One of Utah’s best-known and best-loved public figures, the businessman Larry H. Miller, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 64. He’d been in poor health for some time and had recently had both legs amputated at the knees due to complications from his Type II diabetes.
I wasn’t much of a fan, personally. I took frequent exception to the decisions he made in running his Megaplex movie-theater chain — long-time readers may recall the Brokeback Mountain debacle a few years ago — and what many folks in this state perceived as his good moral quality all too often struck me as overbearing self-righteousness. Also, frankly, it has long annoyed me that his name appears everywhere you look in the Salt Lake Valley; he had a near-monopoly on local automobile dealerships, for example. Still, there is no question that his was a significant life, and that he had a huge impact on this state.
He was, first and foremost, the most prominent car salesman around these parts. His dealerships offer every make of car there is, and their locations literally run from one end of the valley to the other. There’s a long stretch of State Street in the Midvale-Murray area that probably ought to be renamed Miller Row for all the car lots that bear his name, and there are even a few Miller dealerships in the surrounding states as well. But he’s also responsible for constructing or otherwise bringing to Utah a whole string of local institutions, including the aforementioned Megaplex theaters (there are a half dozen or so of those along the Wasatch), the Miller Motorsports racetrack in Tooele County, and most everything in the state that relates somehow to professional sports, especially those things tied to the Utah Jazz, our local NBA team.
The Jazz came to Utah in 1979 (the name long baffled me since Utah is not widely known for its wailin’ jazz scene, until I finally learned that the team was originally the New Orleans Jazz); Miller has been the sole owner of the team since 1986. It was for his Jazz that the Delta Center — now called EnergySolutions Arena, gack* — was constructed. Miller also owned the local minor-league baseball team, a hockey team, and a television station, KJZZ, which is of course named for his basketball team and which shows a lot of really lousy programming — including frequent re-runs of The Singles Ward and other “Mormon cinema” films — whenever the Jazz aren’t playing.
Finally (and most significantly to me personally), Larry H. Miller was a classmate of my mother’s at West High School, the “tough” school where the kids all wore leather jackets and carried knives in their engineer’s boots. Or so Mom says the stories used to go back in the American Graffiti days of 1962. My parents sat with Larry and his wife at her 35-year high-school reunion and enjoyed a pleasant evening with them; as a result, she’s long defended him as a “nice guy” whenever I’ve been on a rant about his sanctimoniousness. Of course, it probably helps that she’s a big-time Jazz fan. It’s her primary hobby and outlet at this point in her life, her biggest joy and the source of much of her social life. It’s not a stretch to say that Larry H. Miller enriched my mom’s life.
For that reason, for my mother’s hobby and her love of the team, I honor his passing.
* For the record, I despise the modern practice of naming all our public facilities for whatever big corporation slipped the landlord the biggest envelope of cash. “Delta Center” came from Delta Airlines, of course, but the word “delta” is generic enough that it was easy to overlook the connection. EnergySolutions Arena is just plain awkward.
