Testy Prof. Wonderful Sees Only Darkness in ‘Intellectual Decay’

In his glory days as the wizard of physics on television, in the classroom and in lecture halls, Julius Sumner Miller used to shout, leap and wave his arms. A pithy phrase from a Greek or Roman philosopher was always on the tip of his tongue.

He used showmanship to tickle the imagination and challenge the intellect, and he insisted that the basic principles of physics--mystifying to many--can be demonstrated with such simple things as children’s toys or kitchen devices.

In fact, he devised toys--among them, a wheel spun on a frame that stores energy so it can continue to spin--to enliven science for his favorite audiences, schoolchildren.

And in the kitchen? How about sticking nails into potatoes. They bake faster, because metal is a good conductor of heat. Want to cut up onions without crying? Freeze them slightly to reduce their vapor pressure.

He enjoyed telling interviewers that he was a man of high spirits and quick emotions. “You have to be filled with imagination,” he said more than a decade ago. “To work with me, you must be alive, awake, and alert. You need a sense of the dramatic, you need to approach life with spirit.”

But showmanship and flair have faded from Miller’s life.

Gaunt and drained of energy, Miller sank into a sofa in the small den of his Torrance home the other day, looked directly at a reporter and said, “Have you ever interviewed a dying man before?”

Professor Wonderful--the name that still sticks to Miller from his days on television’s “Mickey Mouse Club” in the 1950s--is dying.

“I’m gravely ill and I’m waiting for death,” he said, in precise, measured tones. “I pray for it every hour since leukemia is fatal and my heart is not right. I’ve lost over 30 pounds. See, I’m a skinny old man.”

By his own calculation, Miller, 78, has given 1,459 lectures around the world, been on television with the likes of Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, written eight books, and published more than 300 papers in professional journals.

He made 40 appearances on the Mickey Mouse Club and did a series of Walt Disney children’s records on great scientists.

Miller, who was a professor at El Camino College for 22 years, nearly died after a heart attack in 1964. Last December, after another attack, he wrote a letter to friends, reporting that he was feeling “the usual ravages of the flesh.” Some interpreted it as a goodby.

“The outlook is disquieting and the uncertainty a burden--a halt to my pace and a finality athwart my way of life . . . ,” the letter said. “But I can still stir to the bird on the wing--to the gurgle of a brook--to the rain in my face. . . . “

He said his leukemia was diagnosed early last month after he returned from what was supposed to be a three-month trip to Australia, where he has become a celebrity over a 25-year period of lecturing, appearing on television, publishing books and even doing splashy advertisements for a candy company. He said the trip was cut short when he became “violently ill.”

Miller told a reporter that he never has been “a kindly old man,” and he did his best to prove it. He asked the reporter how old he was before he would see him, saying he does not talk to young people because they don’t know who he is. The reporter, who is 48, passed the age test, but Miller was angry when the reporter confessed he had never seen him in the classroom or on television.

“Demonstrations of physics, that’s been my business for 50 years,” he said. “Why do they send someone who has never seen me?”

Miller calls himself an old-fashioned academic, brought up by his mother--”She was a Lithuanian peasant who spoke 12 languages”--and his teachers in the the rigors of precise, disciplined thinking. Many years ago, he already was saying that the intellectual life was in trouble.

“I am sorely disturbed by the intellectual decay I see around me,” he told The Times when he retired in 1974. “Students are exposed to more knowledge, but they are not equipped to think. Culture is so diseased, I can but hope that the few students who leave my hands will be different.”

‘Easy to Be Mediocre’

Last week, he said: “We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can’t read, write or calculate. We don’t have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor.”

Why?

“The intellectual life has started to decay. It’s easier to do nothing. Nowhere in the classroom is the joy of learning cultivated. Information is merely conveyed.”

Will it change?

“The young will inherit the republic, and what do they know of academic rigor? Intellectual integrity is the highest virtue, and there is little of that today. . . . It’s easy to be mediocre, it’s hard to acquire excellence.”

The future?

“You’ll see a darkness putting the Middle Ages to shame. It can’t be escaped, it’s over.”

