Miller made his mark

Mark W. Miller owns more than three dozens pairs of suspenders, walks five miles a day and swears once a year.

In my 71‚Ñ2 years at The Vindicator, I never saw him in anything but long pants, long-sleeved shirts and suspenders, even when he was covering a track meet in late May.

He wakes up around 6 a.m. every day even though he worked until midnight five nights a week for much of his life, carried the same clipboard for 30 years, never trusted computers (he wrote out his stories longhand first) and claims to have every edition of The Salem News from when he was the sports editor decades ago, working 60-hour weeks and getting paid for 40.

He brought in sliced vegetables for the staff every Saturday — he was the rare diabetic who always obeyed his doctor — and considered eating a slice of pizza every six months to be splurging.

Canfield High girls basketball coach Pat Pavlansky once told me Mark (I refuse to refer to him by his last name) was his favorite reporter because he made him feel like his team was the most important one in the area, something every coach who knew Mark would understand.

Mark wasn’t blessed with a lot of natural talent — I often compared him to a 10-minute miler who worked harder than everyone else on the team — and he often flubbed names, stats and quotes, either because he couldn’t type (Mark is a classic hunt-and-peck guy) or because, well, he was Mark. Case in point: He once spelled Boardman track coach Dave Pavlansky’s last name (probably the second-most famous coaching name in the Valley, behind the Stoops’) three different ways in a story, and they were all wrong.

But for the last 31 years at The Vindicator — and a few decades more in Salem and Warren — Mark worked harder, cared more and behaved more decently than any reporter in town. As any of his coworkers would tell you, it was like working with Jimmy Stewart.

At age 77, Mark abruptly retired last month, leaving without much fuss or fanfare. He always said he’d retire when it wasn’t fun anymore, something I never understood, considering he spent most shifts typing in schedules and taking high school game results over the phone.

That day finally came and he had already filed his retirement papers before calling his boss to tell him the news.

For many people, Mark was the voice of The Vindicator, answering more phone calls than anyone else. He did what his boss asked and he never complained about an assignment, never yelled at an angry reader (“Usually they just need to let off steam,” he’d say) and was always willing to make the extra call, even if it meant waking up a coach (or his wife) at 1 a.m.

Every night before he left, he called his angel of 47 years, Alice Jean, to let her know he was on his way. He and his wife weren’t able to have kids — a shame since Mark would have made a great father and an even better grandfather — so he spent his life writing about everyone else’s.

He loved writing about sports that other people ignored — swimming, wrestling, tennis and, especially, track and cross country — and he was a pretty good athlete himself, although he never bragged about it. That wasn’t his way.

What Mark was, was old-fashioned. He reads the Bible every day, never liked rock music — his favorite song is “As Time Goes By,” and he loved watching “Casablanca” over and over again, two things I can’t argue with — and he’s one of the cheapest men you’ll ever meet. (“I’m parsimony,” he’d say, meaning “parsimonious.”)

He often mispronounced words: Warshington instead of Washington, Southerin instead of Southern, athaletes instead of athletes — but it was part of his charm.

I’m going to miss him.

Longtime Hubbard volleyball coach Chuck Montgomery likes to say, “Mark covered me in high school and he was old then.”

If I live to 77, I hope I’m as young as he is.

X Joe Scalzo covers sports for The Vindicator. Write him at scalzo@vindy.com.