RE LOG - Spring 2017

Sue Miller continued from page 23 and committed to anything she undertook, with Mom on your team you were guar- anteed success. She would break down every barrier and bust down every door to help the community do what it was trying to do. She had engagement, passion and emotion. She never involved herself in anything she wasn’t willing to put 100 percent into. Stuart: My mother spent some time doing real estate sales at Lennar, but I think she found greater fulfilment getting involved in community activities and programs that would benefit the community at large. She expressed her sense of responsibil- ity to her community in the form of both actually giving and engaging others to be involved as well. Leslie: Mom really loved her city, she loved Miami. Over time, she was able to see Ransom Everglades kids graduate, go out into the world and then come back to help build Miami into the city it’s become today. Miami has made a huge transi- tion in the last 15-20 years, and Ransom Everglades has been a big part of that. Jeffrey: Ransom Everglades really is this common glue that we all share, a place her children and grandchildren passed through. She had this incredible connec- tion with Mr. Bowden; that’s where it all began. We all played water polo, and my parents never missed a game. We would always see them up in the stands, sup- porting the family, being there for each of their kids. And my mom never missed a Grandparents Day; she was always there to show her love and support for her grand- children. Over time, she began to under- stand that Ransom Everglades was really this important place in the community, a feeder of the University of Miami and a producer of students who would make a difference in society. Leslie: Two of my earliest memories of my mom are when she broke down after [President] Kennedy was killed, and after the death of two sons of our family’s gar- dener. The gardener would come around once a week to do the lawns at everyone’s houses. He was from Liberty City and drove a beat-up truck, and he would bring his two sons and we would go out and play with them, watch TV, have sandwiches. One day the kids didn’t come back. They had climbed under a fence to play near a rock pit and drowned; they didn’t know how to swim. The memory I have of my mother when she heard this will never go away. She was so totally distraught. She showed us, with those reactions, that you have to care for everybody, whether a politician or a gardener. At a very young age, we became sensitized to the fact that it didn’t matter who a person was, or what To Continue... a person did, everybody mattered, and everybody deserved respect. Jeffrey: When I drove by the construc- tion site next door to my mom’s house [after her death], one of the workers said to me: “Your mom would stop her car ev- ery day to say, ‘Hi, how are you?’” If there is a memory of her that represents what she stood for, in my mind it is that. She just looked at every person as important as she is. She left such an indelible mark on people’s minds every day. Stuart: She never became consumed with things or position in life; she just was consistently a very decent, lov- ing, caring person, appreciative of the benefits life had afforded her, but not consumed by them. She always dealt with people with a great deal of respect. It didn’t matter whether they were kings and queens or people of more mod- est backgrounds. As my parents found financial success in their endeavors, and as they found themselves surprisingly financially secure, and then financially blessed, I think what grew inside of both of them was this sense that those who benefit from great success have an unspoken responsibility to reflect that success back to the community and leave it a better place than they found it. 68 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2017 “She would break down every barrier and bust down every door to help the community do what it was trying to do.” – Jeff Miller ’79