Honoring a Scrap Yard Philosopher by Raising Cash for School Athletics
by Nick Coleman – Star Tribune
My friend Morrie Miller died in 1989. By the Hebrew calendar, today is his Yahrzeit, the commemoration of his death, when his memory will be kept alive through prayers, fasting and the lighting of candles.
On Sunday comes the golf tournament. That’s not part of Jewish tradition, but it is a perfect fit for Morrie’s legacy. Morrie was a gentle giant with a Ph.D in education from the University of Minnesota who gave up a promising teaching career to help his mother run the family scrap yard in Winona.
He was the only professor I ever knew who looked good in work boots and could talk about the comic contradictions of life while shredding steel: a scrap yard philosopher whose mind was full of curiosity and who kept himself happy by cracking wise.
He died too young, of cancer, but never stopped with the jokes, and I can imagine him finding much self-deprecating humor in this weekend’s juxtaposition – honoring him from the Yahrzeit to the golf course.
Still, the Morrie Miller Memorial Golf Tournament at the Cedar Valley Golf Course in Winona is a fitting tribute to a man whose easy smile and constant kindness disguised his athletic prowess and a fierce connection to his hometown. In Morrie’s name, they will raise enough money to keep the winter and spring high school sports programs alive in a town of 30,000.
Beset by budget shortfalls, the Winona school board planned to save $176,000 by eliminating winter and spring sports. Morrie was a triple threat for the Winona Winhawks in the early 1960s, starring at football (for years, he held the record for longest run from scrimmage for a touchdown), and also at basketball and track.
When they heard about the cuts, Morrie’s cousin, Hugh, and Morrie’s brother, Jerry, who has been Winona’s mayor for eight years, came up with an idea: If they could find $120,000 for athletics, could the School District find the rest? “Extracurricular activities are too important to just sit and do nothing,” Jerry Miller says. “That was unacceptable.”
The tournament will be exceptional. At this point, it looks like it will exceed its goals: Net proceeds are expected to be close to $160,000.
This is actually the second annual tournament to honor Morrie. The first was held last year, in the hopes of raising $25,000. In a wonderful tribute to Morrie, it wound up raising $80,000 to support the city’s 500 teenage athletes (public and nonpublic) and to develop a strength and conditioning program and a youth football program named for Morrie.
With even bigger budget challenges facing the schools this year, Sunday’s second “Morrie” has become a crusade to help preserve Winona’s traditions and culture.
Morrie wouldn’t laugh at that. He would be honored.At a time when the country has had to fall back on charity to pick up the pieces in the wake of a total government meltdown, it is no surprise that things look much the same in small-town America. After years of cost-cutting and false economies, the fabric of life is starting to unravel.
Winona had to cut its street maintenance program, and has $40 million in unfunded street construction needs. The School District is strapped for cash and hopes to get a three-pronged funding proposal approved in a referendum this fall. And, as everywhere, the taxpayers keep getting nickeled and dimed at every turn to pay for things that used to come out of their taxes.
“I’m putting on my mayor’s hat now,” says Mayor Miller, a moderate who still works at the Miller family scrap yard. “We need a Marshall Plan for this country. Our roads, our schools, our infrastructure — it’s all deteriorating. This is going on all around the state and country. Instead of waiting for our grandkids to do it, why aren’t we starting to do it now?”
Fortunately, the flood dikes that protect Winona from the Mississippi River were built in the 1980s, when federal aid covered most of the cost. If they had to be built today, the city couldn’t afford them, and they could end up as leaky as New Orleans’ neglected levees.
Problems such as these just make it even more important that we light candles to honor the Morrie Millers of our world. And that we get teed off in their memory.