William Dwain Miller, who launched Boulder’s Parks and Recreation Department 50 years ago and was once recognized for his work by America’s first lady, is being remembered with fondness in the wake of his death last week.
Miller, a native of Mereta, Texas, who died Saturday at his home in Fort Collins at the age of 89, was Boulder’s first director of the Parks and Recreation Department. He assumed that post in 1961, when city park land totaled 4 acres. It was up to 212 acres when he left his post in August 1968.
The Spruce and Scott Carpenter swimming pools were built under his administration. There were no lighted tennis courts in the city when he took the job, and there were eight when he left. But most importantly, he was credited with being a strong advocate for the city’s signature green belt program.
“He’s one of the best in the country,” then-city manager Ted Tedesco said when Miller stepped down, and praised Miller’s efforts to boost the green belt program. “It was the most imaginative program I have ever seen.”
He is recalled with great fondness by Boulder resident Jim Kean, who was the city’s acting city manager before Tedesco came on board.
“I’ve got the memo where Dwain wrote him the letter recommending the green belt program. That’s what started the green belt ball rolling,” Kean said.
‘Wanted it to be Boulder. Period.’
Miller is survived by his wife of 62 years, Doris Miller, and she traced her husband’s advocacy for a green belt back to his education at Texas Tech University.
“He was educated in a time period where park management was a flourishing profession,” she said Friday. “They produced a lot of leaders throughout the country who developed park systems to the fullest.
“They were innovative in doing greenbelts around the country. That was started in that time period, and that’s how this idea was hatched for Boulder. And then everybody embraced it as they learned more about what it would be. Boulder wanted to be an entity to itself, other than a suburb of Denver. They wanted it to be Boulder. Period.”
The book “A History of Boulder’s Parks and Recreation (or how we got to be so pretty)” notes that a number of Parks and Recreation members in the 1960s were also members of PLAN-Boulder, whose hope was to acquire and control open space lands in various locations, including around the city’s perimeter.
“So one day Dwain Miller and parks planner Mickey Carter drove up to the top of Flagstaff Mountain,” the book recounts. “They took along an ordinary road map of Boulder and the vicinity. They viewed the valley and began to draw lines and block off areas of their map and color them green. That was the first open space plan.”
Armed with a slide show he’d created that he dubbed “The Values of Green,” Miller was a tireless promoter of a one-cent sales tax for the “Greenbelt/Major Thoroughfare” program, making the pitch anywhere that an audience of at least half a dozen people expressed interest.
In a September 1967 address to the Boulder Republican Women’s group, Miller said, “The new subdivisions, condominiums and apartment houses do not provide enough space for children to play,” emphasizing the need for more areas where people of all ages could recreate.
“Green areas are expensive,” he said. “They will become more expensive. And in the future they will be impossible.”
It was passed by voters, despite the opposition of local realtors, by a 61 percent margin on Nov. 7, 1967.
In 1965, he was presented a medal by Lady Bird Johnson from the American Institute of Park Executives as one of several in his field under the age of 40 cited for their outstanding contributions to the park and recreation fields.
Another of Miller’s innovations was the Boulder Junior Ranger Program, which gives teens a role in natural resource management projects, which was started in 1965 and continues to this day.
‘Had that Texas thing’
Miller left Boulder to go to Colorado State University where he served as a professor of outdoor recreation; “He taught people how to have fun outside,” Doris Miller said.
His tenure ran from 1968 to 1987, although Doris Miller said he came out of retirement to work also from 1993 to 1998 while they were living in Alaska, laboring two of those years for CSU and three more for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
In addition to his wife, Dwain Miller is survived by three adult children, Valarie Weickmann of Fircrest, Wash., Blake Miller of Fort Collins and Mark Miller of Arvada.
A memorial service is slated for 2 p.m. Nov. 10 at the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Collins.
Kean remembers going to Fort Collins for Miller’s retirement party when he left CSU. Four-to-five hundred people packed the venue, he recalled.
“He was a modest person. He was a Texan, and he had that Texas thing about him,” Kean said. “He was very bright. Nobody ever said anything bad about Dwain Miller.”
Doris Miller said of her husband, who was also an awarded Korean medic veteran: “He’d never toot his own horn. And I’m glad to help in doing that now.”
Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan
