Interview #35: Joyce Miller
Science Bowl admin, dog dancer, author, nuclear physics studier, and much more
Intro
Joyce reached out to me a couple weeks ago when she spotted an earlier interview I’d posted. She’d written a historical fiction account of her great uncle Joe Harris, a former professional baseball player from the 1920s. I agreed and read about the book and some of her background, but we talked about way more than the book. She’s lead a fascinating life, and even now in retirement she continues to discover new interests and keep busy.
Joyce retired from a long career working in a nuclear physics laboratory in Virginia, where she was in the room with some of the top physicists and scientists in the world to implement their experiments. She described a little bit about what her area of expertise was, but most of it flew over my head. You thought trying to explain how a double switch works or why there’s no left-handed catchers in baseball… Joyce did her best but my nuclear science knowledge is pretty much whatever The Simpsons has taught me.
She retired and got into writing, which coincided with the pandemic (she opted to be productive instead of baking sourdough bread like everyone else). Her first book was about Joe Harris, and that was a lot of fun to hear about her experience writing and publishing it. She was far from a diehard baseball fan when she undertook that project and discovered the vast world of baseball fans, families and history that gladly took her in as one of their own. Then she wrote a book about her experience with dog dancing and trying to train a greyhound. Now she’s just finished a third book about an American artist who once painted the portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.
Her books can be found here:
Joe Harris, The Moon (Amazon link): Joe Harris' journey begins in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Recruited by professional baseball scouts to play first base in the minor leagues, Joe gets his nickname "the Moon" and his big break to play for the Cleveland Indians. His tenure in the major leagues is cut short by the First World War where Joe is severely injured in an ambulance accident. When Joe returns from Europe and leaves the Indians to play in an outlaw league, he is given a second chance to play organized baseball. Determined to realize his dream, Joe bats for the Pittsburgh Pirates against Babe Ruth's New York Yankees in the 1927 World Series. Will Joe's injuries from the war intertwined with the financial problems of the Depression compel him to retire from baseball?
Look! You’re Dancing (Amazon link): In Joyce A. Miller's memoir, Look! You're Dancing, she enters two worlds when she adopts a retired racing greyhound and decides to do canine freestyle, or dog dancing. Miller had a less than ideal childhood and felt she was an imposter for most of her life, not fitting in anywhere. When she worked with the greyhound adoption group and helped the sleek racers find their forever homes, she felt fulfilled. And when she started dancing, first with her greyhound and then tap dancing with a group of friends, she felt she finally found true friendship and a safe place that brought out the best in her. Look! You're Dancing explores the unique bond between a hound and a human and how something as simple as a dance enriches both lives.
You can also check out her website here: Joyce A Miller
From Nuclei to Novels
So are you writing any books right now?
So I am writing one right now. Well, I just finished one and it's about… if you drive north from Richmond to Pittsburgh, you go on Interstate 95, go past Fredericksburg and there was this brown sign, you know those brown signs that are like attractions?
It said Gari Melcher's home and studio. And I thought, who is Gari Melchers? I've never heard of him before. I thought maybe he's like a Civil War general or something, I just didn't know. The curiosity got the better of me and so I stopped one time and I went and he was this famous artist from the 1920s, same era as the Joe Harris book. So I thought, well, that's keeping with the same time frame for historical fiction. And he was the contemporary of John Singer Sargent.
The studio has all his paintings. And then in the house there are six paintings that his wife painted. So then I was really interested in her because the paintings were on par with his paintings as far as technique goes. And so I wanted to find out more about them and I went to the gift shop and I said, is there a book about them? No, there's no book. So I said, I guess I have to write the book. I wrote it from her point of view. She was 20 years younger than him. They met on a boat going over to Europe and at the time he was this famous painter. He painted Mark Twain's portrait. He painted Teddy Roosevelt's portrait when he was president in the White House. And nobody knows about him. So I had to do it.
Impressive. Three and five years is pretty good.
Well, I'm retired.
So where are you?
In Virginia. Richmond. It's a small sized city and it has a minor league baseball team, the Flying Squirrels.
You're not too far from DC then, right? It's an hour or two?
