We look back at the life of Richard Miner, a much-loved Falmouth resident who was admired for his volunteer work around town. Miner died this past May, but he leaves behind an irreplaceable legacy through his recorded interviews with veterans.
Richard Miner was never one to let the grass grow around his feet. During his retirement, he filled his days volunteering for a number of organizations in Falmouth. One was a food pantry called the Falmouth Service Center, where Brenda Swain is Executive Director.
“You know, I was thinkin’ back, trying to remember how I first met Rich. And it seems like I’ve always known him,” she said.
Even so, Swain said she learned much about Rich’s life when she read his obituary.
“My background’s in early childhood education, and he was the head of a lower school, and he taught for years,” Swain said. “Those were things I didn’t really know about. I would have loved to have shared those kinds of stories with him, but he wasn’t that kind of a person.”
Swain said Rich was always more comfortable being a cheerleader for others than talking abut his own experiences. He was born T. Richardson Miner, Jr. in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. He served active duty in the Navy as an underwater swimmer and deep-sea diver from 1958 to 1962, and later was a gunnery officer and an antisubmarine warfare officer at Fleet Training Group in Pearl Harbor. Rich retired from the Navy in 1976 with the rank of Commander.
“He was the Commander of our Thursday morning stocking crew,” quipped Swain, adding that it was Rich’s Naval training that enabled him to embrace that role so skillfully.
“He organized all of the people on that shift. But he cared tremendously about them too. He had all their birthdays, all their special anniversaries, anything like that. We would also sign cards, sign to them. If somebody was sick, he would make sure they got a note saying we all hoped that they felt better,” said Swain.
Despite his active lifestyle, for the last five years of his life, Rich battled idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable disease. But nobody at the Service Center knew it until early April of this year, when he was forced to give up his Thursday morning shifts. Rich also was Clerk of the Service Center’s Board of Directors, and Swain says he’d always have meeting minutes back to her within 24 hours. At their meeting in May, Rich took the minutes as he always did, but couldn’t finish distributing them.
“And on Friday he said, ‘I have been put in the hospital, so they’ll have to wait until the end of the weekend.’ And then I got a text message from him on Sunday that he was in intensive care, and they would just have to wait a little. So I went up to the hospital, and I said, ‘Rich, will you just not worry about the minutes? Think about yourself for a change,’” said Swain.
In his professional life – years before he became a familiar face in Falmouth -- Rich attended Middlebury College in Vermont, he received a Master’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and began teaching at the Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford. In 1969, Rich became Assistant to the President and Secretary of the Corporation at Middlebury College, his alma mater. Ten years later, he joined the Lahey Clinic in Boston as Director of Development. When Rich and his wife Bobbi retired to Falmouth, Rich dove headlong into volunteer work.
“When he was at a Board meeting, he was all in,” said Mark Schmidt, Executive Director of the Falmouth Historical Society, one of the many non-profits that benefitted from Rich’s expertise.
“It’s pretty rare to find someone that was that committed to so many completely disparate organizations,” Schmidt added.
Rich was passionate about telling the stories of Falmouth veterans. Debbie Rogers of Falmouth Community Television says Rich produced a cable show called, “The Greatest Generation Speaks to Falmouth.” And he had a way of making each veteran feel comfortable and willing to open up about their war experiences.
“He was someone that really engaged you and listened to you and was interested,” Rogers said. “And I imagine that our veterans found that he was just someone that was very easy to be with, and very easy to talk with.”
In all, Rich interviewed some 50 veterans for the show.
“One of the last times he was here, he had come in to edit a project, and had shared what was happening health-wise with us,” Rogers said. “But rather than staying home or isolating in any way, it was important to him that he finish this last project that he worked on. So he did come in, and he had his oxygen tank, but he was in great spirits, and he was really engaged in the project at that moment.”
And that’s what people remember most about Richard
Miner - that whatever task he was engaged in, or whoever he was talking to at a given time, had his full attention and support.
Richard Miner passed away on May 21st. He was 77 years old.