CONVERSATION WITH ZELL MILLER

STEELY:	I'm Mel Steely, and this is Ted Fitz-Simons, both in the History Department at West Georgia College. We're here today in Young Harris, Georgia, with Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller. Today is the 19th of May, 1986. We're going to talk to the lieutenant governor about his early years, growing up here in Young Harris and his early entry into politics. Zell, you're the product of the mountains, with very deep family roots in the mountains. Tell us a little bit, if you would, about your ancestors, the Collins and the Miller families.
MILLER:	Well, they came out of [Buckham?] County, North Carolina, down into Georgia in the late 1920s, early 1930s, waiting for this area to be opened up whenever the Cherokee Indians were removed. I think it was about eighteen and thirty-two [1832] they cut a section out of what was a huge part of northeast Georgia, Cherokee County, and formed Union County. They named it Union County back then because already there was a great deal of Union sympathy in this section, not Union sympathy as you think about it when the Civil War came along, but the Union above sectionalism. You remember the toast, I think, that was supposed to have occurred between Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun when Andrew Jackson said, "To our Union. It must be preserved." And John C. Calhoun, the great states rightist, came in and said, "To our Union, after our liberties most dear." Most of these people that were up in this area settled--were with Union sympathies, and whenever they were debating what to call this county, somebody said, "Well, call it Union. Most of those folks up there are Union sympathizers." Anyway, they cut out Union County in 1832, and, as you know, the Indians were removed right around that time. My great-great-great-grandfather was a man named Thompson Collins, and he first settled for a while over around [Loudsville?] Campground, which is on the edge of what is White County now, and then when they opened this area up, he and his family came over [Tessney?] Gap into a little valley of Union County that was known as Choestoe [pronounced CHOESTOE]. Choestoe is Cherokee, which means land of the dancing rabbit. It's in an area that's kind of at the foot of Brasstown Bald Mountain, goes over to where Vogle State Park is now, and then on in that area somewhere south of Blairsville. Blairsville, by the way, was named for Postmaster General Blair in the Andrew Jackson administration--again showing how strong they were for Andrew Jackson. But he settled there, and there are an awful lot of Collinses in Union County to this day. He had a son named Bud Collins that served in one of the first general assemblies. They say that at that time there were still a good many Indians up here, and supposedly he wore a moccasin on one foot and a shoe on the other, to show that he wanted to represent both the Indians and the whites that were in Union County. And then later the Millers came in from White County. That's where they all were. My grandfather, another Bud, this time Bud Miller, married Mary Collins, Mary Jane Collins, and they had a lot of children, and one of the children that they had was Steven Grady Miller, who was my father. He was born in eighteen and ninety-three [1893], and his father ran an old country store over there, one of those old-fashioned country stores, and farmed, and was a schoolteacher. He taught school two or three months out of the year. Two of those children--my father, Grady, and his sister, Verdie--came over to Young Harris College, where they got their education, and it was at Young Harris College that Grady Miller met my mother, [Birdie? Verdie?] Bryan, who had come there to teach art in 1919.
STEELY:	Okay. Now, you had one relative--I believe it was one of the Millers--that was thought to be extremely fair and honest and helpful.
MILLER:	No, that was a Collins. That was Thompson Collins. The first man that came in was Thompson Collins, and this was one of his ancestors on down the line that lived in the early 1900s. Thompson Collins was known as a very fair, very good man that would help anybody. The story is that one time some people came by and wanted him to drive their wagon to the top of Tessney Gap because they weren't sure about whether they could make it or not, and so he did. And on the way up there, all of a sudden some revenuers came out, and the people who had hired him jumped off the wagon and went running off into the woods, and Uncle Thompson, or Uncle Thomp, as he was called, was charged with possessing what they called back then "unmarked barrels," which meant that it was filled with moonshine liquor. And they took Uncle Thomp and sent him off to New York State for some reason; I don't know why. But they sent him off to New York State, and he served a while in prison, and the family didn't hear from him for a couple of years, and then all of a sudden he showed back up in Choestoe and told them that he had walked all the way from New York and says, "I have slept in many a corner of a fence row." And from then on, anybody that Uncle Thomp could help, he did. He was known for a big heart. On his tombstone--by the way, up there in Choestoe, this old cemetery, where I've got four generations buried on one little hillside, Collinses and Millers--but anyway, Uncle Thomp's tombstone has got: A Poor Man's Friend. I've always liked that pretty well.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Yes, I'll bet you have.
STEELY:	You never really knew your father Grady Miller because he died about the time you were born. Tell us what you do know about him. What kind of man was he?
MILLER:	Well, you're right. He died--I was born February the 24th, and he died on March the 12th, 1932. My mother was not able to go be with him in the hospital because, of course, of my birth that was about to occur any minute. I've never known anything about him except just what people have told me. My mother, who was originally from South Carolina, could have moved back to South Carolina upon my father's death and I guess live with her father and taken me and my sister with her, but she said she decided to stay here because she wanted me to grow up where people knew my father and could tell me about him, and she told me a lot about him, and I met a lot of his friends, and I've met a lot of his students, because he taught at Young Harris College and Emory at Oxford for a number of years. And from what they've told me, a man that was very much a scholar. Whenever he was in World War I, instead of coming back after the armistice, he stayed over there and went to Kings College, had his master's degree in history, enjoyed the classics. I had one student tell me that he always wore a tie; you never saw him without a tie hardly at any time. Kind of immaculate. One of his students told me about that he remembers whenever he was eating peanuts as he went down to the post office from the campus and he was shelling them, and he would put the shells in his pocket instead of throwing them on the ground, which said something about him. But evidently a man with some kind of scholarly demeanor but also a man that was keenly interested in political affairs. And in nineteen and twenty-six [1926], he was elected to the state Senate from Union County on this rotating basis that we had up until just not too many years ago. And there--he had taught Ed Rivers when Ed Rivers was a student here at Young Harris. He and Ed Rivers were in that Senate together, and he managed Ed Rivers' first, unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign. But evidently a man that was very scholarly. I've got an awful lot of his letters that he wrote. Quotes a great deal of Latin. So a man that came out of these mountains, a product of these mountains, but evidently a very worldly, scholarly figure and a person that thought education was the most important thing that there was.
STEELY:	Your mother, Verdie Bryan Miller, obviously has had a tremendous impact on your life and, in fact, that of the Young Harris community. Tell us a little bit about her, if you would.
MILLER:	Well, quite frankly, she is without doubt the strongest and most independent person that I've ever known. I try to get a little subjectivity because I know that probably most sons feel that way, but I'll tell you a little bit about her, and you'll see what I mean. She had grown up, as I say, or been born in North Carolina. When she was a young girl, she showed some artistic talent, and her father sent her to the Art Students League in New York, and she studied at this very prestigious school for artists back in the early 1900s. She saw an ad in a magazine that they were looking for art teachers at Young Harris College, a little Methodist college in north Georgia, and she applied and got the job. And in nineteen and nineteen [1919] she took a train and arrived in Murphy, North Carolina, about twenty miles from here, and she was met by--back then they called a hack, kind of like a stagecoach without a top, and came to Young Harris College, and there she met my father. They were married within a few years. They had a daughter named Jane, who is six years older than I am, and then I was born in 1932. And then, as I say, my father died. My father--they lived in a dormitory. They lived in a dormitory up until I was about to be born, and then they let them have a faculty home. It's since been torn down, but it was right over here on the hill. But when he died, my father left my mother a thousand-dollar [$1000] insurance policy, and that was it. She took that $1000 insurance policy and bought this broom sage hill, what was then a rocky, broom sage hill, and with the seven hundred dollars [$700] that was left--I think she paid three hundred dollars [$300] for it--and with the $700 that was left she hired a workman to build a home that she had designed and had drawn on a piece of paper. She wanted it made out of rock. She went to this lady, whose name was Callie Nichols, who was a good friend, that owned some land on a creek not far from here, and asked Mrs. Nichols could she have the rocks in that creek. And Mrs. Nichols said yes, she could. And so all during the summer, spring and summer of nineteen and thirty-two [1932], my mother got down in that creek and would take these rocks and put them on the bank. I was just an infant child. My six-year-old sister looked after me. On Saturdays then some of the menfolk[s?] would go and help load those rock[s] on a sled drawn by a mule, and with my mother they hauled them here, and they built this home. They built it until the $700 gave out, and it gave out at a time when it had this beautiful exterior, but the interior was just like a barn. The floors were--I can remember looking down through the cracks that were an inch wide to the dirt below. There was no sheetrock or anything like that on the walls. The electrical fixtures were just wires there in the wall. The story is that a dog came in and ate the butter out of the dish the first night that she moved us in here. And it was pretty much in that way that we lived until I was eighteen or nineteen years old. We actually put a chicken--I can remember putting a chicken brooder in one corner of the living room and raising chickens over in the corner of the living room. And then whenever they got [to] a pretty good little size, like, they were getting up towards between small chickens and fryers, we fenced off with chicken wire part of our living room. Actually, it was more of a chicken house than our downstairs. I don't mean for it to sound uncomfortable because--it was cold, I remember that very well. But she didn't worry a great deal whether everything was immaculate. I can remember at Christmas time she'd put up huge trees in it. At Halloween time she'd put up fodder in the corner and pumpkins all around, and everybody else that lived in nicer houses on the other side--they couldn't do that, so we got a kick out of it. It was fun. But gradually she would work on it and try to finish it up. Whenever I was about six or eight years old, she decided that she needed a basement, and so she and another little lady got a shovel and a pick and went up underneath the house and began to dig the basement. They'd have these big flat-bottom tubs. They'd fill them up, and they'd drag them out, and they filled them up and dragged them out, until they could get where they could stand up underneath the house. And she actually, she and another lady, named Mrs. Verdie Shook, who is by the way now almost a hundred years old; my mother is ninety-three--and they both are in adjoining rooms in a nursing home up at Hiawassee, these two ladies that worked so hard together building that basement. And my mother had a thing about cement. She loved to mix cement. She took a wheelbarrow down into that basement and would mix cement, and then she would take her hands and stucco those clay walls, and you could actually see--she's painted it since then with white paint--but you can actually see her fingerprints where she stuccoed these walls around. All of the cement work that you see around this house-- from the front steps out there, to these steps out here, to this patio--she laid all of it.
STEELY:	She laid the patio--rock and everything?
MILLER:	Yes.
STEELY:	That's remarkable.
MILLER:	And also she was very interested in politics. I don't know exactly where she got that from, but she used to say that we were related to William Jennings Bryan, the old Democratic presidential warhorse. I don't whether we were or not, but she loved William Jennings Bryan. I can remember early on my mother having us listen to all the national conventions of the political parties that went on. And even if they went into the night, we'd stay up and listen to them as long as we could. She was fascinated with government and politics and wanted me to read about it. I learned early on that one way I could get out of work: My mother wouldn't bother me to have me go do something if I was somewhere reading a book. She wanted us to read, and she wanted us to learn. She herself was involved in government. She was elected to the city council in Young Harris back when it was unheard of a woman being on the city council. And for twenty-five years she was a member of the city council and served a couple of terms as mayor. She was also the treasurer of the city, or tax commissioner or whatever you want to call it. And people came to our house to pay their taxes. Later, whenever there was a water system put in Young Harris, they came to our house to pay the water bills. She always held--and by the way, that's a good way to find out what people are thinking, and I learned early on when somebody comes around to pay you some taxes, they're going to let you know what kind of government they think you're giving them. She always was one of the persons who hold the election, the only woman that was out there. I can remember as a little boy going out there to what we called the [Lull? Little?] House. It was just a little house about eight by ten, just provided a shelter, but that's where they held the election, and I can remember being huddled over in the corner watching my mother over there with those men in their [Gallast?] overalls and a day or two of growth of beard, and maybe some of them a little bleary-eyed frond having a drink or two during the election day, and she and them, counting the votes. And I could hear her right now. They'd say it, and she'd say, "Carried" when she got to five. I guess that excitement of an election rubbed off on me at a very early age. But she made her way without a husband and without really much of an income. She sold magazines, made her a little bit of money around Christmas time, worked in the post office some, worked up at the college sometimes as kind of a maintenance person, and eked out a living for me and my sister.
