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02/28/2018 07:30 AMMarching is nothing new for Alan Miller. He marched as a cadet in ceremonies at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London. He marched with the corps of cadets in the parade for the second inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in l957. He has marched as retired military in Memorial Day parades in Essex.
On Saturday, March 10, however, Alan will not be marching. He will be riding in a car as the grand marshal of Essex Go Bragh, the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Essex. Alan is being honored for the two times he served as director of the Essex Park & Recreation Department during the period from 2002 to 2005.
The parade, which steps of from Essex Town Hall at 10:30 a.m. and follows a route along West Avenue through Champlin Square and then down Main Street, features the fifes and drums of the Sailing Masters of 1812, Irish dancers, antique cars, and a wide range of community organizations from scouting groups and sports teams to the Essex Historical Society. Following the parade, there will be activities including crafts, face painting, and a Go Bragh party at the Griswold Inn. If bad weather forces cancellation, the decision will be made by 9 a.m. the morning of the parade and announced on the Essex website www.essexct.gov and the Park & Recreation Facebook page www.facebook.com/SXParkandRec.
Park & Recreation was a much smaller operation, Alan recalls, when he headed the department.
“I gave the orders and then I carried them out,” he says. “There was no professional staff; no office. The office was right here in my house.”
From the time he was in elementary school in his native Appleton, Wisconsin, Alan had told people his aim was to go to West Point. In fact, he received a letter of admission, but he was already in residence at the Coast Guard Academy. The West Point letter had been sent to his grandmother’s house, since he lived with her during his last year of high school, and forwarded twice before he received it.
Alan decided against West Point. His eyes weren’t perfect and he didn’t want to risk the chance of being ultimately rejected at West Point for faulty vision.
Growing up in Wisconsin, Alan knew little of the sea. He wasn’t even a particularly good swimmer. At the Coast Guard Academy, he recalls taking a remedial swimming course. In his 26-year career, Alan made up for his early ignorance of maritime life. In all, he served some nine years at sea, including nearly a year on an icebreaker in the Antarctic. He also served on icebreakers in the Great Lakes and in the Arctic.
People know less, Alan admits, about the Coast Guard than they do about the other branches of the United States military, and many people have a limited vision of Coast Guard operations.
“They think it’s about search and rescue and life-saving,” he says, “but I did none of those things.”
In addition to icebreakers, Alan was involved in law enforcement operations aimed at narcotics interdiction off Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
His assignment to an electronic navigation station on the Costa Brava in Spain turned out to have consequences he didn’t initially expect after he met 18 year-old Clara Gonzalez. They married in Spain, but not before Alan, who has since converted to Catholicism, got the required permission from the local bishop. When he went to the interview, he found that the priest only wanted to talk about one thing, baseball.
“He was a big Yankees fan,” Alan recalls.
Alan himself has always been a St. Louis Cardinals supporter.
“Ever since Stan Musial, Stan the Man,” he says.
Alan remembers the bachelor party before the wedding. It ended when a Spanish officer, head of the local civil guard, clapped one handcuff around Alan’s wrist. It was not for misbehavior. Rather, the word for handcuff in Spanish “esposa,” is also the word for wife. Alan asked that the handcuff be taken off, but his request was refused.
“They told me it was so I would learn what it was like to be married,’ he says.
He had to wear the handcuff on one hand until his best man, who had the key, removed it on the steps on the church before the wedding.
More than 50 years later, that handcuffing seems not to have been unnecessary.
“She was the one, she was the one,” Alan says.
In 2004, Clara and Alan took a 484-mile journey, all by foot, that started in France and ended northwestern Spain in the city of Santiago de Compostela, following the famous pilgrim route to the Cathedral of Saint James, where the bones of the saint are said to be buried. Alan and Clara covered about 14 miles a day and slept at night in church hostels sharing quarters with other pilgrims. They carried backpacks, with only one change of clothes, washing what they wore along the way. Often their wool socks did not dry in time so, with the dry pair on their feet, they would pin the wet pair to their backpacks as they walked.
“You learned tricks like that as you went along,” he says.
At the end of the trip, when Alan came home to Essex and unpacked, he found he was crying.
“They were tears of joy and sadness that it was over and I would never do it again,” he says.
By the time Alan and Clara moved to Essex, he had not only retired from the Coast Guard with the rank of captain but also retired from a second career as director of Campus Facilities and Operations at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. In preparation for that second career, while he was stationed in Washington, D.C., Alan had gotten two master’s degrees, one in business administration and one in information systems management.
Alan was eager to volunteer in Essex, and felt his background in facilities management made a good fit with Park & Recreation.
“It was time to give back to the community,” he says.
When current Park & Recreation Director Maryellen Barnes asked Alan to serve as honorary grand marshal of the upcoming parade, he replied that he was honored, but he had a question for her.
“What do I do?” he asked.
“She told me I had to smile and wave,” he says. “I told her I could do that.”
And as the old saying has it, everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. On other days, Alan admits his ancestry is German.
Essex St. Patrick’s Day Parade
The Essex Go Bragh St. Patrick’s Day Parade is on Saturday, March 10, stepping off at 10:30 a.m. from Town Hall. Any weather cancellation will be announced on the Park & Recreation page at www.essexct.gov and the Park & Recreation Facebook page www.facebook.com/SXParkandRec.