Political observer, float meister Jay Miller dies
Writer’s column appeared in ‘New Mexican’ for 26 years
John Cloyd Miller II, known to friends as “Jay,” was a teacher, a union man, a lobbyist, a political columnist, an author and the king of funny Fiesta de Santa Fe parade floats. He died last week of liver cancer in Phoenix at the age of 80.
Miller was born in Lordsburg but spent much of his childhood in Deming, where his father was superintendent of schools. The family later moved to Silver City, where his dad served as president of Western New Mexico University.
After earning a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico, Miller began teaching high school in Albuquerque. There he met fellow teacher Jeanette Duncan, whom he married in 1961. They were married for 53 years; she died in 2014.
“He loved history and he loved politics,” said Kathy Dickerson, a friend for more than 45 years. “He just adored his wife.”
In 1965, Miller took a job with the National Education Association of New Mexico in Santa Fe, serving first as the union’s chief lobbyist and later as executive director.
After retiring from the NEA, Miller in 1987 took over the “Inside the Capitol” politics column, which was started in the 1940s by New Mexican editor Will Harrison and continued through the years by several people involved in politics and/or journalism — Charlie Cullen, Fred Buckles, Bob Huber, Carroll Cagle and Fred McCaffrey, who sold it to Miller. carried Miller’s column for 26 years.
In a 2013 blog post, Miller said the column that caused him the most headaches was one about a bill to require motorcyclists to wear helmets. “I received some very strong disagreement from bikers,” Miller wrote. “So I wrote that I was surprised about receiving any reaction and wondered who the bikers found to read my column to them. That, of course, only escalated matters. It was a learning experience about not belittling any group. My wife made me promise to let her read my columns before sending them.”
Through his years in Santa Fe, Miller would go on to hold positions on the Santa Fe school board, the Santa Fe Fiesta Foundation, the Santa Fe Girl’s Club, the St. John’s United Methodist Church Board, the Governor’s Mansion Foundation and the Lions Club.
And he turned a series of his scathing columns about then-Gov. Bill Richardson’s controversial proposal to exhume the body of New Mexico’s most famous outlaw into a 2005 book titled Billy the Kid Rides Again: Digging for the Truth.
But perhaps Miller’s biggest claim to fame in Santa Fe was his quarter-century effort to keep Fiesta de Santa Fe’s annual Historical/ Hysterical Parade as hysterical as possible.
Beginning in 1969, the Jay Miller and Friends Fiesta Float Building Society — consisting of as many as 150 local residents — appeared in the parade with elaborate floats that made fun of state and local politics and humorous aspects of Santa Fe life. Those floats won the parade’s Hysterical Division 20 times and the grand prize twice.
Jeanette Miller told The New Mexican in 2005 that their group would meet about three weeks before Fiesta to come up with ideas because they wanted the float to lampoon something that had been in the news recently. Jay Miller said the group had “no shame” when it came to poking fun.
One year, an NBC television crew was in town to film the Fiesta, so Miller and Friends decided to make fun of the network. They put a fake camera at the back of their float. A huge peacock — the NBC logo — made of colorful ribbons and people dressed as peacocks followed behind. Though the real NBC filmed the parade, Miller said they didn’t use any footage of the float in their coverage.
Dickerson, who met Miller through the NEA, recalled one year when the Miller float was involved in a mishap. She said the group had people who would measure power lines along the parade route to see how tall the floats could be. “But one year they changed the parade route and somewhere near the small downtown park now called Tommy Macaione Park, the float knocked down the electrical line, she said. “We later found out it had knocked out the power for the whole east side [of Santa Fe].”
He told The New Mexican that Jay Miller and Friends disbanded in the mid-1990s because of difficulty finding places to construct floats.
Problems with his eyes caused Miller to cut back on the number of columns he produced. In the early days, he was cranking out six a week. But by the time Miller left Santa Fe, he no longer could read. Dickerson said that she and family
members would read newspaper articles to him.
Miller quit writing the politics column in 2013 after moving to Arizona. His friend and fellow political columnist Ned Cantwell wrote sardonically, “Jay Miller is a quitter. After just 26 years and 7,200 columns, he’s tacked a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on his Inside the Capitol column.”
For a few months, Miller turned “Inside the Capitol” into a blog.
“Although I have a thick file of notes from those who have disagreed with my columns from time to time, I hope the overall effect has been a balanced analysis from a lightly different view,” he wrote on the blog in 2013. “The urge to put in my two cents may never cease entirely, so I will sporadically continue my blog.”
But the last blog entry came about a month later.
Miller is survived by daughter Melissa Barker, grandsons Tyler and Derek Barker of Scottsdale, Ariz., and son Duncan Miller of Phoenix. He is also survived by special friend Lloyd Barker.