STEELY:	She never did teach art again?
MILLER:	Well, she taught art some, and she did also a good bit of painting of china and painting of pictures, helping people--she would teach but not students. Whenever she was teaching up there--she told me one time that she started teaching up there for two dollars [$2.00] a student, and she had $2.00 a month a student, and she had eight students, so she was making sixteen dollars [$16] a month there when she first came to Young Harris. I guess she thought she could beat that doing something else.
STEELY:	I imagine so.
MILLER:	But she was a very strong lady, and I'll never forget--I tell this story often because it just demonstrates what kind of woman she was. When I decided to run for lieutenant governor and the day that I was going to qualify, I thought that was a big occasion. It was to me. And I called her up and said, "I want you to come down here and be beside me whenever I qualify for lieutenant governor." And she says, "Well, I can't. I'm too busy." And so I was kind of disappointed, but I knew my mom, because she was always busy. She was always busy. She worked all the time. And so I got to worrying about it a little bit more, and so I decided to call her again. I says, "Now, come on down here." I said, "I really want you to be here. This is something important to me." And she says, "I'm too busy." And I says, "What are you too busy doing that you can't be down here when your son qualifies to run for lieutenant governor?" She says, "I'm building a billboard in our yard that says, ELECT ZELL MILLER LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR."
STEELY:	[laughs] You couldn't argue with her then.
MILLER:	I couldn't argue with her then. That was more important than coming and standing beside your son, was to put something up where all the cars would see it as they went by.
STEELY:	Her experience taught her what the priorities were.
MILLER:	That's right.
STEELY:	That's interesting. You were born during the deep days of the Depression. In your book you talk about growing up in the mountains and in Young Harris. You talked about going to school in a four-teacher, pot-bellied stove school where you got between Bert Lance and the stove to keep warm, each of them having an equal amount of warmth.
MILLER:	[laughs]
STEELY:	Would you tell us a little bit about these early days of school, grammar school? How you played, things of that nature?
MILLER:	Well, I started grammar school when I was five years old. They let you do that then. Bert's father, Jack Lance, was president of Young Harris College. He started at the same time. It was a four-room schoolhouse, but it was really two rooms because there was a big partition that you could open up and make it into two rooms or you could make it into four. It was a schoolhouse that set up on a hill not far from here. It's been torn down now. But they had double desks, where two people sat to a desk. And Bert and I sat together for a number of years: first grade, second grade, third grade. I think by the time we got to the fourth grade, they'd changed the seating arrangement. But, yes, there was a big pot-bellied stove that sat in there that heated the room.
STEELY:	What do you remember about your teachers?
MILLER:	Well, the teachers were very good. My first- and second-grade teacher--she taught both grades--you were supposed to be studying while she was teaching the other grade--but her name was Mrs. Maude Potts, and she taught for about [forty? four?] years the first grade and was an excellent teacher. And Mrs. Louise [Wofford?], who taught me in the third grade. I had a teacher by the name of Mary [Will Hunt?] that taught me in the fourth and fifth grade. She is the cousin to Ed Jenkins. Her mother was a Jenkins. Very good teachers. In the sixth grade, a man by the name of Frank Irvin, that was a teacher and a wonderfully sentimental type of individual. Would interrupt his courses on how to diagram sentences by going off on tangents about who was related to who, and who was the best athlete that ever came out of this county, and who was the best student that had ever been through his room. He made you want to excel. Whenever I was in the sixth grade, my mother got the idea of moving to Atlanta and helping in the war effort. This was in 1942. She wanted to help in the war effort. She had volunteered during World War I as what they called a canteen girl to go overseas, and the war had ended before she could go. She had this great patriotic streak. Even as strong a Democrat as she was in her early years, she loved Barry Goldwater in her later years because she thought that he was for the defense of this country. She had a curious mixture of strong, strong patriotism-- But anyway, she wanted us to go down there and she'd do her part in the war effort, so we moved to Atlanta for about two years. She worked out of what we call the Bell Bomber Plant. It's now Lockheed. And then we came back, and I went to Young Harris High School, Young Harris Academy.
STEELY:	What did you do as a child before you went off to Atlanta and then after you came back from Atlanta, things like social life, play, things of that nature?
MILLER:	I played the usual games that kids played up here in those days: hide-and-go-seek; red rover, where you'd line up--four or five kids would hold arms and four or five kids down at the other end would hold arms, and one would go and try to burst through the other one, and if you did you got to bring one back until there was no more line at the other end. And we played mumblety-peg, where you'd have a knife and you'd try to stick it up with various different kinds of designs. Fox and hound, where you'd take an old Sears & Roebuck catalog or maybe an old paper, and you'd have five minutes' head start and you'd drop paper on every so way and folks would try to track you. Fish in these creeks, and there were certain swimming holes in the summer where you'd go swimming, swimming holes. They had colorful names, like the Blue Bend, the Jackson Hole, Carson Bottom, Sycamore. And they were great places to go swimming, we thought, back then. In the nude, of course, bare. I've gone back to them and looked at them in later years, and they look just like little knee-deep puddles of water in that creek. Back then we considered them great swimming holes.
STEELY:	Did you do much hunting and fishing, trapping, that kind of thing?
MILLER:	Well, I always had rabbit boxes in the wintertime. I had five or six rabbit boxes that I would have set, and early on frosty mornings I'd go out and see if I had caught any in these pine ridges around here. That was more than just play, though, because if you caught a rabbit, you could sell it over here at the store for ten cents, and that was a big, big deal, being able to make ten cents for selling a rabbit. In the summer we would pick blackberries. Again, that was business as well as pleasure because you could sell them for two cents a pound. I never will forget that we worked one summer, picked these blackberries, and we'd take them over and sell them. What they did was they took them and made wine out of them, whoever got the thing. But anyway, but they'd give you two cents a pound. But they wouldn't give you the money. They'd give you what they called a due bill, and that's the store owed you that much money. And at the end of that summer, my sister took what she had made and bought her a nice looking notebook and some pencils for the coming school year, and I took what I had made and bought me a can of fruit cocktail, which I thought was the most scrumptious and fancy food that anybody could have. To this day, I think fruit cocktail is just out of this world. But I remember my mother and my sister looking at me. They didn't say much, but I could tell that they were looking at me with a great deal of disapproval and even disdain for wasting your money on this kind of fancy food when you could be buying something useful.
STEELY:	You squandered it.
MILLER:	That's right. I squandered it!
STEELY:	What role did the church play in those days? Was your mother a strong religious woman?
MILLER:	Very strong. She was a member of the board of stewards of the Methodist Church as long as I can remember. She was also the communion steward, which meant that every month she was in charge of the communion. We went to church in those early days in the chapel up at the college. All of my neighbors were Baptists; we were Methodists, and we went there. All of my neighbors, as I say, were Baptists, and I wanted to go with them, and my mother sort of compromised, and what I would do is I would go to the Methodist Church on Sunday morning with her and then that evening I would go with my neighboring friends to Old Union Baptist Church at night. And so I got a little bit of both, the Methodist and the Baptist.
STEELY:	The Baptist, generally a little more exciting?
MILLER:	Oh, lots more exciting, and a lot stronger speaking and lots better oratory. The only thing was sometimes there would be embarrassing times, especially at revival time, whenever at the end they would want to know if you had been saved or not, and tell you what a sinner you were. That worried me a great deal, was whether I really was "saved," quote-unquote.
STEELY:	When were you baptized?
MILLER:	I was baptized when I was twelve years old in the Methodist Church.
STEELY:	But you weren't sure that took.
MILLER:	I wasn't sure whether that took, especially in my teenage years.
STEELY:	What kind of sports were you involved in?
MILLER:	Well, I always loved sports. My uncle, who lived next door to us--he still does--Hoyle Bryson, was one of the great athletes that came out of Young Harris College and was a professional baseball player in the Phillies organization. He had two sons who were a little younger than me but our age, and they were very good athletes. We played a lot of baseball. Back then they had we called town baseball team. Young Harris had a baseball team, Blairsville had a baseball team, Hiawassee had a baseball team. And we had a league with about four Georgia teams in it and about four North Carolina teams in it. And played every Saturday and Sunday, and big crowds would come out to watch us. That was before the days of television. Ed Jenkins and his father and his brother made up one-third of the Blairsville team, and I and my two cousins and Hoyle made up four out of the nine players on the Young Harris team, so it was not only town teams, it was almost family affairs, too.
STEELY:	This is the first time you ran into serious contact with blacks, wasn't it? Baseball.
MILLER:	Well, that's true. And we only did that on the Fourth of July usually, or maybe on Labor Day. It was a special occasion when we would play what we would call the Bean Creek Negroes. This was a group of blacks from over in the edge of White County. We started it here in Young Harris as sort of a traditional thing that on the Fourth of July we would either go over there for a game or they would come over here. We did that, oh, eight or ten years of my life, and it was a big occasion. People really came out and watched that because this was before the days of fussing and fighting over segregation and integration. This was in the forties and fifties, especially in the fifties. All this business about integration seemed far removed. We didn't have the black and white rest rooms up here. We didn't have black and white water fountains. That was something I learned about later.
FITZ-SIMONS:	So if a black man came through town in a car and wanted to stop and use a rest room, nobody worried about it?
MILLER:	Not then. That's exactly right.
STEELY:	Very different from central and southern.
MILLER:	Very different, as I later learned, [from] central and south Georgia.
STEELY:	When you were in Atlanta during that period, you were in your early--well, let's see: ten, eleven, twelve?
MILLER:	I was ten, eleven and twelve.
STEELY:	What do you remember about wartime Atlanta?
MILLER:	Well--
STEELY:	Or was it Marietta?
MILLER:	No, it was Atlanta. We lived down close to where the Varsity is, on Spring Street. I went to Lucky Street Grammar School, and then I went to [O'Keith?] Junior High in the eighth grade. I can remember saving tin cans and flattening them out and saving grease and saving paper and those things that you did back then for the war effort. I can remember my mother listening to all the fireside chats [President Roosevelt on the radio] and all the things that were going on at that time. I remember that she took us on V-J Day up to in front of Davidson's, now, there where they used to have the Roxy and Capital Theater and the Paramount on down below it. She wanted us to be a part of that experience. I can't remember a whole lot about it except there were just lots of noise and strangers were kissing one another. That's about my memory of V-J Day, lots of noise. I must have been eleven years old.
STEELY:	Were you in the Scouts or anything during those days?
MILLER:	Yes, I was in the Scouts at that time. I also held a job. I had a job--I got my Social Security number whenever I was twelve years old, and I worked up there in front of what was then the Paramount Theater. I worked for the Planters Peanut Company, and I wore one of those Mr. Peanut things, and I handed out peanuts to people as they came by, with a teaspoon. Talking about the war effort, I can remember this: I can remember when somebody in a uniform came by, I would just rake them out. I wouldn't hand them a teaspoon; I would just rake him out a whole handful if they wanted them. And finally my employer says, "You're giving too many out. Don't give so many out. Be a little stingier."
STEELY:	[laughs] You told him you were just--well, you didn't tell him anything.
MILLER:	I didn't tell him anything.
STEELY:	Let me give you a quote from your book, The Mountains Within Me. You say, "Growing up in the mountains gave me an appreciation for hard work, the environment, and my fellow man." Would you comment on this? Explain what you meant by it.
