Clyde Clifton Miller, our grandfather

Clyde Clifton Miller, who usually went by Clifton, was born on May 30, 1894, in Yadkin County, North Carolina. He died on Aug. 5, 1938, of injuries suffered in a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus being test-driven by a mechanic who had forgotten to connect the brakes.

Clifton and his brother William.

Clifton with sisters Nevada and Viola (Ola). Nevada would die of diphtheria at age 9.


Clifton, second from right, with Gough, William, John Holcomb (who married Clifton's sister Thelma) and Luther; Harvey (Woodrow) is in front. All told, his siblings were Nevada, who died of diphtheria at age 9; Viola (Ola), mother of Margaret Wallace; Thelma (1901-), mother of Virginia Holcomb Harris; William; Gough; Luther; Jenny; Harvey (Woodrow) and Johnnie, a girl born 3 months after John Wesley Miller's death (she married Leban Hauser)

There's Clifton in the middle of the back row. Also in that row were his mother, Tennessee Isabel Gough Miller, and siblings Viola (Ola); Thelma and William; in the front row were siblings Luther, Jenny, Harvey (Woodrow) and Gough. When we look at this and other photos of Clifton, we immediately see resemblances to his twins, Brother and Cissie, and especially to Brother's daughter Mary Catherine Miller, who inherited those solemn, deepset eyes.

The document above is Clifton's World War I registration card (thanks to Cathy's friend Sharon Buller, a genealogy buff, for finding this document). We believe the disability it refers to was a club foot or some kind of foot problem that caused him to walk with a rolling gait. This may have kept him out of the so-called Great War. And who knows, had he been thrown into trench warfare in Europe, if any of us would even be here?

Brother Miller wrote this about his dad's death:


My father earned his living as an automobile salesman, Texaco filling station operator and contractor. When I was 13, he was killed in an accident involving a truck he was driving and a Greyhound bus driven by a mechanic who was making a test run. The brakes on the Greyhound failed and the bus ran head-on into my dad's truck. He died shortly thereafter in the hospital without ever regaining consciousness. My mother had never worked outside the home, and the responsibility for the family fell on her and on Norma, and then on the rest of us. Norma had graduated from high school and I worked after school, Saturdays and summers in a grocery. When a settlement was made with Greyhound, we received $60 per month until the last of us (Marilyn) graduated from high school.

What I loved about my dad was that although we didn't have much in material things, he always made me feel I was special and really worth something. He built up my self-esteem. Until I was on my own, I never realized how much my parents sacrificed for us.