Miller's Vets: a judge's second service

2009 – today

The founder: Robert L. Miller Sr. was a St. Joseph Superior Court judge, a Notre Dame Law graduate of 1942 and 1947, and a veteran twice over — of the Second World War and of Korea — who retired from the Navy Reserve as a lieutenant commander. In retirement, the University of Notre Dame Magazine's account begins, he came across a photograph in the South Bend Tribune he could not put out of his mind: a homeless man sleeping in a wooden box in an abandoned building. His granddaughter Amanda Miller worked at South Bend's Center for the Homeless, and through her he knew that a share of the city's homeless were his fellow veterans. He met with the center's executive director, Steve Camilleri, and out of that meeting, in early 2009, Miller's Vets was born.

The color guard: Miller's first move was to restore the form of the service itself. The veterans he gathered had all been through basic training once; he outfitted them in proper military uniforms and drilled them as a color guard. After a couple of months they debuted at South Bend's West Side Memorial Day Parade of 2009 — eight homeless veterans — and won first place in the adult marching unit category, the first of many awards. The Tribune counted the demand a year on: calls for Miller's Vets to perform at Veterans Day ceremonies, five engagements around 10 and 11 November 2010 alone, nine to twelve veterans dressing for ceremonies at a time and more than twenty in the whole company. Pride first; the housing followed.

The Last Salute and the Garden of Peace: Miller's second work was for the veterans who died with nothing. He wrote a funeral program carrying full military honors — the rifle salute, the ceremonial folding of the flag, taps — recruited five local funeral homes to lend their services, and acquired from the county a separate section of cemetery ground: sixty-four plots, in the university magazine's count, which the Tribune, while the ground was being organized in 2010, put at sixty plots near Portage Manor on the city's northwest side. The section is known as Miller's Vets Garden of Peace, and the program that buries indigent veterans there with honors is called The Last Salute. Miller's Vets funds and organizes the funerals of any veteran in the area who cannot afford one; in the magazine's record, Miller himself did not miss a single one.

The Veterans Center: The third work was a roof. When a building near the downtown Center for the Homeless came up for sale, Miller funded its purchase, and on Veterans Day 2011 the Robert L. Miller Sr. Veterans Center was dedicated: housing for twenty-four veterans at a time, run under the Center for the Homeless's umbrella. The magazine's early accounting put eighty-one percent of its residents into stable housing after their stay. The center was still the city's working veterans residence years later — Notre Dame Law School's students held a legal-aid night there for homeless veterans in February 2019 — and it anchors the west end of the city's homeless-services campus to this day.

The succession: Judge Miller died at his South Bend home on 27 April 2019, aged ninety-eight, having led the veterans court's Pledge in uniform three years before and having missed, by the magazine's account, no Last Salute funeral in a decade. He had chosen his own successor: Chuck Lahey, a retired major-felony public defender, to chair the veterans organizations he founded. The Indiana Lawyer's obituary closes the record his life made in this section: the programs he founded "but for his life wouldn't have existed" — the color guard, the funerals, and the building with his name on it, which are, in the span of one retirement, the largest single addition any individual made to South Bend's veterans institutions since the Grand Army.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine, Echoes, "A Notre Dame Man for Others" (July 2015) — the Tribune photograph, the meeting with Steve Camilleri, the founding of Miller's Vets, the color guard's 2009 parade debut and first place, the Last Salute program and the sixty-four plots of the Garden of Peace, the Veterans Center's dedication on Veterans Day 2011, its twenty-four beds and the eighty-one percent figure.
2. South Bend Tribune (2010), via the Michiana Area Research Library summary — the calls for the color guard's Veterans Day performances and the Garden of Peace ground being organized with sixty plots near Portage Manor.
3. The Indiana Lawyer, "Robert Miller Sr. leaves legacy of love for law and community" (30 April 2019) — the founding of Miller's Vets and The Last Salute in 2009, his death on 27 April 2019 at ninety-eight, and Chuck Lahey's succession.
4. Notre Dame Law School news (February 2019) — the Miller Veterans Center under the Center for the Homeless, housing up to twenty-four veterans, and the legal-aid night of 12 February 2019.