MILLER:	Well, of course, everybody worked hard up here if they were going to make any kind of go of it, especially my mother. As far as the environment, I learned early that you're supposed not to dirty these creeks. Back then, there were some people who had outdoor toilets that were over the creeks. And I remember that my mother thought that was just terrible, that they were so lazy that they wouldn't dig a hole in the ground and make an outdoor toilet like the rest of us. And she taught me that that was ruining that stream for everybody down below it, and that man should have more consideration for the people who lived on that creek down below him, and that showed. And that you didn't cut down certain trees. Things like that. As far as my fellow man, I learned early on that--my mother got along very well with not only the college people but she got along with the town people, which we were. Back then, there was almost class difference between these people who lived on the campus and who made pretty good money--we thought good money back then--and who wore ties and who had automobiles, than those of us who were right in the community, the town folks. I was impressed that my mother could cross that line some way or other. Of course, it was because she had once worked up there, and they knew my father and that sort of thing. I can remember a little bit about that class distinction.
STEELY:	Did you ever feel bad, one way or the other, about the class you were in?
MILLER:	I think I did. We didn't have running water, oh, until I was a grown man. Whenever I was a teenager, the way I would take a shower was I would wait until everybody had gone to supper up at the college, and then I would hurry up there, and I would go into those shower rooms and I would take me a shower and then hurry back down here. And every once in a while somebody would come in there, and they would see me there, and that was most embarrassing, that here I was, a town fellow, going up there and taking a shower.
STEELY:	You talk a little bit about Byron [Herbert] Reece in your book. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with him.
STEELY:	Well, he was a distant relative. He lived in Choestoe, and he lived next door to--when I say "next door," he didn't live next door to anybody back then because there was a good bit of distance between--but he lived about a half a mile down the road from my Uncle Fletcher Miller. Every afternoon after work, every evening after work he would come up there and sit around, tell stories. I went from digging with him several times, frog hunting with him. I've been fishing with him. I didn't think of him back then as a person who was a great writer. I knew he wrote, but I thought of him as a good companion that told good stories. I always like people who could tell stories. I don't know exactly why. But I used to be fascinated by the people who sat around in what we call these loafers' benches at the various country stores. I would spend hours listening to them tell their stories and tell their lives. My mother hated me for going up and doing that. She said, "You're going to learn a bunch of cuss words." And I did.
STEELY:	[laughs]
MILLER:	But I also learned some very colorful stories and some colorful language.
STEELY:	It prepared you for the Marine Corps.
MILLER:	I guess it did.
FITZ-SIMONS ?:	Zell, you went to Young Harris College and Academy. I guess in a sense maybe you sort of crossed that line you spoke about. What was it like being a student there?
MILLER:	Well, those were some of the great days of my life. See, I was there six years. Back then they had an academy of four years and they had a college of two years, and I started there in the eighth grade. I had not finished. I'd started at O'Keith, and then my mother moved us back here. At first I was very scared and very timid and very self-conscious about being a town person and thought all those other people were pretty sophisticated, but later on, as I began to be accepted and as I got involved in the activities of the debating society and the athletics that was going on, I came to love it very much. Very happy there.
?:	Did anyone at any time ever--well, your older relatives--say anything to you about Sam Jones?
MILLER:	I remember hearing about Sam Jones, yes, but no, they talked more about other persons that had been involved in Young Harris' early years than they did about Sam Jones.
?:	Sam Jones, then, wasn't really a benefactor?
MILLER:	No, the main benefactor of Young Harris was a judge by the name--that's how it got its name--his name was L.G. Harris, Young L.G. Harris. He was a judge down in Athens here, from Oconee County. He really never saw this campus. Never visited this town. Young Harris College--may I digress a minute?
?:	Yes.
MILLER:	Young Harris College had been started by a Methodist circuit rider named Artemus Lester. He was twenty-nine years old, and he started it in eighteen and eighty-five [1885] up here, just a little ways from where the entrance of the college is now, in an old building. Had seven students there. He wanted to start it for the mountain children. It didn't amount to much. Didn't have the money and a lot of interest. At that time, this location was called McTyere, Georgia, M-c-T-y-e-r-e. He pronounced it Mac-TIER. It was only after it had been going for a few years and it looked like it was about to die, that Young Harris made a sizeable donation to it. And it was such a sizeable donation that they changed the school's name. It had been called McTyere Institute. They changed its name to Young Harris and changed the name of the town to Young Harris. But he and Dr. [First name?] Sharp and some of the early benefactors of Young Harris were mainly who they talked about.
?:	It's interesting that he came from Oconee County. I wonder if anyone ever drew a parallel between his contribution to education and that of [Green Haygood?] and [Atticus Haygood?]? Both of them were--they were from Watkinsville, I think.
STEELY:	[...]
MILLER:	I hadn't even thought about that comparison, but sure.
STEELY:	It's an interesting sort of parallel.
FITZ-SIMONS:	There's a Young Harris Methodist Church in Athens. He was the benefactor for that also.
?:	Well, now, you ran into--were associated with a number of students, like Bob Short and Jack Brinkley, Guy Sharpe, Ed Jenkins. Tell us about them as students.
MILLER:	Well, of course, Ed Jenkins and I go back even further than our days at Young Harris College. He was born about five hundred yards from where we're sitting, right up here, just right almost across from where the Young Harris chapel is. His ancestors ran a boarding house there. I can't remember when I didn't know Ed Jenkins. We knew each other when we were nine, ten years old. His family later moved over to Blairsville, eight miles from here, and he went to Union County High School, and then he came back to Young Harris College, and we formed a very, very fast friendship because we were interested in the same things. We were interested in baseball first and politics second, but always baseball first. He was then probably my best friend, and he's remained such almost ever since. But those others that you mentioned, Guy Sharpe came and was really a good-looking Mr. Personality, with dark black hair, elected president of the class almost as soon as he got here, good speaker on the debating society, and he and I became good friends. Jack Brinkley--back then you had a debating team that was made up of three people, and at one time the debating team was Jack Brinkley and Guy Sharpe and myself, and another time it was Ed Jenkins and me and a man that's dead now, by the name of [Mac Hayne?]. But formed close friendships with these people that's continued ever since.
STEELY:	Debating was a little different back then, wasn't it, than it is today?
MILLER:	Debating?
STEELY:	Yes.
MILLER:	Yes, how you debated back then was you had a three-member debate team, and the way it worked was the first two just almost gave speeches. Wasn't much debate to it. They just gave arguments. And then the third person on that debate team would give partial argument but then would spend the rest of his time in what we called the rebuttal, rebuttling what those other two had already said on the other side.
STEELY:	And you drew good crowds for this?
MILLER:	Oh, drew huge crowds. At what we called the champion debate, which was the debate between the Young Harris [Debating] Society and the Phi Chi [Debating] Society, the chapel would be filled, and there would be people standing outside, and there would be people sitting in the windows, listening to it. It was the big occasion of the year. And if you were the champion debater, that was about like hitting a home run in the playoff game.
FITZ-SIMONS:	And you did become a champion.
MILLER:	Yes, the teams that I was on won four different times. They've done away with debating at Young Harris College, and I'm very sorry. I always thought it served a great purpose.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Well, you went on, then, to graduate now from Young Harris in '51 and then went to Emory for a couple of quarters, where you found the situation sort of reversed. I mean, you'd been sort of the big man on campus here, and you were sort of swallowed up over there, and you mention, I think, that you were overwhelmed by the sophisticated of Emory students. What did you mean by that?
MILLER:	I truly feel that was probably the most miserable six months that I've ever spent in my life. I had been about everything you could be at Young Harris College, not because of any great abilities, [but] because I was here longer than anybody else. And if you were at Young Harris College for six years, you're bound to get to do a bunch of things. But anyway, I had gotten a scholarship, a political science scholarship, to Emory University. I think it amounted to twelve hundred dollars [$1,200], which was a great scholarship back then, so I thought. Most of my classmates either went to the University of Georgia or La Grange. I was the only one that went to Emory. I don't know exactly why I went to Emory. I had heard that it was tough, and I liked that challenge. I had gotten that scholarship, which meant lots to me. And I guess because deep down, my father had once taught at Emory at Oxford. And so for some reason, I went to Emory. It was the first time that I'd ever stayed in a dormitory. It was really the first time I had ever been away from home, been away from my mother. That had something to do with it. But the main thing that had to do with it was that the students just seemed so much smarter than any students that I had been in class with. I had made tremendous grades, but I had made them without studying too hard. And there, to make a C, I found that I just had to really bear down. But what amazed me was how glib the students were and what they seemed to already know that I didn't. And in one of my political science classes, there was a fellow by the name of Elliott Levitas. Of course, Elliott was a Rhodes scholar, became a Rhodes scholar out of Emory University and went on to become a congressman. But he knew all kinds of things about philosophy. I didn't know all this stuff about Karl Marx and Hegel and all these other folks that he seemed to know. Anyway, I felt very, very intimidated by the whole situation. I managed to get pretty good grades, but I really beat myself to a pulp to get those B's, and at the end of two months I quit, and I came home.
?:	Did you feel it was a defeat?
MILLER:	I felt very much defeated.
?:	A sort of frustration, perhaps.
MILLER:	I felt like I wanted to get back over on this side of the mountain and never venture out into the wide world again. It was too scary for me.
?:	It's really interesting. It just occurs to me, a situation like that, that a city boy in the country would have felt equally, I think, intimidated by lack of knowledge. It just didn't happen that way.
MILLER:	First time also that I became to realize that I had a drawl or an accent or something that was different from a lot of other people. I never had known that I talked a little different until then.
?:	In of this, whatever it was--discouragement, frustration--is this what sort of propels you into the Marines?
MILLER:	Oh, no doubt about that. Yes, I very quickly saw that I needed to do something else with my life at that particular time, and so sort of on the spur of the moment I joined the Marine Corps. Maybe it was some of that patriotism of my mother's that was coming out, because at that time we were involved in the Korean War, and I had a lot of friends that, town friends, that had gone off to the Korean War, especially one by the name of Eugene [Kirkendahl?], who had been a very close friend of mine. He was in Korea at that time. And another one by the name of [Eric Ing?], who was a close friend of mine. The two of them had joined the Marine Corps and gone off, and so I just decided I'd join the Marine Corps, too. So in August of '53 I did.
?:	The Marines say, "We make men," but what were the positive and negative influences of the corps on your life, if any?
MILLER:	It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It ranks right up beside their having a mother like I did, and meeting Shirley and having a wife like I did, and having some good teachers at Young Harris, like Mrs. Herren, Miss Edna Herren, that I did. The Marine Corps did a great deal for me because I had grown up in a home without any male figure whatsoever, just a mother there and an older sister. I had grown up sort of undisciplined. We didn't have any regular time to eat because we'd eat when my mother would get through working in the yard or wherever she was working. And there was no regimen to my life whatsoever. Had no self-discipline. The Marine Corps was tough, as Emory was. There was one big difference, though. I couldn't quit and go home. I had to stay there and take that. I don't know that it made a man out of me, but it made me a lot stronger individual. I would recommend it highly.
STEELY:	Let's take a break here. We're about out of time. [End Tape 1. Begin Tape 2.]
STEELY:	Zell, you were talking about being in the Marines. While you were in Marines, I believe you got married. You married Shirley Ann [Carla?], who is the banker of the family, I understand. Tell us about her and how you got together, what was your life like as a married Marine? Brown bagging, I think you called it.
