Remembering a Miller

Our step-father, Don Anderson, remembers being a four-year-old boy in the front yard of his Albany, TX home and watching his mother upset by terrible news. It was 1942 and her younger brother, US Navy Seaman First Class Franz LaVerne Miller, had been killed on the USS Houston. Spared the fate of the fleet in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, the cruiser Miller was assigned to had been sent to the Philippines based on intelligence received of a Japanese attack. Less than two months later, Miller was one of 48 killed on the top deck of the cruiser by a Japanese torpedo. Miller was a resident of Ibex, TX, a tiny oil-boom town in eastern Shackelford County. He was an aeronautical engineer graduate of Tarleton State University before joining the Navy. His final resting place is in the Manila American Cemetery. He sacrificed his life and any future with his family for America. We are proud to have a connection to him, and proud his name is memorialized on the courthouse grounds at the Shackelford County Courthouse.