Gary Lee Miller

There will be a celebration of Gary Lee Miller’s life at Shoes and Brews in Longmont, CO, on March 19 at 4:00 PM. The Longmont resident and recently retired educator died Monday, March 6, at Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, CO, of cancer. Lee Miller was born March 3, 1943, in Spartanburg, SC, second of three children, to Fred H. Miller, a chemist, and Jewel Alice Lee Miller, a teacher. After graduating Spartanburg High School, he moved to New Orleans to attend Tulane University. He later transferred to Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, NY, then to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, where he had the distinction of being one of only two men enrolled in the all-women’s school. After soaking up New York City, he moved to Indianola, IA, where he completed a History degree at Simpson College. His extended academic excellence earned him a Ford Foundation Fellowship which funded a Master’s Degree in Theater and Dramatic Criticism from Stanford University. His career path was varied and dynamic. After Stanford, he returned to Spartanburg, SC, where, for a time, he taught filmmaking at Greer Middle School. Over the next decades he was an artist/entrepreneur in many enterprises, sharing his passion for theater with upstate SC. As Artistic Director in the the 1980s, he helmed The Warehouse Theater out of the red and firmly into the black by directing a string of sellout successes over a period of years. In 1995, he and his family moved to Longmont and began a new life in view of the Front Range, which he came to love. An opportunity to return to teaching took them to Basalt, CO, where he taught at Aspen Country Day School. A few years later he returned to Longmont and began working for the Eaton School District. He continued teaching in Colorado Public Schools until retiring from Westminster High School in 2013. An accomplished director, writer, and actor, Lee had a passion for storytelling, literature, theater and movies. He could network an entire school’s computer system, replace a clutch in a car, and quote Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Sartre, Jung, Sri Aurobindo, Joseph Campbell, and almost any cowboy movie ever made. He was a student of philosophy, cosmology, history, politics and the human spirit, a modern renaissance man in his breadth of curiosity and knowledge. He had a deep sense of honor and believed truth must be looked in the face and had little patience for folks who didn't. He had to be right about everything, which annoyed the hell out of people; but usually, in the end, he was right. Dammit. A devout family man, his entire purpose in life was to love, protect, and provide for those he loved. In addition to his wife, Deborah, of Longmont; he leaves a son, Greg (married to Lynn Slater Miller), of Cold Spring, NY; a daughter, Jessica, of Longmont; a son, Eric, of Boulder; a grandson, Jack, of Cold Spring; and a sister, Claire Alice Miller Hopkins, of Spartanburg, SC.