Baker's Daughter, Miller's Son

Lovers and adulterers, heroes and harlots, gossips and thieves, and maybe the occasional ghost (and certainly skeletons in the closets), the Miller and Baker families had their share, and Tom Miller, writing as Tom Canford, is willing to tell all. This memoir, initially written for distribution to family members, had been intended for publication, but the author did not get around to editing it before his death. His friend Jonathan May has managed that feat in part as a gift to Miller...
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Lovers and adulterers, heroes and harlots, gossips and thieves, and maybe the occasional ghost (and certainly skeletons in the closets), the Miller and Baker families had their share, and Tom Miller, writing as Tom Canford, is willing to tell all. This memoir, initially written for distribution to family members, had been intended for publication, but the author did not get around to editing it before his death. His friend Jonathan May has managed that feat in part as a gift to Miller family members as well as to all readers intigued by the tale of a boy growing up and life in Southern Illinois and Las Cruces, New Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s (with family tales tall and otherwise taking it back further in time and the author's own musings bringing it well into the early 2000s). Since the author had always thought of himself primarily as a lyricist, a selection from his musical plays and his occasional lyrics appears at the end. The descriptions of life in Southern Illinois, particularly Carrier Mills, in the early part of the last century, and in Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, in the 1930s and later will be of interest especially to people who know those areas and their inhabitants and also to anyone curious about family life and social life of the times. Readers who have met the author through his autobiographical World War II novel Boy at Sea and through A Fever of the Mad, his memoir about working as a publicist on movies with special emphasis on his experiences on Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky and Francis Coppola's The Cotton Club will be pleased to see this earlier version of the Tom they have come to know.His late sister Norma Miller was invaluable to him in providing stories from the past and reminders and refreshers on tales he remembered. Quotations from her diaries and from letters written by various family members and friends add to the pleasure of the work.