MILLER:	We were like a lot of people that went to Young Harris College that got married. We used to have a president of Young Harris College named Charles [Clay?] who said, "Young Harris College is like a shoe factory. They come out of here in pairs." I had met Shirley at Young Harris College. She had come over to go to the high school. I had joined the Marine Corps, and I came back on weekends and I had met her. She was from Andrews, North Carolina, which is just right across the county line, Cherokee County-North Carolina. Her father had been sheriff. She shared my interest in politics, which was a little bit back then, not like it later became. But anyway, we got married in January of '54, while I was in the Marine Corps, and she finished Young Harris in June of '54 and came to Camp Lejeune, and we lived first of all in a little eight-foot trailer. It was eight feet wide, out at Camp [Geiger?]. I was what you called a brown bagger. That is, I spent the night there and would go into work every morning and come back. In 1955 I got an assignment to go to Great Lakes, Illinois, to go to journalism school. She came back to Andrews, and by that time she was pregnant with our first son. He was born--Murphy was born in June of '55. I got back about that time from Great Lakes, and as soon as he was old enough, she able enough, we moved him and her to Camp Lejeune, and we lived in married housing called Midway Park. Bought ourselves a black and white television from Sears & Roebuck. We thought that having a baby boy and a black and white television, that we were getting on up there.
?:	You had made it.
MILLER:	We had made it.
?:	You mentioned going back and forth between here and Camp Lejeune. I'm sure you did sort of--this was when you were at home, when you were at Emory. What was transportation like then?
MILLER:	Well, of course, whenever I was growing up, we didn't have any transportation. Our family never owned a car. My mother couldn't drive. We never owned a car. My Aunt Verdie every once in a while would take us somewhere. She had a little Ford coupe, and she would take us somewhere, and I remember I would ride up in the back, behind it. [?] But the way I got to Atlanta, the way we got to Atlanta was on the bus that left out of here. It didn't run every day. For a long time it just ran on weekends. But you'd take a bus from here, and you'd either go through Gainesville to Atlanta, or if it were a Trailway bus, you'd go from here down through Blue Ridge and Canton and that way. It was about a four- or five-hour travel, the bus stopping at every place. That's the way I traveled. That's the way we traveled whenever we worked in the Atlanta during the war. I can remember my mother bringing us up here on a Christmas Eve, and we spent Christmas Eve here at home. She wanted us to be able to spend Christmas Eve at home. We got up the next day and caught a bus back, and all we did was just come here on a bus and spend Christmas Eve and go back on Christmas Day, because she had to work the day after Christmas. But we traveled by bus.
FITZ-SIMONS:	That was it. Okay. And the bus ran on the weekend. Was this to accommodate any particular--
MILLER:	Mainly to accommodate the college students.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Oh, yes. Okay.
MILLER:	That was why it would run on weekends, through here.
?:	When you got out of the Marines, when you left the Marines, you went to the university first, I think, with the idea of eventually getting into law, didn't you?
MILLER:	All the time that I was at Young Harris, all the time that--when it dawned on me that I was not going to be a professional baseball player and that I had to figure out something else I was going to do with my life, what I figured out I was going to do was I was going to be a lawyer. Ed Jenkins and I used to talk a great deal about that. This knack for speaking or whatever it was that I had a youngster, I thought that you could make that go on, and I guess I had people tell me that "you ought to be a lawyer." I remember seeing these famous--not famous, but successful members of the Young Harris board of trustees who were lawyers, like Henry Duckworth and Lon Duckworth and Charles Reid, who at one time was the Supreme Court chief justice. They were all Young Harris people. Anyway, there was something about it that I--I just always knew that I was going to be a lawyer. I kept that right on through the Marine Corps. Shirley and I talked about it, that I was going back to the University of Georgia, I'd get my bachelor's degree, and I'd go to law school. I got back there, and I took a course. One of the courses that I took the first quarter I was back was Georgia history, under E.M. [Coulter?], Dr. Coulter. And I was mesmerized. I was just completely hypnotized by this man and what he had to say about the history of this state. I had never had anything like that hit me before. It was primarily his great teaching ability. I took every course he offered. I decided that I was not going to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a history teacher, I guess like Dr. Coulter and, perhaps subconsciously, like my father. And so I went ahead and got my master's in history and was working on my Ph.D., and a vacancy came open at Young Harris College, and that was just too much to pass up, them offering me forty-eight hundred dollars [$4,800] a year, so I moved Shirley, and we came back.
STEELY:	So Dr. Coulter was probably one of the more important influences on your life at that stage.
MILLER:	Very much so. I had an English teacher at Young Harris College that also was sort of the debate coach, by the name of Edna Herren, who helped me more than any other individual did during my whole lifetime as far as wanting to make something out of myself. But it was definitely Dr. Coulter that pointed me towards history. Every once in a while, in later years after that, Shirley would remind me of that. She loved Dr. Coulter, too, but every once in a while, she'd say, "You know,"--she'd see all these big verdicts that these lawyers were getting and how successful and wealthy they were getting, and she would say, "You know, I wish you never had taken that course under Dr. Coulter and had gone and become a lawyer." Of course, I don't know if I'd have been a successful lawyer or not. But I enjoyed history very much. I liked teaching history.
?:	You had a minor field in political science?
MILLER:	Yes.
?:	And who was your mentor there?
MILLER:	Well, Dr. [Say?], of course, was a person that I admired very greatly. I took a lot of courses under Dr. Say. Dr. [Merritt Pound?]. In history also, I took everything that [Jay Childe Benson?] taught. And [Kenneth Coleman?], and [al]most all the ones that were in the history department of the University of Georgia at that time. But particularly Dr. Coulter and Dr. Benson.
?:	Probably a great many people would agree with you there. I certainly would. They were two of my favorites. While you were there, and I can identify with you here, you not only taught freshman courses but you tutored football players.
MILLER:	[laughs]
?:	I've got to ask you this. Just from what you experienced, could there have been a [...] type of exposé at that time?
MILLER:	No, I don't think so. I had two part-time jobs. I worked out at [Alan's?], which is a hamburger joint out there on Prince Avenue, and they paid me seven dollars [$7.00] a day. I worked from five in the afternoon till twelve at night, and I worked three days a week and sometimes four. I don't know how exactly I got into that tutoring business. I think I had gone to a job placement place at the university, and they just asked me would I like to do that, or maybe Dr. Coulter got it for me. I don't remember how it was. But I got a job tutoring football players that paid me two dollars and seventy-five cents [$2.75] an hour. I would tutor them in anything related to history or political science, and I had quite a number of famous individuals. I tutored Bobby Walden, the big toe from Cairo; [Billy Roland?]--oh, a number of people--[Freddie Edmondson?], the fine basketball player--and a number of them. But no, it was more just sitting down with them and trying to figure out maybe what they should learn for their tests that were coming up more than anything else.
STEELY:	When you left the university and came back to Young Harris to teach history, you also taught for some time at DeKalb College.
MILLER:	That was later, whenever I went back to work with the Department of Corrections in '67, along in there, I taught out at DeKalb College, yes. I taught history out there, for a couple of years.
?:	You enjoyed the teaching here, though.
MILLER:	I enjoy teaching anywhere. I enjoyed teaching at Young Harris College, I've enjoyed everywhere I've taught. I like to teach. If I have time to adequately prepare myself, I think I'd rather do that than anything else, just as far as self-satisfaction.
?:	You did some teaching at Emory, too, right?
MILLER:	Taught a course out at Emory. Really, it was a course in state government that met once a week for three hours at a time, in state government, and then a course that I enjoyed very much teaching: I taught with Dan Carter, the man who wrote The Scottsboro Boys. He and I taught a course called Southern Politics of the Twentieth Century. It was also a one-day-a-week thing where he would lecture for an hour, I would lecture for an hour, then we'd have class discussion for an hour.
?:	I know it's chronologically a little ahead of time. I just couldn't resist putting that in. And then this other question occurs to me: When you taught at Emory, did you ever think back about those first months you spent there and were so uncomfortable and felt a sense of triumph?
MILLER:	Well, yes, I will admit that I did. I also felt that same kind of sense whenever my oldest son, Murphy, wanted to go to Emory University, and my first thoughts were, "Oh, no, son, you don't want to do that. I tried that one time." But he did, and got through successfully, and that also was sort of a triumph over those miserable six months that I had spent there at one time.
?:	Generally, then, you [...] teaching experience: DeKalb, Young Harris. This was really a good period in your life, would you say?
MILLER:	Yes, it was. It was. One of the happiest periods of my life was whenever I was here [in] Young Harris, back in my hometown, and I was teaching and being around these young people, and also they let me coach baseball. I was the baseball coach for four years. And I also got elected to the state Senate, and so I had the best of all worlds at that time. I was into baseball, I was satisfying my itch as far as politics was concerned, and I was getting to teach like I wanted to. So yes, that was a very happy period of my life.
?:	And being home.
MILLER:	And was home.
STEELY:	Ever want to go back to that sometimes?
MILLER:	Yes. I don't think there is any time of my life that I haven't known that someday I was going to go back to teaching. I just keep putting it off. I keep saying, "Well, I don't want to do it now. I want to serve one more term" or something like that. But someday I'm going to go back to teaching full time.
STEELY:	Your family gave you something of a political heritage. Your great uncle, Bud Collins, sat in the legislature; your dad was a state senator and campaign manager for E.D. Rivers; a distant cousin, Dr. M.D. Collins, had schools named after him all over Georgia and was the state school superintendent; your mother was on the city council and mayor; you followed her as mayor; Bud Miller was a teacher; your mother was a teacher; your dad was a teacher. You've had all kind of people in education, all kind of people in politics, and you've got kind of a dual vein going through you here. Which one wins out? Do you feel you're more of a teacher or are you more of a politician or whatever? Comment on that, if you will.
MILLER:	Well, it's always kind of been awkward because most of the educators--after I got into politics, most of the educators looked upon me as a politician, and most of the politicians looked upon me as an educator. Neither one would quite accept me because I was so involved with the other. I would say that for most of my life I considered myself an educator first and a politician second. I doubt if I could say that now, as long as I've been in politics, but I still consider myself an educator.
STEELY:	One of the groups that I'm associated with, AAUP [American Association of University Professors], tends to view you as an educator who's in a good place to help education.
MILLER:	I got into politics--I like to say this--it probably was just ambition and ego, like it is with practically all of us who get into this business. You have to have a great deal of ego to think that you could put your name on a ballot and somebody's going to put a check by it or approve it. But I really got into politics because more than anything else, I wanted to see improvement in education in this state. I thought that Georgia was not where it should be, that it was backward in that respect back when I first got into it. And I wanted to be the one that would help bring it up. It's always been my highest priority. But my mother taught me early on that politics was an honorable profession. We never had that--like I've seen in some places, where people look upon politics as something ugly or something nasty or something crooked. I grew up thinking that it was very honorable to be in politics and that you can be in politics and be an honorable person. It was an honorable profession to pursue.
STEELY:	In 1963 you served as mayor of Young Harris, following your mother's example. In fact, I think you followed her immediately as mayor of the town. This was your first political office. Would you tell us a little bit about being the mayor of a small mountain town?
MILLER:	It was in '59 when I first was elected. I served two or three times. It was '59 when I was first elected, and it was in kind of an unusual way. We had elections on Saturday back then. It was my first year back at Young Harris College, to teach. It was held in late November, and I went to a Georgia football game that Saturday, and I came back and Shirley said, "They've elected you mayor of Young Harris." I hadn't really run. Nobody wanted to be mayor back then. They just drafted you almost. They drafted my mother to be mayor. But anyway, that sounded good to me, and so I served as mayor. I knew what I was getting into because I had been around my mother when she was mayor and was city council member for so long. There are aggravating little things, like somebody driving cars too fast and squalling tires or laying rubber that you had to go check on, or there was somebody that wouldn't pay their town taxes, and there was always the controversy of whether you ought to pave this street or not pave that street or whether this street had priority over another street--all those little things that you have in politics, only it was on a more minor scale. It was a good learning ground.
STEELY:	Did you deal much with the State Highway Department during those days as mayor?
MILLER:	Yes, I did. In fact, I was very idealistic in those days. I drew up a new city charter. We hadn't had a new city charter in years and years. I went down there to the capitol and met with my representative and senator and got them to approve it as a local bill, went over and met Mr. Jim Gillis. I was completely in awe of him. But it gave me an excuse to do those things, being mayor, and ended up paving all the city streets in Young Harris. They never had been paved before.
