For some reason I got to thinking about Kirk Miller yesterday.

Kirk was a year older than I was, but during elementary school days in Richland, he and I were usually in the same classroom because of the way the classes were split up with each teacher having to manage more than one grade.

As a result, I knew all the kids in the class above mine, including, of course, Kirk. So sometimes he and I would pal around together. Kirk was smart and witty and devilishly handsome.

I vaguely recalled my mother telling me that he had died some time ago, but I couldn’t recall any details, so I went about searching and found that his mother Betty Lou Miller, died just last August in Manheim, PA.

 

Her obituary mentioned that her son Kirk had predeceased her and that he was a doctor. After a little more digging I found that he had died in 2001 in Virginia, but I didn’t discover too much more.

I went to the yearbooks to get a picture of him, but he wasn’t listed. So I guess that means that the family moved out of Richland several years before he graduated. I did not know that. I do recall that the Millers were good friends with my aunt and uncle Joan and Mark, and as they also moved to Manheim, that makes some sense.

In any case, I do have a Kirk anecdote.

It must have been when I was ten or eleven. I was interested in science and I wanted to try to form a science club. I got Julian Weiant, an older kid who lived across the street from us on West Main Street interested, and then I talked Kirk into it as well. So now there were three of us. I probably would have approached Eric Blouch as well, as I knew he like science, but before I could, our fledgling science club came to an ignominious end.

It was a Saturday, cloudy and dreary, and I was trying to have a meeting, but only Kirk could make it. I had a rocket ship that we were working with. It was a plastic rocket. You took the top off and added four of the pellets that were supplied with the rocket kit and poured in a cup of water, then you closed it back up, waited a predetermined time (you know, a countdown), and then you would pull the release. The rocket would fly a few feet into the air.

Well, after one or two liftoffs, Kirk and I didn’t find this terribly impressive. Perhaps if we doubled the number of pellets we could double the altitude of the takeoff. It was a worthy science experiment, or so we thought. 

But why stop at doubling the pellets? Let’s triple them! Yeah. That should make a much more spectacular blastoff.

So that’s what we did.

And you can probably see what’s coming.

We had barely even started the countdown before that poor little plastic rocket had blown itself up, and shards of plastic were lying all over the yard.

Happily, neither of us was hurt by the blast.

But that was the end of the science club.

I see from Betty Lou’s obituary that Kirk’s sister Sherry is still with us. Maybe I’ll write to her.