Clara Miller was one of those people who always raised her hand when someone asked for volunteers.
The wife of a Presbyterian minister, Miller, who died May 7 at age 92, already had a track record of community efforts before she moved to Denver and started volunteering at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church.
While in Kingman, Ariz., she helped start the Good Samaritan Fund, which aided highway travelers whose cars broke down or who ran out of gas or money.
The fund collected money from local organizations, and in cooperation with the local police department, found food, shelter and even car repairs for stranded people, said her daughter Geni Miller of Durango.
Clara Miller also helped found the League of Friendship annual dinners given for Anglo and American Indian community leaders as a way to open doors of communication.
The dinners started in a church but eventually expanded to a facility at the Kingman fairgrounds to accommodate the several hundred people each year.
Sponsors managed to get most of the food donated by local business people.
“She had a powerful can-do attitude,” said her daughter.
In Denver, Miller tutored elementary school students, was editor of the Montview Manor newsletter, the Metamorphosis, and a deacon at the church.
Clara Elizabeth Burr was born July 19, 1912, in Higganum, Conn., earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and a master’s from Columbia University in New York City.
She married James Golden Miller on Sept. 19, 1942, and they lived in several states where he worked at churches. He died in 1981.
Clara Miller taught high school English and history for 30 years. She never stopped learning, her daughter said, recalling that when the family took vacations to the beach “we hit three museums before we ever saw the beach.”
In addition to daughter Geni Miller, she is survived by daughter Elizabeth Miller of Denver; a granddaughter, Jessica Clare Miller of Denver; and two sisters: Gladys Peck and Euphemia Gardner, both of Higganum.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-820-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