STEELY:	You did it primarily through state money, though.
MILLER:	Through state money, oh, yes.
STEELY:	You didn't have the tax base.
MILLER:	No, we didn't have the tax base to do it.
STEELY:	How much money did you bring in in taxes in those days? What would be a typical budget for a town like this?
MILLER:	Oh, gosh, it was--
STEELY:	A few hundred dollars?
MILLER:	A few hundred dollars, yes.
STEELY:	Enough to even pay for a policeman or a constable?
MILLER:	No. If you paid for a policeman or a constable, you had to go around and collect from the businesses to do that or something like that.
STEELY:	So your law enforcement here at that time, then, was provided by the sheriff's office.
MILLER:	It was provided by the sheriff's office, although every once in a while--I don't think we ever had a city policeman while I was mayor, but there have been city policemen [...]. The mayor more or less was thought of as the person to preserve law and order. In fact, I never will forget what they gave me after I had been elected mayor and they swore me in--they gave me this book that had all the registered taxpayers, and then they gave me another book about the court proceedings that had happened: such-and-such had been arrested for [being] drunk and fined by the mayor fifty dollars and had all that record. And then the other thing they gave me was a blackjack and a pistol. [Laughter]
FITZ-SIMONS:	Did you ever use any one of them?
MILLER:	I waved the pistol around at a person or two, but I never did use it.
STEELY:	You were also elected to the state Senate in '60 and then reelected in '62, as I remember.
MILLER:	That's right.
STEELY:	What was the Senate like in those days? What committees did you serve on?
MILLER:	I served on the--Garland Byrd was the first lieutenant governor I served under. The main committee that I served on was Education. I can't remember the others, to tell you the truth, right now. And then in my second term, though, Peter Zach Geer was the lieutenant governor, and I had been active in his campaign. I had supported Peter Zach Geer for lieutenant governor because I had come to know him as the executive secretary to Ernie Vandiver. So I had supported him. Back then, you know, the Senate rotated, and so you didn't have to build up a lot of seniority to be chairman, and so he offered me a chairmanship of the committee. He said, "You can be chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee or you can be chairman of the Corrections Committee, Prisons Committee." And I said, "Well, I think I'll take Health and Welfare." So that second term as senator, I was chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee. Still served on the Education Committee, served on the Rules Committee--again, because I was close to Peter Zach Geer politically--and I also served on a committee that already was going to become famous, known as Economy and Reorganization, the committee that later Culver Kidd headed up. And the reason that was such an important committee was that it had subpoena power.
STEELY:	That was the only committee.
MILLER:	It was the only committee. Later it was done away with. In fact, later, as lieutenant governor, I had [voice level drops; ...]. But it was an important committee. I had good committee assignments under Peter Zach.
STEELY:	It was because of your association with him in his campaign?
MILLER:	That's right. And also there were only five of us who came back from that other Senate. See, the Senate rotated. When I was first elected, the Senate rotated among three counties: Rabun, Towns and Union. Rabun County would elect a senator, and the next time Towns would elect it, the next time Union would elect it, and then it would go back to Rabun. And the Senate had absolutely no seniority. The only senator who had any seniority was the person who came from Fulton County. He was the only senator who had any seniority. Well, then, after I served my first term, reapportionment came about. Then you had a continuing Senate, and so there were five of us who came back, who ran and were elected to that second Senate: [Bob Smalley?] and me and Erwin Owens, and man from Dahlonega, and Harry Jackson from Savannah, and Charlie Brown from Fulton. And so we were the only five senators who had any seniority from the Senate before, so that had something to do with [...].
STEELY:	In those days would you have classified yourself as a supporter of Governors Sanders or Vandiver? And what was your impressions of those two men?
MILLER:	Well, Vandiver--it was in the middle of his term when I went there, but I considered myself a Vandiver supporter. I had voted for him when he had run in '58. I had not voted for [...], because I thought Vandiver was more progressive, he was from north Georgia, that sort of thing. So I was very much a Vandiver supporter. And then, of course, as far as Sanders was concerned, he was in that Senate when I went, and so I had been a colleague of his in the state Senate. I admired him greatly. This was the days, of course, when John Kennedy was President of the United States, and this was the days when you were electing young people to public office. Carl Sanders was just in his thirties, but I was very impressed with him and supported him early on for governor.
STEELY:	Was his commitment to education one of the things that got your interest?
MILLER:	That, and also that I knew him personally, and also, frankly, at that time I was very much opposed to Marvin Griffin because of his segregationist views.
STEELY:	So his being a great storyteller didn't [...]?
MILLER:	No, I could admire that, but I was very much a supporter of Carl Sanders and later served in his administration as a department head.
STEELY:	While we're talking about politicians a little bit, tell us what's it like to run for office up here? What is local mountain politics like? How did you campaign? What were the districts like you had to work in? How did you get votes?
MILLER:	Well, it's changed a great deal, but in nineteen and sixty [1960] it was a rural, rough mountain area that I had to campaign in. I ran against an old-timer by the name of Kiser Dean, that already served in the Senate, the House, and had been chairman of the local party. To me, he represented all that was bad in politics. Political boss type figure, a person who had been in it for years. And here I was, a young idealist, and I wanted to run against that. Later, this man became a very fast friend. I find myself, as I grow older, probably being more like him all the time, and I'm sure there's some young idealist out there that would want to defeat me because I represent what's bad in politics, maybe in his eyes. But anyway, he was a fierce opposition. At that time, you campaigned by having key people for you. You just went to see key people in the various districts. There was in the Young Harris district what we called the Brasstown [Gumlog? Gum Log?] District, on this side of the mountain. Then on the other side of the mountain there was Hiawassee, which was a big district. There was what we called the River District, then there was Macedonia, Upper and Lower Hightower, and then Tate City, where there were fourteen votes, all in one family. And you had to go over into Rabun County to come back in to Tate City, to see the man that controlled that fourteen votes, by the name of Arthur Young. You went to see key people. Nobody had really taken it to the people as such, and I did. I knocked on every door in this county that had a Democratic voter behind it. Back then, and to a certain extent now, you know who are Democrats and Republicans, and it's about evenly divided in Towns County. Was then; it's changed now. But you knew who was a Democrat or a Republican by their name. All your Dentons were Democrats; all of your Brysons were Democrats; all of your Taylors were Democrats. All of your [Corns?], all of your [Shooks? Shucks?] were Republicans. I mean, that was just something that you knew, being involved in it like I was from childhood. But I went to see all the Democrats. I knocked on their doors and asked them for their vote. I printed me up something. No politician had ever printed up a brochure before. I did. I got on the Murphy radio station. I got my good friend, Lee Kirby, who could play the fiddle, and his son, Robert, who could play the guitar, and at court time I went up and made them a speech, standing on a little column up there in front of the courthouse. It was modern politics for Towns County, the kind of politics that a college graduate would bring from the University of Georgia. But, of course, now we would view it as very, very old-time politics. But I won by 151 votes.
STEELY:	Was that a good margin then?
MILLER:	No, that was a pretty close margin. I guess you had maybe eighteen hundred people [who] vote[d], and I won by 151 votes. I'll tell you a few interesting things about that. When I went to Tate City--well, things were so rough I actually carried a gun whenever I was campaigning in the last couple of weeks. But when I went to Tate City, went over there, the man who controlled Tate City was Arthur Young. He's a great fiddle player. I talked to him, listened to his fiddle playing, watched him as he drank a little moonshine--to tell you the truth, I took a little sip, too, with him--and I thought I'd sewed it up, but when Tate City came in, Mr. Dean got eight and I got six, so Arthur was hedging his bets. Later, I would carry Tate City fourteen to nothing, in future elections, but I didn't that first time. Down Gumlog and Brasstown, you ask what kind of politics it was--I mentioned early about the little log house we had here in Young Harris. Back then, down there, they voted on the back of an old flatbed logging truck. They would have the election holders and the ballot box setting up on that.
STEELY:	What did they do if it rained? Put a tent over it?
MILLER:	Well, they'd put a tarpaulin--what we called a tarpaulin over it. But here's the interesting thing: Always around elections, especially in the mountains, you would have a number of people that looked upon election day as an excuse for them to get drunk, or to maybe get them a free drink of liquor from the candidates. So what they'd do, they would finally be about twelve o'clock, noon--there would be a few drunks already around that polling place, on that flatbed truck. So they would then drive the truck down about a half a mile down the road, and leave the drunks up there. [Laughter] And so along about two or three o'clock, the drunks would have got down there and [were] raising Cain. And they'd drive the truck another half a mile or five hundred yards down the road. And by the time that seven o'clock, when the polls closed, the truck would be a mile or two further down the road from where it started that morning.
STEELY:	You had drunks spread out all along the road? [laughs]
MILLER:	We'd have fights, we'd have a shooting every now and then. It was rough politics. But it taught me a great deal. It taught me the importance of seeing each and every individual voter that you could. Because the elections were so close, individual votes were very important. But the main thing it taught me was this: You see, there's always been a very strong Republican Party in Towns County, and you always have Republican opposition, so as soon as you had beaten the Democrat, your next chore was to put back together the Democratic Party, to put back, to get those folks who had been against you, for you, between the primary and November. And that was not always easy to do, and it took a certain amount of skill to do it and a certain amount of political skill to do it. One of the things that I've always prided myself in--I have never run against anyone--I hope this holds true with Senator Talmadge--I have never run against anyone, whether I beat them or whether they beat me, that later were not supporters in future races. Mr. Dean, as I mentioned, became a supporter. In my second Senate race, I ran against Tommy Irvin's uncle. They became big supporters. I ran against Phil Landrum for Congress, and he defeated me, but later he became one of the best friends I had. Mary Hitt, John Savage in my lieutenant governor races, and so on. When I ran for lieutenant governor in '78, I had--all of my old opponents came down there and endorsed me. I don't know why I was able to do that except that it was something that I had learned early on up here, that you can run against a person and it can be a bitter race, but after it's over, you can put it back together again. You can become personal friends and maybe even political allies.
STEELY:	Do you actively sit down after the elections and say, "Okay, these are the people I need to see" and have a plan or a system for putting it back together?
MILLER:	Well, I try to conduct myself with these people during the primary where I know that I can do that. Sometimes it gets so bitter that it's strained, but I knew the strong supporters of Mr. Dean when I first ran, and I did not want to antagonize them. I knew the strong supporters of Mr. Landrum. And I tried to conduct myself with them where I can still remain friends. And in the Talmadge race of '80--I know we're getting ahead, but--people like Tommy Irvin was a very strong--or Ovid Davis or some of those folks who were very, very strong Herman Talmadge supporters--later, whenever I needed them just two years after that, in '82, for my third race for lieutenant governor, they were there to support me for that race. It comes back, this lesson that I learned running in Towns County, where you had to do that if you were going to survive.
STEELY:	Would it had been the same thing in [...]? In interviewing Senator Talmadge, his story is much like yours: Your enemy should never remain your enemy because you're going to need him down the road, and he's going to need you.
MILLER:	That's right.
STEELY:	And you should work with him at some point.
MILLER:	That's one of the greatest lessons that anybody that wants to survive or be successful in politics can learn. One of my great colleagues in the Senate is Culver Kidd. Nobody practices that more to perfection than does Culver Kidd. That's why he's been able to survive all these years.
STEELY:	Going back to Governor Vandiver for a minute, you mentioned that one of the reasons you opposed Marvin Griffin was his segregationist views and so forth. How did you feel about Governor Vandiver when he made his "no, not one" speech? How did you react to it? Did you feel that this is just politics and they're just saying it to get elected, or is it really an ultimatum that we are going to close the schools down? Can you take yourself back to those days and think what you thought then?
