Marion Russell Miller was born January 25, 1920 in Henning, Minnesota. He grew up on his parents' farm in Anita, Iowa, where he attended high school. After graduation he attended the State University of Iowa from 1939 to 1943, and earned a B.A. in English.

Mr. Miller served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II and was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. He married Jeannine Lalou on November 8, 1952, in Paris, and the couple had one daughter, Alice. After the war ended he continued working for the Army as a civilian in France and Belgium. One Army department in which he served was MIS-X Det, where he researched European citizens who aided American airmen who had fallen behind enemy lines. His work with this office earned him the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française. After completing this two-year project he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1955 he moved to Verdun, France, where he worked for the U.S. Army and earned a degree in business administration from the University of Maryland through their overseas education program.

He returned to the United States in 1965 and worked at U. S. Army arsenals in New Jersey and Rock Island, Illinois. Following his retirement from Army employment in 1986, he earned a B.A. in French and Spanish from the University of St. Ambrose in Davenport, Iowa. Marion Miller died January 5, 2000.