Tucson-based writer and journalist Tom Miller died Monday, Dec. 19, at age 75 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He is remembered for many things, including being a yippie journalist during the antiwar movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, a self-proclaimed “Bamboligist” and a wry observer of humanity’s many follies.
Miller will be posthumously awarded a 2023 Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson Local Genius Award, given to “visionary and innovative Tucsonans whose activities have a global impact, and whose talents have been internationally recognized.”
He is survived by his wife of 29 years Regla Albarrán Miller and her two sons Juan Carlos Albarrán and Leonardo Albarrán and four grandchildren; two of Miller’s siblings, Ann Monahan and John Miller; as well as many nieces and nephews.
Miller grew up in a family of four children — his oldest brother Charles Miller died in 2019 — in a liberal, open-minded household in Washington, D.C.
His parents were “good folks,” says his brother John Miller. In his 80 years, John has rarely met anyone who’s had as good an experience with both their parents as the Miller children did. “We were very lucky with parents like that,” John said.
Miller started off his journalism career at the College of Wooster in Ohio and dropped out during his second year to focus on covering the antiwar movement in the late ‘60s. He never finished a degree, which, his brother points out, turned out not to matter.
Miller started off as a “yippie journalist,” akin to Gonzo journalism and coined from the 1960s counterculture Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies.
He became an activist in college and began his career covering the antiwar movement for the underground press and then slowly moved into the “above ground press,” as he called it, to publications including the New York Times, National Geographic and Rolling Stone.
When he was first on retainer for Rolling Stone, he wrote about things such as the 1968 Democratic National Convention and related protests against the Vietnam War. Rather than follow around the delegates, Miller stuck with an ambulance crew whose members were patching up protestors getting clubbed by the police, says Miller’s longtime friend James Reel.
In the 1970s Miller received a federal subpoena to testify about his sources in his coverage of the antiwar movement. He refused, and ultimately won, a victory he was very proud of.
Miller wrote about many topics for national publications as well as in his nine books.
He wrote about oddball characters he met in his travels. He wrote about the U.S.-Mexico border region, traveling into Central America in the ‘70s to look at the origins of migration. And he wrote about Cuba, which is where he met his wife and which he considered a second home.
“He had a point of view. It was as a wry observer who found people to be very interesting in the varieties of their flaws,” said Reel, the classical music director at Arizona Public Media.
The way he wrote about Cuba extends to everything and everyone he wrote about, Reel says.
“He understood that life is complex, people are complex, and you can’t really advocate for one side or another of an issue when you’re writing about complicated regions like he did,” Reel said. “His goal was to tell readers in the United States about Cubans as they saw themselves. That was his only mission.”
Miller’s longtime friend and professional collaborator Tim Fuller remembers when they met, in the mid-’70s. Fuller was living in a house in Tucson with a bunch of theater people, and he came across an article by Miller in Rolling Stone about British mercenary John Dane.
“This is the most amazing story I’ve ever read,” was Fuller’s reaction. He was pleasantly surprised when he found out the author lived in Tucson. So he looked him up.
They became friends, and Miller the lifelong writer and Fuller the lifelong photographer went on many assignments together over the years.
They went to Chiapas in southern Mexico to work on a story about Guatemalan refugees. They worked on stories for the New York Times about migrants dying in the Arizona desert. And they worked on a story about the Hanigan trial, where three ranchers were accused of torturing Mexican men who crossed their ranch on the border west of Douglas, Arizona, in the mid-’70s.
Miller wrote about difficult topics like murder, torture and people fleeing their homes, but he also wrote about more lighthearted things.
He called himself a “Bamboligist,” based on his interest in the song La Bamba. He owned more than 80 recorded versions of the song and researched its origins and how its popularity developed in Mexico. And he helped produce an album for Rhino Records with 10 different recordings of the song, with versions that varied from Ritchie Valens to The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“So he did ostensibly trivial stories like that and found a lot of humanity and life history, and he also covered the antiwar movement,” Reel said.
He was never fully satisfied with his writing, making changes here and there right up to publication, Reel says. Miller liked patterns, often using the rule of threes. And he hated clichés, and always looked to root them out of his writing.
“Just going over it again and again, trying to make it clear and concise and show that there’s a writer’s personality there but not make the writing about himself,” Reel said.
While Miller put himself in his stories, writing in first person, he was not the focus, Reel says. It was only once he developed Parkinson’s disease that he started to center himself in his work.
His last book, “Where Was I? A Travel Writer’s Memoir,” is a memoir, which came out earlier this year. While it covers much of his life, his experience with Parkinson’s frames the book.
Miller’s last visit to Cuba with his wife was at the end of 2015, and she says she misses sharing her country with him.
Over the last four years, Fuller and Miller would grab a coffee together once a week or so at Raging Sage Coffee Roasters. And in the last three months, as Miller’s health declined, there was hardly a day Fuller didn’t spend some time with him.
His Parkinson’s had gotten to the advanced stages about a year ago. Miller fell and broke his hip in August and never fully recovered.
In June of 2020, a group of Miller’s longtime friends and colleagues put together a “festschrift,” a gathering of essays about and dedicated to Miller.
“He was so phenomenal,” said former journalist and longtime friend David Carter. “Really being in the complete vanguard of coverage of the borderlands. He was one of the earliest to recognize its significance and also how quickly things were changing.”
Carter wrote the forward for the compilation and says the tributes are “an informal variation on the academic festschrift — the festivals or feasts of writing dedicated to a scholar in recognition of a long and unusually distinguished career.”
The compilation, which includes 17 essays from seven cities, covers a half a century of personal appreciation of Miller and his work.
Reel, who also has an essay in the compilation, says that ultimately, Miller was a travel writer, but not a guide book writer.
“He was a guide to specific characters in specific places,” he said. “You learn about who lives on a certain patch of ground, not where to get a room.”
Australian researchers have created a hydrogel that could be used as a one-off intervention to treat Parkinson's disease and possibly other neurological conditions, a member of the development team said in an interview with Reuters. Olivia Chan reports.