MILLER:	I did not consider it an ultimatum back then. I considered it just something that the probably had to do to win the election, although I disagreed that he had to do it to win the election. I think he got to thinking that he had to do it to keep from losing south Georgia or something like that. I didn't view it as an ultimatum, and only when it looked like it really was going to happen did I begin to worry about it at that time. But during the campaign it didn't worry me.
STEELY:	So you felt that you could still support Vandiver?
MILLER:	Yes.
STEELY:	Okay. Did most of the politicians that you associated with at that time view it as an ultimatum? Were you out of step with them, or you felt pretty comfortable with them?
MILLER:	I think they did not view it as an ultimatum. I think they viewed it more as a political statement of exaggeration and one that he probably ought not to have gotten carried away and made. There's some that even after he made it that someday he's going to have to eat those words.
STEELY:	Okay. Did you feel that your views on education and politics and, as you said, the idealistic reformer, in a sense, if we can define you as that, came from your dad? Was that in your blood here? You know, he was a supporter of Rivers, who was considered to be something of a reformer and a progressive, the great supporter of the New Deal, et cetera. Was there an unconscious heritage being passed on here, or do you relate at all with it?
MILLER:	Probably there was that. And, again, I've changed over the years, but at that time I wanted to change a lot of things. I thought change was synonymous with progress. I'm not so sure of that now. But at that time I wanted to see things change. I particularly wanted to see things changed as it related to education and, I think, as it related to race.
STEELY:	It was kind of the zeitgeist of the time, though, wasn't it? Everybody looked for change. Kennedy was coming in. As a state senator between '61 and '64, you were in a position to observe Georgia's lawmakers and the governors as they dealt with the integration problem. What do you remember about that? The reactions of those that you knew best and do you think that any of them were really serious about wanting to close the schools? You're kind of an idealist. You're a new man coming in, in a sense, even though you had been around politics. What was it like being there in the Senate, in politics, in those early days?
MILLER:	Well, you had some people that did want to close the schools and would have voted to close the schools. They were persons I had known and had worked with in other areas of government. I remember being surprised, almost frightened by the strong feelings that they had on race. You could talk to them about a lot of things and work with them on things, but when it came to the race issue, to me, coming from this area that really didn't have any black-white problems, it was very surprising, shocking, and almost frightening.
STEELY:	I had the same experience with ministers in the Baptist church, men that I would never have thought would have had feelings like that, because I had never seen any--and all of sudden, this viciousness. I was--like you said, shocked is the word.
MILLER:	And I can remember walking around on the fourteenth floor of the Henry Grady in those early days, when it looked like that they might close the University of Georgia, and some of them were very serious about doing it.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Zell, while you were in the Senate, you got to know a number of influential men like Bob Smalley and Jimmy Bentley and Mac Barber. Could you comment on them?
?:	Yes, and Jimmy Carter. You served with Jimmy Carter in the Senate also.
MILLER:	Well, you ran into some--there were some very able individuals back then. I'm not so sure that they were more able than we have serving today, but it was a different style. Now you have legislative council that draws up bills, and it doesn't matter whether you--you just go down there and tell them a few words about what you want in a bill, and they'll draw it up for you. Back then, there was legislative council, but there wasn't anybody down there except about three people. Most of the people drew up their own bills. I mean, I remember George Busbee drawing up his own bills and Smalley and folks like that, Frank Twitty. I remember Jimmy Bentley as--you mentioned his name--as one of the finest politicians that I'd ever met. I went to the '58 Democratic state convention, where Vandiver was the nominee, and Peter Zack put his name in nomination, and Jimmy Bentley seconded it. It was the first time that I ever seen either one of them in action. I came back and told Shirley what speakers they were. And then I came to work with Jimmy. He probably could have been governor if he had not changed parties at the time that he did. But Mac Barber--I worked closely with him because at the time he was one of the persons who also had education as a very high priority. That brought us together. But there were some very able individuals, particularly Carl Sanders, Jimmy Carter--very, very intense and also very educationally minded.
STEELY:	Was Mac in school with you?
MILLER:	No.
?:	You weren't there at the same time he was at the university?
MILLER:	No, I don't--no. He's a little older than me.
?:	Yes, I guess so. I guess so. Well, what was the Silver Fox, Culver Kidd, like in those years?
MILLER:	Not much different from the way he is in his later years. When I went to the Senate in '61, he was over in the House, but he stayed at the same hotel that I stayed at, the old Georgian Hotel, and so I got to know him there. He also ran for lieutenant governor in '62. At that time, Peter Zack was elected. And I got to know him then because he came up here. We had all the candidates up here for a political rally on top of [Bald? Ball?] Mountain. I've mentioned that I think Culver's success is that he always looks on to the next battle. He lines up the votes he can get on an issue, and if he's not successful and you're against him, he'll come back around and try to get you to be for him the next time. Introduces more bills than anybody I've ever seen. I don't know exactly where all of those bills come from, but he's one of the most remar---he is the most remarkable legislator that I've ever known, both from the standpoint of longevity and from the standpoint of being able to keep so many balls in the air at one time. I have never seen anybody that would know as much about what was in each bill as he does. I have seen them bring up a bill in the Senate, and the author of the bill not be there or the person who was going to speak on it and maybe in out in the corridor, and there's nobody there to speak on it. Culver will say, "I'll speak on it," and he'll all of a sudden get up from his desk and tell you what was in that bill. It's really amazing. I have had a lot of battles with him, and I've been in a lot of battles with him where we were on the same side. I have a great deal of respect for Culver Kidd as a legislator.
?:	That's interesting.
STEELY:	What about Jimmy Carter?
MILLER:	As a legislator, he was--he was more the executive type. I call people executive types and legislator types. Legislator types are people who are willing to compromise and who work and bring people together and try to get a consensus, try to get something that'll get twenty-nine votes to it, or try to come up with an amendment that might make it palatable, that sort of thing. Jimmy Carter was not that type of individual. He wanted things his way, or he didn't want it. One of the things I like about the legislative process: I like the give and take of trying to come up with something that will satisfy twenty-nine in one house and ninety-one in the other, or in trying to satisfy those six conference committee members. I enjoy that kind of give and take.
?:	Zell, what about the two lieutenant governors you served under?
MILLER:	Well, Garland Byrd was a very good presiding officer. As you know, he was planning on running for governor and then stopped because of the heart attack. He was a good politician. He had almost got elected commissioner of agriculture earlier, when Phil Campbell was chosen. Lost just be a few county unit votes. Good politician, good speaker, good presiding officer. Peter Zack Geer was one of the most able persons I've ever been around in politics. He was the epitome of the county unit politician. If the county unit politician had stayed in effect, Peter Zack Geer would probably have been governor. But when integration came along and then when the county unit system was overturned, that was the death knell of Peter Zack Geer as a statewide political figure because he was going against what most of the people were for at that time. But as far as being a good speaker, he was excellent. As far as being a good presiding officer, he was the best presiding officer that I've ever seen, in either house. In my opinion, he was better than George L. Smith or the speaker or Garland Byrd or any of these others. He was an excellent presiding officer. I think that it was shown to the state as a whole whenever he had the contested election between Maddox and Callaway within the legislature. He presided over that and did an excellent job. First time people began to notice him. But by then it was too late.
?:	Looking back to that time, what was the Republican Party like then? I know you come from an area in which there's always been a Republican faction.
MILLER:	Well, the Republican Party was practically nonexistent in those early days. One of the first Republicans to come to the Senate was Dan [McIntyre?], from Fulton County. Great guy. The Republicans in those days--there were a few in each body. There was a man by the name of Charles [Kiker?] from Fannin County, that every time Fannin County's time came around to elect a senator, it would be Mr. Kiker. They were not treated a great deal differently then. It was only after you began to get five or six or seven or eight in the Senate, or after you began to get twenty or twenty-two or twenty-four or twenty-six in the House, after you began to get a congressman or two that there began to be this sharp division between Republicans and Democrats.
?:	But the Democratic Party was in sort of a state of transition then, was it not?
MILLER:	Oh, yes, it was changing from the time when it had been simply a county unit system that appealed only to your rural counties, to a party that if it was going to survive, had to appeal to the urban areas. And it was electing that kind of person at that time.
?:	How strong is the rural-urban split or feeling now?
MILLER:	It's still some there, but you don't see as much. I see more of a split now between your suburban areas and urban, and your suburban areas and rural, than I do between rural-urban. Your suburban faction has become a significant faction within the [...].
?:	And generally what is the political orientation?
MILLER:	Most of those are going to be Republicans.
?:	Okay. Speaking of the Republican Party, what do you think really motivated Jimmy Bentley to change parties, and what were the reactions of most of your colleagues, political colleagues?
MILLER:	Well, I think that an awful lot of people at that time were very unhappy with the Democratic Party. Like I said a while ago, my mother was a Barry Goldwater supporter at that time, and she had been one of the strongest Democrats you'd ever seen. There was a great disappointment with the Democratic Party. They thought it was going in a direction they did not want it to go in. I don't know if race had anything to do with it or not. I know it didn't have anything to do with it with my mother; it may have in some other parts of the state. But it was just going--too much government, going in a direction that they didn't want it to go in.
?:	How did you feel personally? You were idealistic in wanting change, and Kennedy--
MILLER:	I was still very much a Kennedy, and I was still very much a Lyndon Johnson. At that time I believed very strongly that the Great Society was the way to go. I particularly thought it was the way to go because of what he wanted to do for Appalachia. It didn't turn out that way, I'll be the first to admit.
?:	But you had a great hope for the future of big government, though.
MILLER:	That's right.
?:	Do you think [Jimmy Bailey?] could have made the same change a little further down the road? Joe Brown did it--well, I'm not going to say Joe Brown was really successful because he went full cycle: Democrat, Republican, Democrat. But do you think Jimmy, really, at a later time--did timing have anything to do with his--the wipe-out?
MILLER:	No, I just don't believe in this period of our state that you could change from one party to another. You might can do it quietly, before you get into a position, and that sort of thing, but once you're elected statewide to a position or even maybe to a congressional district and try to change, I don't think you can. For some reason--I don't understand this--the people of Georgia don't want you to change, either parties--and their suspicious of you if you even change philosophically. And yet--I get a great deal of criticism because I've changed over the years. To me, it's becoming more knowledgeable, it's growing, it's a maturing process. The only way you learn how to do anything is not just go charging straight up but to go like that [demonstrates probably a switchback pattern in the air with his hands], going up the mountain. But they want you to remain the change, and they're suspicious of you if you're not the same person that you were back in the 1960s or early 1970s.
?:	They think you're two-faced or something.
MILLER:	For some reason, it makes you look two-faced. I don't see it that way. I always have liked what [Winston] Churchill said. Churchill said that if you were not liberal when you were young, you had no heart; and if you were not conservative when you got older, you had no head. [Laughter]
STEELY:	Did that hurt you in the Talmadge race?
MILLER:	Hurt me greatly. It hurt me a great deal.
?:	Might have been the deciding factor. I don't know. You've done a lot of polling on that. We'll get to that in a later taping and all, but I think it's a fact.
?:	You mentioned that Dr. T. J. [Thomas Jackson] Lance was president of Young Harris and, of course, as you already said, you knew Bert in school. Were there any bonds of friendship that affected your political relationship to Bert Lance? Did you support him for governor in '74, for instance?
MILLER:	Well, really, Bert and I did not see each other from the time that he left here as about a ten- or twelve-year-old. His family left to go to Calhoun about the time our family left to go down to Atlanta for that period during World War II. As teenagers and as young men, we never saw each other. It was not until he came to Atlanta with the Carter administration that I really got back to be friends with him again. And in '74, of course, I was running, myself, for lieutenant governor. I was looking after my own race. But, yes, I voted for Bert that time. Bert--some tragic things about Bert Lance and politics. He's got an awful lot of ability, and I'm sorry that some of the things have happened to him that have.
STEELY:	Let's take a break here, to switch the tape. [End Tape 2. Begin Tape 3.]