Miller says that by the time he was 16, he had “read the library dry” in his hometown of Billerica, Mass. He left Boston College with degrees in philosophy and theoretical physics, but it was during the Depression and there were no teaching jobs. So he and his wife became butler and maid for a wealthy Boston doctor.

“We were paid $30 a month,” he said. “That’s 50 cents a day each, washing pots, pans and toilets.”

He said he wrote 700 letters trying to land a teaching job, and when he got one, at a private school in Connecticut, the pay wasn’t much better: $20 a month.

Miller was a civilian physicist with the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, held fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA.

He formed the most important intellectual association of his life when he went to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., in 1950. There he became a student, and friend, of Albert Einstein, who became an idol. Today, Miller has a collection of Einstein memorabilia that includes a copy of the great thinker’s birth certificate.

Miller taught for a time at UCLA, but said he opted for El Camino in 1952 because he did not want to be in a big, remote institution.

Sam Schauerman, vice president for instruction at El Camino, was Miller’s dean when he was at the college.

Taking Course From Miller

“He used to call me and say, ‘Sam, you’ve got to to come to my classroom today. I’m doing a demonstration you’ve never seen, and if you don’t see it by me, you’ll never see it by anyone else.’ ”

He said Miller used to tell students they weren’t taking a course in physics, they were taking a course from Julius Sumner Miller. “He could quote from all literature, he could get them into mathematics and philosophy, he could talk on any subject, and he often did,” Schauerman said.

When he was 65, Miller was forced to retire from El Camino, which had a mandatory retirement age then. Miller hates the word retire, saying he was forced out.

Schauerman said that as brilliant and dazzling as Miller was, some at the college didn’t like his style--or his ego--and were happy to see him go.

Faculty Embarrassed

“He embarrassed some faculty because he was adamant that most faculty were not rigid enough and students were not learning enough,” he said. “For him, intellect is to make the mind work and expand.”

He said Miller’s ego created controversy: “He felt everyone in the world should know who he was, and it grates on people when he gets upset that they don’t know him.”

Prolific Painter

Alice Miller, who calls her husband a “tough guy,” said one of the reasons they are still together is that she disagrees with most of his opinions.

She came out of the kitchen and showed the reporter a wooden plaque she had carved that said: “The opinions expressed by the husband are not necessarily those of the management.”

Alice Miller has her own creative life, painting voluminously--their house contains almost 300 of her works, most of them stacked against a wall and covered--as well as weaving, knitting and crocheting.

Miller admitted he has terrorized students in the classroom, but most have gone on to appreciate it.

One called him on his 75th birthday. “He said he suffered at my hands, but he said it didn’t do him harm,” Miller said. “He’s in physics now.”

Schauerman said students either “loved or hated” Miller, and he went on to tell about a veteran who wanted to get out of Miller’s class because he had had enough regimentation in the military.

“I said there was no space in another class and told him to come back in three weeks,” said Schauerman. “He never did, and at the end of the semester, he said, ‘The old rascal gave me an A.’

“I asked him what kept him there? He said he was very interested in literature and the classics and Miller had so many quotes that it was quite a challenge for him to remain there and look them all up.”

Miller says his professional life has been one of accolades.

The American Assn. of Physics Teachers in 1984 cited him “for extraordinary service in bringing physics to the public and to the physics teaching community for over 50 years.” He has been appointed to the Collegium of Distinguished Alumni by Boston University, is in the University of Idaho Hall of Fame and is an honorary tenured professor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where he presented lectures for 18 years. The academy called him the “wizard of all wonders of science.”

Mementos on Walls

The walls of his home on Cranbrook Avenue contain plaques and certificates, a large photo of Miller lecturing to hundreds in a huge Australian auditorium, and wood carvings from Africa, where he has lectured.

Clippings and photos of his life are contained in 70 matched black albums.

Miller said that on the recent Australian trip, he delivered the manuscript of his autobiography to Macmillan Publishing Co. there.

“My message is clear,” he said. “All that a man does in his vocation, and his avocation, work and fun, all must be with the purpose of improving the human condition, and that is what is sadly lacking.”