Education degree in 1967 at age 64. During the last five years of her teaching career, Eileen was the school librarian. When she retired in 1969, she began managing the Sundre Public Library. A year later, glaucoma forced Chan to give up his medical practice. When driving and outside chores became too much to handle, Eileen and Chan moved into Foothills Lodge. After Chan's death in 1991, Eileen stayed on at the lodge, where she enjoys knitting, playing cards, sewing, watching videos and as always reading her perpetual books, which now include the bestsellers and lots of non-fiction.

When she thinks back, Eileen is most proud of "keeping the family functioning under difficulties and of getting my degree." She regrets not having more patience both at home and in teaching. She knows that she could go anywhere but feels that Sundre is a great place to live, friendly and progressive, with everything she needs or wants right here, including a good library.

Memoirs

Letter of Appreciation by Margaret Miller
I feel most fortunate to have spent so much time with my mother. As I matured, I began to appreciate everything she did for her family. We did come first. Mom was always there and such a comfort to me during my bouts of rheumatic fever. I remember being in the General Hospital when Mom and Jean Gochee were taking university classes two evenings a week. I looked forward to those pre-class visits, and soon recognized Mom's light footsteps coming down the hall. When I was confined to bed at home, we both wasted (as Dad said) our time over those crazy jigsaw puzzles. We loved working on them together.

Mom was always very bright and still loves to read. Returning to university was a big decision for her. How proud we were when she received her B.Ed. degree—likely the oldest member in the graduating class. I remember someone sitting next to us say, "good for her". We thought so, too.

During the past years, Mom has spent lots of time with us. I enjoy taking her places—movies, shopping, and brunches with my golf pals. They, too, enjoy Mom—she is so sharp and interested in many things. She always looks great - hair done and up-to-date clothes. Maybe this also makes her appear younger.

Yes, my mother is very special. She's an amazing person, and I'm so happy she is able to enjoy life. I can't imagine life without Mom—we love her.


Associated Member Museum: Sundre and District Museum