?:	Zell, I have a feeling that your rural, north Georgia background made you a better judge of character in any way or had a positive effect on your political career?
MILLER:	It had the effect that I've already mentioned in that I learned to survive from one primary into a general election, where you had to put a consensus back together after you had had a bitter primary. I learned that. It was a good lesson. But as far as helping me with my other politics statewide, I'm not so sure it did. In fact, I found out that I did not know a lot about urban and suburban Georgia, and I especially was pretty dumb when it came to south Georgia. And so I don't know that it was a great helpful influence or not. I really don't know. If I had had that same experience of having to--I guess it is, because, you see, a lot of places--you had that old expression that the Democratic primary was tantamount to the election. Well, nothing was tantamount up here.
?:	That's right. And it was always just one election for those folks.
MILLER:	Yes, with me it was always two elections.
FITZ-SIMONS:	So you knew, the general election always had meaning for you.
MILLER:	That's right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Well, you've touched on periodically your changing ideas in politics. What really is what you'd call your basic philosophy of politics? What's it all about? What's the purpose of it?
MILLER:	Well, my views on what government is and what it ought to do for the people has changed a lot over the years. I think that there should be enough government to do certain things that the people have got to have assistance in, like education and transportation, certain health needs, certain things that we must do for our elderly. But I don't believe that government ought to try to do everything for the people or it ought to be as big as I once thought it should be. I have been disappointed in what--and I think a lot of people have been; I'm not the only one. But I was very disappointed in Johnson's Great Society. And yet, at the time it was coming along, I thought it was the thing. I thought it was going to be the salvation of Appalachia, but it did not turn out to be, and I can understand now, for historical and political reasons, why I should have known that it wasn't going to be. I don't know whether I'm a liberal or a conservative. Those kind of labels have always bothered me. I don't know of anybody's that's approached their own financial situations more fiscally conservative than I have. You don't find many people that run campaigns without borrowing money. I never borrowed money for campaigns. I spent exactly what I've got, and that's the way I think government ought to do. But I don't know. It's a philosophy. It's still changing and probably will until the day I die.
?:	And that's probably pretty healthy, too, I think. I really do. You've had help and utilized it from your former students in your campaigns, and you're probably still close to a great many of them today. What about this relationship?
MILLER:	Well, yes. It's a very important relationship to me. It formed the basis--it was my organization when I first got into statewide politics. I had been the executive director of the Democratic Party, and I had certain contacts, and I had worked in the Sanders and Carter and Maddox administrations, and that had given me certain contacts. But the real base of my campaign organization was my students and also people who had gone to Young Harris. They are all over this state, literally. By the time I was running in '74, they were persons who had finished college and started families and probably belonged to Kiwanis Club. And to this day they are a very important part of my organization. I go to Sandersville, Georgia. I go by and see Tommy Walker, who I taught at Young Harris College. I go to somewhere else. I go by and see this person about Young Harris College. In '74 I would walk into a place and I would say, "I'm Zell Miller. I'm running for lieutenant governor," and they'd say, "Oh, yeah. I know so-and-so. They went to Young Harris. Do you know him?" That sort of thing.
STEELY:	In reading some of the articles on you, it's interesting to note the people that worked closest with you, with the possible exception of [Pembree?], deny any knowledge of a Miller organization. Everybody knows there's a Miller organization. Well, [he?] said, "Well, I don't know. You'd have to ask Zell. You have to ask Shirley." It works like the current Talmadge organization in that it's a nebulous thing that's out there, and only you can pull it together. Is that a fair statement?
MILLER:	That's a pretty fair statement. It's in my head and, to a certain degree, a lesser degree, it's in Shirley's head, and to a lesser degree, it's in Marty's head because Miss Pembree--she was a student of mine here at the college and has been with me off and on practically ever since, in all my campaigns, so she knows those students, and she also knows [others?] very well, but it isn't--I do something quite different than most politicians. I have never had county chairmen. I don't believe in county chairmen because I think if I name a county chairman, a lot of folks are going to like it, but there's going to be a lot of folks that don't like it, and you lose as many--you'll gain some, and you'll give him that ego thing that he's got to carry the county for you, but my philosophy about that is I had rather have these non-political types that are loyal to me because they knew me as a teacher or because of Young Harris College or because of some reason like that, rather than it be the sheriff or the county commissioner who's probably got as many enemies as he has friends. Yes, the Miller organization is kind of nebulous from that standpoint. It's also made up of more amateurs than it is professionals.
STEELY:	Okay. Did you change that somewhat when you ran for senator? Did you become more professional, run a more professional campaign?
MILLER:	You could argue that I ran a less professional campaign. [Laughter] I had never tried to put together an organization like they felt that I needed to put together during the Senate campaign. I also had never had a pollster. I had never had a, quote, "political consultant" type until that Senate race. In my own mind and I guess in the minds of those who were close around me, well, we've got to do it like everybody else does it. And so there I found myself hiring me a political consultant. Worst mistake I ever made. And doing things like you're supposed to do them. That had never been the way I'd run campaigns before, and I never will run another one like that again, from the standpoint of--
STEELY:	Organization?
MILLER:	--organization.
?:	You don't believe the pollsters were of any value to you?
MILLER:	Yes, a pollster is of some value to you, I guess. He can maybe ferret out positions on certain issues. I can't really ever remember a pollster telling me something that I was real surprised at.
STEELY:	I've heard it argued that the main value of a pollster is he tells you where to spend your money. He can't tell you what you believe or anything, but he can tell you where intensity is and which of the issues you believe in that you need to put your money on to sell. That was about it.
MILLER:	I will admit, my organization and the way I run campaigns is very unorthodox. It's been called that I run it out of my hip pocket. I'm comfortable doing it that way. It might not work in races larger than a lieutenant governor. I don't know. And I don't know that I'll ever find it out. Well, I found it out in the Senate race, but that's the way I want to continue to do it as long as I'm running for lieutenant governor.
STEELY:	It might be interesting to make one more try for one of those offices before you get out, just to test it.
MILLER:	Well, I don't know.
STEELY:	We just have to wait and see.
MILLER:	See, I've always been my own campaign manager, too, and there are folks that say that you shouldn't be your own campaign manager. I don't know. I am comfortable--if I am going to spend that money, I want to be the one to figure out how best to spend it.
STEELY:	You put in a good bit of time, as you just mentioned, in the administrations of three governors in the late sixties and into the seventies. You were director the Board of Probation, executive secretary of the Executive Department, commissioner of conservation, personnel officer of the Board of Corrections, assistant director of the Board of Corrections--
MILLER:	I didn't hold any job very long. [Laughter]
?:	You might wonder about that. So what's wrong with this boy?
STEELY:	But in addition you were executive secretary to Lester Maddox when he moved up to the lieutenant governor's slot and headed up the Georgia Democratic Party, and were a member of Pardons and Paroles. Later on we're going to go into some detail on these different positions and all, but did you enjoy your work in administration, and did it prepare you, other than giving you contacts for the current job you hold?
MILLER:	I enjoyed it to a certain extent. I did not enjoy any of those jobs as much as I enjoy the legislative process. There are two main reasons I very much enjoy being lieutenant governor. One is that it's close to the legislative process, and I very much like the legislative process. I like that, politics. The second thing is being lieutenant governor gives me time to pursue other things. I can scratch my political itch, but I've got time to pursue other things, and I like to do that. But all those experiences were very educational. I worked in the Sanders administration as the probation director, and then I worked in the Maddox administration as his executive secretary, and then I worked in the Carter administration as a member of the Pardon and Parole Board and as a member of his--executive director of the Democratic Party. So I worked very closely with all three of those gentlemen. I guess I'm the only person that served in all three administrations.
STEELY:	Yes. It was said at the time that you weren't really the executive director, that Hamilton Jordan really ran the whole thing, much as they're saying today, the same kind of thing. Is that accurate?
MILLER:	No, that's not accurate at all. I never heard hardly at all from Hamilton Jordan whenever I was the executive director of the Democratic Party. I worked pretty closely with Charlie Kirbo. Charlie Kirbo--I don't know what he and Hamilton talked about, but I worked primarily with Charlie Kirbo on that.
STEELY:	During this time between elective office, you ran twice for a seat in the Congress against Phil Landrum. What made you decide to run for Congress? Was it the legislative process or ambition or what? Or both?
MILLER:	Both. I have always--I had always--you notice I changed the tense--I had always wanted to go to Washington. I thought that being up there on the Potomac was where it was. And yes, the legislative process--there again, going into Congress or later on, whenever I had ambitions to go into the Senate, which is the greatest legislative body of them all--that was one thing, that I wanted to go to Washington. But it was also at that particular time, too, because this was the time that the Great Society was coming along, and at the time that I made up my mind in '64 that I was going to run for Congress against Phil Landrum, Phil Landrum at that time had not decided to support the policies of the Great Society, and it was only after I was running that right in the middle of the campaign, Phil Landrum came to Gainesville and said that Phil Landrum was going to [handle?] the Appalachian bill for him and various other things. You could have knocked me over with a feather because here I thought I was going to be the candidate that was going to be running, supporting these things, and it turned out that Congressman Landrum was sort of hand-picked by Johnson to do those things. It was a great lesson in politics for me, but it literally knocked me over, and I never quite recovered or knew in what direction to go, although it was a very close election and there were a lot of ballots that were thrown out in that election because there was a third candidate running. It was a very interesting election. There was a man running by the name of Franklin Stone "Buckeye" Uhl [pronounced YOU-uhl]. In lots of the counties, his name went all the way across the bottom of the ballot. He did not campaign; he just qualified. And back then, you would check or cross through a name, and his name was left. You'd cross through a name, not check, but you'd cross through a name. His name was left on a lot of the ballots. And so in that election of '64 there were some seven thousand five hundred [7,500] ballots thrown out, and there was less of a margin than that between the two of us. So it was an interesting race, but I wanted to run because I wanted to go to Washington, and I wanted to run because I wanted to help do some of those things that it looked like were going to be done in Washington at that time.
STEELY:	When you campaigned for Congress, did you use the same technique that you had for the state Senate, or had things changed enough to where you would put emphasis on radio or something like that in a congressional race?
MILLER:	Well, I didn't have much money to spend. Only in one race have I ever used any TV at all. I just didn't have the money to spend on it. No, it was primarily like I've run most of my races. It was kind of a loose organization made up of more of your amateurs than your professionals.
STEELY:	They were your supporters generally.
MILLER:	Yes, although at that time there were some anti-Landrum support, and as always, whenever you're running, not all those people are voting for you; a lot of them are voting against somebody that you're running against, and so there was some of that in that election.
STEELY:	He had been in politics long enough, been in Congress long enough to have made some enemies.
MILLER:	Right. He had his county chairmen. He had his main men in each county, and so what you would do is you'd go into that county and campaign against his chairman.
STEELY:	Not a bad approach.
MILLER:	It's the only approach when you don't have the money.
FITZ-SIMONS:	[...] getting beat. [Laughter]
STEELY:	Okay, so your strategy, then, was to campaign against his individual supporters, to picture yourself as a believer in the Great Society. Then, when he switched on you--well, he didn't switch; he just made a decision, I guess.
MILLER:	He made a decision--
STEELY:	And just left you hanging out there.
MILLER:	That's right.
STEELY:	How about the '66 race?
MILLER:	It was pretty much of the same, although by that time I had picked up some support, particularly from your doctors in the district because of Landrum's strong support--well, not his strong support but his support for Medicaid. I had always been for it also, but I was not up there doing anything about it! And so there were a lot of them mad at him, and I got some support in '66 from that element that I had not gotten in '64. But he beat me worse in '66 than he beat me in '64.
STEELY:	It's odd the doctors felt that way because it turned out to be a great boon for them.
MILLER:	Yes.
STEELY:	It keeps many of them afloat. Have you been tempted since '66 to make another run for Congress at all?
