Yet another icon of my childhood gone. Dan Miller was the Peter Jennings of Nashville television news. Or maybe he was the Walter Cronkite except that Miller outlived Peter Jennings but not Walter Cronkite. That is ironical because Cronkite was the oldest of all three and helped shape the auteur of TV journalism that Miller and Jennings lived in to. Peter Jennings, of course, had lung cancer which came from smoking. Dan Miller had a heart attack. Like a year and a half ago. So I’m a bit late coming to the story.
And that is nothing new, because I am often late to the game. It doesn’t change the fact, however, that the important question is not when something happened but rather when you heard about it. If you don’t know something has happened, it might as well not have as far as you are concerned. For a year and a half, I have been operating under the assumption Dan Miller had been confidently and calmly recounting the events of the day on the Scene at Six. (Television schedules in Central Time being much more reasonable, the national news comes on at 5:30, local news at 6, Wheel of Fortune at 6:30, and prime time starts at 7:00. [By the way, if you were a fan of Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak’s short lived talk show in the 80’s — and who wasn’t? — you saw Dan Miller there as his Ed McMahon-ish sidekick. {Ed McMahon outlived Dan Miller too.} Dan and Pat got to know each other when Pat worked as the weatherman on Channel 4. He once suggested that the station should treat the school closing announcement mascot, Snow Bird, with Tergitol. But that’s another story for another time.])
See the thing is that there are a few things that lent stability to my childhood. In no particular order, they included American Airlines, the carwash on Franklin Road, IBM computers, giant sized SweetTarts, and Dan Miller. You grow up and you go off to college and you think you are too cool and vegetarian for all that big-market, Chevy Impala driving, I’ve Been Krogering! type of booshit until one of the pillars you had been standing on to mock the world starts to crack and crumble. And so yes, maybe this is overstating the case but even though you know things are going to change it can be unsettling when they actually up and do.