1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

Chaney experience, where both his parents were deaf, and the concern with whether the
son would be deaf. How does this work out for you?
MILLER: It wasn’t a problem at all because New York is so compressed that the isolation
of the silent world really doesn’t apply. It was just another language to me, really – two
languages actually, that is, sign and being able to read lips and to intuit, I suppose, might
also be part of that. I was learning English, of course, and the varieties of American
English because New York is such a melting pot – Irish, Italian, German. Those were the
major groups I remember, as well as Native New Yorkers – meaning those who had been
in New York for at least a generation. But the church was very important for me.
Q: Which church was this?
MILLER: St. Mark’s Church.
Q: Was this the Catholic Church?
MILLER: No, St. Marks was an Episcopal church. I had a good voice as a child. I sang in
the choir. The church was the center of many of my activities and I was given a
scholarship to Trinity School in New York. I was a good athlete, as well as the first in my
class all the way through.
Q: What sort of athletics?
MILLER: I played everything. I was a five letterman in a small school, Trinity, in a
different era of physical demands. So I played football, I ran winter track and spring track,
I played baseball and basketball. We were very well coached. All our teams did very well.
Our basketball team was undefeated in 1948 in a very tough league. I was awarded the
Holden Cup given to the best athlete in the school in my senior year.
Q: What about at home? This is the era – as a small lad you were there to catch or at
least be aware of the Great Depression toward the end. Did this affect your family very
much?
MILLER: No, I don’t think so because – no, we were never in poverty. We were poor, but
never in poverty. My father was always working so there was never that problem that so
many had in the thirties and since everyone else I knew was in the same condition it was
not seen by me as exceptional. My childhood life growing up was within a city and a
community and a world where everyone shared this experience.
Q: What about New York being such a cosmopolitan place – did the outside world
intrude as far as national politics and international events and all this?
MILLER: Oh yes, very definitely, from the beginning. Not only because of the ethnic
make up of the city which was heightened, I’d say, by that time, because of tragic events
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