MILLER:	Well, when Congressman Landrum retired in '76--I was already then lieutenant governor--I thought about it, but it became very evident very quickly that Ed Jenkins wanted to run for that seat, and I would never run for anything--Ed Jenkins and I would never oppose each other in any kind of race. I was already in office. It just didn't seem the thing to do.
STEELY:	Ed came to talk to you about it?
MILLER:	We talked some about it.
STEELY:	Okay. Did you find in financing these early races and even into your first term for lieutenant governor that you got money in the same way that the boys did back in the forties and early fifties, where literally people would come up to you and just hand you money and stick it in your pockets and this kind of thing? Was that a mountain tradition or must pretty much flatlands?
MILLER:	That's pretty much a flatland traditions. I never had that happen to me at any time until after I got elected lieutenant governor. When I was running for reelection as lieutenant governor in '78 or when I was running in '82, I would have that happen in a few places, yes. But no, I never even had heard of it until then. I mean, I'd heard of it, but I didn't think it happened because it sure hadn't happened to me.
STEELY:	Talmadge and Arnall and the other people that we've talked to talk about it as just that's the way it was done.
MILLER:	That's right.
STEELY:	You didn't have to be the guy that was the office holder. Anybody--this is the way they did it. Talked about taking their suits off between speeches or something, people just going through and pulling out all the money, great piles of money. Financing seems so different before all the laws and regulations that they have now. Interesting phenomenon.
MILLER:	Well, I never had that experience because I wasn't an incumbent and because I usually was running way behind, and I have always had trouble raising money in political campaigns. Up until just very recently I've had that problem. Any campaign I've ever had, I probably raised less money than my opponents did, even my first race for lieutenant governor. But yes, I've seen that happen.
STEELY:	That's the only way that you still raise money--in your Senate campaign, you did the standard things, but other than that, your birthday party, which raises precious little in the sense of per person, is about the only big thing that you do, isn't it?
MILLER:	Right. And I do not raise as much money as other politicians, and neither do I spend as much. But, knock on wood [he does so], here in '86 I have raised more money than I've ever raised in any other previous campaign. I think It has something to do with incumbency, probably.
STEELY:	It also has something to do with the fact that you're known on certain positions and people decided they want to keep you up there because they agree with what you're doing. It's worth an investment.
MILLER:	That's probably right.
STEELY:	You've been campaigning all over the state, in four statewide races, major races: three lieutenant governors and a Senate race, [and are] getting ready to go into a fifth one. How does mountain politics today differ from politics in other parts of the state today, and how did it differ in the past?
MILLER:	Well, there's not as much life to it in north Georgia as there is in south Georgia. By that I mean there's just not as much enthusiasm. But that's the best way--all of us have our standard political campaign speeches that we make over and over again, with some variation. And I can take that speech and make it in south Georgia, or I make it in Atlanta to certain groups, or make it in suburbia, and I can anticipate what the response is going to be to the certain lines that I throw out or the stories [where they're not live?]. You will not get that reaction in north Georgia. They will not laugh at the same jokes that they'll laugh at somewhere else. They'll not applaud as loudly on certain applause lines as they do in other parts of the state. It's just more of a "set back and I want to check you out" attitude, hear what you've got to say.
STEELY:	Mountain independence.
MILLER:	Yes. Reticence, too.
STEELY:	That's true then and now.
MILLER:	Yes, it's been true ever since I've been running.
STEELY:	Okay.
MILLER:	Neither will they want to know your positions. It works the other way, too. In south Georgia or in other places, they will want to know exactly where you stand, and if they didn't get it in that speech, they'll come up and ask you. You find the reticence. They're not trying to dig into your positions, too, to a certain extent.
?:	Do you think of yourself as an educator or a politician or both?
MILLER:	I'm both. That's why I say I like being lieutenant governor; that way I can do a little bit of both.
STEELY:	And, as you said before, you plan on going back to teaching at some point.
MILLER:	I hope to. I will admit this: I'm probably more and more, in my own eyes and certainly in other people's eyes become a politician and an educator--I would imagine that few years ago, more people thought of me more as an educator than do now.
STEELY:	What impact has politics had on your family, Zell? Your life with your sons?
MILLER:	It has impacted good and bad. I've certainly had to be away from them more than I would like to have been. It's probably affected them in ways that I don't know by seeing their father characterized in one way or another.
STEELY:	Do they ever talk to you about that?
MILLER:	Not too much, but I can tell it. For example, I'm not so sure how pleasant it was for my children in Atlanta to be in--say North Fulton was where they were at that particular time--whenever I was executive secretary to Lester Maddox--I don't know what their colleagues, their peer groups, thought about that at that time. I don't know what they thought, seeing their father classified as Zig Zag Zell. I'm sure it's had some scar tissue there. On the other hand, it's had some good things. We have been able to go places and meet people that we probably never would have had that experience. I don't know. I hope it hasn't affected them in an adverse way.
STEELY:	Have they inherited your love for country music?
MILLER:	Not particularly, although Matt runs the radio station and knows about as much about it now as I do, and I've always prided myself in knowing a good bit about it. And I think they listen to it more now than they used to. Of course, everybody does.
STEELY:	Yes. Did you get this as a child or grow up with it or pick it up after the Marines or what?
MILLER:	I've always enjoyed music. Some of my earliest childhood memories are listening to the Grand Ol' Opry. I had a friend named Jack Nichols. I would go over to his house on Saturday night and we'd listen to it together. I've always enjoyed it. I've always enjoyed listening to them pick on the front porch.
STEELY:	So you just grew up with it, in a sense, and now you're in a position where you can help them as well as learn from them and enjoy them.
MILLER:	Right.
STEELY:	Being in politics I think has enabled you to help education a good bit. For instance, you take some pride, when you were in the Senate, for offering the bill that provided for state funds for students in private schools. Could you talk a little bit about what being in politics has enabled you to do for education?
MILLER:	Well, lots of changes have come about since I first went down there in '61. [APEG?] was passed, which was a great advancement but was never fully funded. You mentioned the tuition grants to private colleges that certainly has enabled some of them to have a better financial footing than they otherwise would, better financial base than they otherwise would, and has enabled some students to probably go to Young Harris and other places. If they hadn't have had them, they probably would never have gone to college. I don't know. I've watched with a great deal of satisfaction as you've seen teachers' salaries increase over the years. They're still not what they should be, but they increased a great deal. I was pleased to have been a part of the Quality of Basic Education program passing, although I think that you're going to see some things about that that's not going to be real popular with small counties in the future. It was passed unanimously in both houses, as you know, but now, as it's actually being implemented, there's going to be some wrinkles that are going to have to be smoothed out. My main ambition is to see teachers' salaries--secondary and higher education--be what they should be. And we haven't reached that yet. I think more and more our people are becoming aware of it. It used to be that people, whenever they were looking for industry, they came to the South, to a city in Georgia looking for a place that had cheap labor and looking for a place that had a railroad siding. And now they come not looking for those things; they come looking for skilled workers. And more and more people realize that the only way you're going to get those skilled workers is through education. So there's a change that's coming about in the people's thinking, and with that coming about in their thinking, it's going to enable us to do things in the general assembly that lots of us have wanted to do but just didn't have the public support back in the counties.
STEELY:	You grew up with some pretty strong feelings about things, such as honesty and right and wrong, Republicans, the church. Would you comment on these things? How did you form your opinions? Did they just evolve, or were there just times you knew when your mother sat you down and said, "Zell, this is right" or "this is wrong" or you learned something at school? What were the formative influences on the things you really hold to be deep beliefs?
MILLER:	Well, my mother, of course, is the number one influence that I had on all of these things. They say that you learn what?--sixty or seventy percent of what you know by the time you're five or six years old. That was whenever I was constantly with this woman that was my mother, and almost solely with her. And so she is the great influence. But there have been other influences, and particularly, I think, reading a great deal has influenced me to think certain ways, too. But she by far is the overwhelming influence on my life.
STEELY:	More so than the church or any of the other schools or--
MILLER:	Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I still remember what she said about certain things.
STEELY:	What has been Young Harris College's enduring legacy to you?
MILLER:	Well, I would be working in some meager occupation somewhere or maybe in prison if it hadn't been for Young Harris College, because that was where I first had any idea that I could make something out of myself and that there was something out there that was, like I say, more important than baseball. And it gave me an opportunity to learn how to speak in public.
STEELY:	You seem, from [my] reading your book, to have determined pretty much when you were out logging a little bit that you weren't going to be doing that the rest of your life, that kind of hard work.
MILLER:	That's true. That was the first job I ever had. I was fifteen years old, and I made three dollars [$3.00] a day, and I was what they called a swamper on a timber-cutting crew. That's what they gave the little weak fellows that went in there and cut out the underbrush or cut some of the limbs off the logs. But I saw how those other people worked, and no, I knew that wasn't for me.
STEELY:	Smart man.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Have you ever had the feeling, though, that you never really had a job that you didn't really learn something from, no matter how distasteful?
MILLER:	Oh, no, I've learned something from all of my jobs. I've learned something from every political race I've ever run, especially the ones that I was not successful in.
?:	Is anything you'd change in these early years if you could? If you could remove them, [is there] anything you would want to?
MILLER:	No, I don't think there's anything in my early years that I would have changed. I would have hoped that I could have done more things to have made my mother proud of me and to make her pleased that I was her son. But nothing in my earlier years I would have changed. I maybe would like to have had that six months of Emory over sooner. Nothing in those early years.
STEELY:	Or to have avoided it altogether.
MILLER:	What?
STEELY:	Or to have avoided it altogether.
?:	But I mean, again, what I just said about all your experiences being valuable. That was probably a very valuable experience you had at Emory.
MILLER:	It was a valuable experience like being defeated for public office is a valuable experience.
?:	Okay.
MILLER:	It's also a humbling experience.
?:	Yes, yes, okay.
MILLER:	Like getting shot at by [cross-talk; ...]--and missed.
?:	If you had to pick out what was a best and worst memory of the mountains, what would it be?
MILLER:	Ho! The worst memory of the mountains is the bitter cold that we used to have, especially in this house. For a number of years, the only heat we had was this open fireplace, and we would warm ourselves and then run up and hop into bed. Sometimes my mother would put an iron by the fireplace and wrap it in a towel and take it up there and put it where you'd have that down at your feet to keep you warm. But bitter cold is the worst memory I have about growing up, by far. The best memory I have is Christmas mornings with my mother, doing things out in the yard that met with her approval, or doing something in school that met with her approval.
STEELY:	Okay. Can you think of anything that we haven't covered in this early period that you'd like to go over or talk about?
MILLER:	No. I had an aunt that lived next door. Her name was [Euziah?] [pronounced you-ZEE-uh]. I called her Phoebe. She was Hoyle Bryson's wife. She did a great deal for me whenever I was growing up. I have already mentioned her two sons, Bob and Bryan, that we played baseball together; but she was a good influence on me, too. My mother worked so hard and stayed so very busy with all her projects that it was Phoebe who gave me some of the tenderness and love and fed me sometimes, whenever I was hungry.
STEELY:	Do you think the fact that your mother wasn't able to give a lot of that to you, because she worked so hard, enabled you to want to do that with your boys?
MILLER:	Yes, but I was never able to do it, like she was able to do it for me.
STEELY:	Who is Murphy named after?
MILLER:	He was named, really, after a friend that I had named Murphy [McManus?] that went to Young Harris College and was a good basketball player, and it was not so much named after him as that I just liked the name.
STEELY:	He's the one who's the superintendent of schools in Bremen now?
MILLER:	Yes. He was a great basketball player at Young Harris College several years ago. But I liked the name more than being named after someone.
STEELY:	Okay. Ted, can you think of any more questions?
FITZ-SIMONS:	No, I think that's about it.
STEELY:	Thank you, sir.
MILLER:	Thank you.
STEELY:	I appreciate it. [End of Interview]