Two hours. I was just there this past weekend for the Science Bowl. So, I worked for 30 years at a nuclear physics laboratory. That was in Newport News, VA.
And what were you doing at a nuclear physics laboratory?
So I did mechanical design and engineering there. I got involved in the Science Bowl, which is kind of a quiz bowl thing for middle school and high school kids; they come from all over the country. The Department of Energy sponsors it and they and they come there to compete and I do the score keeping. So they do a Round Robin competition and then they go into double elimination until there's only one team left, one high school, one middle school team.
And you've been doing that for a few years?
Over 20 years. And even though I retired from the physics lab, I was not allowed to retire from the Science Bowl.
So you found more time to write after you retired then?
So I retired in 2019 and then in March of 2020, the world shut down. I always liked to write when I was a little kid and draw, paint, do that kind of stuff. Then in 2020 I took a few like online classes since we were stuck at home, and fortunately for me, my cousin had already done the research on our grand uncle. It was kind of there on a plate for me to write this book about him. I didn't wanna do a biography where I had to do footnotes and keep track of everything. So I made it historical fiction and then the things that I didn't know I made up. But I'd say 90% of it is true.
What did you do in the physics lab?
It was nuclear physics research to understand the makeup of the atom, the building block of everything. We had four experimental halls and each hall did a different kind of physics experiment. I was part of Hall A, which did what they call coincidence experiments. We had an accelerator that accelerated the electrons around a racetrack; it was 7/8 of a mile and it would go down two straight sections, then two curved sections back around. It will go around five times and the electrons would be traveling at the speed of light and then they would hit them into a target just like you're playing pool. So you shoot the electron into a nucleus of an atom and stuff flies out.
In our experiments, they had to see the same thing in two different spectrometers. They'd have to see the same thing in both. Physicists came from all over the world because that was the only place they could do those kinds of experiments. They would come to our engineering team and they would say, we want to look at a lead atom, or we want to look at a carbon atom, or we want to look for dark matter, or whatever it was, and then they would have to explain to us what they were trying to do and then we would design the equipment to do that experiment. It sounds way more complicated than it is. The physicists would propose an experiment and then they would get a peer review. The peers would grade them A, B, C, D, and usually only A and B experiments got to run because there was a limited amount of time.
Did any big discoveries come out of these experiments?
Well, we've been doing it for a long time and there's been some spin-off technologies in the detector systems. Breast cancer imaging, they've got some spin-off technologies for that. The other thing is that the stuff they're doing now, maybe we won't know what comes out of it until another 20 years. It's like when they first went into space, people were like, what are we going to get out of that? We're sending a guy up to the moon. But now we have cell phones, microwaves, and we have things that we didn't even know we needed.
Some of the things they're talking about are being able to make a programmable laser. So they can change the wavelength of the laser and they can treat plastic with it so that when they wrap the plastic around ground beef or chicken, it won't spoil because the bacteria gets caught in the grain structure of the plastic and that's what makes it spoil. Or they'll be able to do metal so that it doesn't rust. Things like that.
So what kind of background did you need to get into that?
I started out doing architectural drafting. This was all before computers, and we used to draw on the board with the T-square and pencils and erasers. So this company had a lot of its drawings destroyed in a flood. They hired me because my printing was really nice and I traced the old drawings because they were ruined. That company was a vacuum freeze-drying company. I got some vacuum experience. And then I left there and went to work for a place that made vacuum pumping systems.
I decided I was going to move to Virginia and worked for a ship building company for a while and did piping and then one day I saw this ad in the paper for, at the time it was called CEBAF, which was the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. It was brand new and they needed people who could do vacuum and cryogenics and piping. Had my interview, which took all day long and after that I didn't even want to work there, but they offered me the job. It was just really interesting work. And also we met people from all over the world, it just was a great place to work for 30 years.
Did anything about that job experience help when you started writing?
Just discipline. I knew how to do a project and break it down into, you know, if you want to have a book at the end of a certain period of time, you have to write so many words and you have to get somebody to proofread it. We did that with our drawings and make sure you didn't mess up something. I think that helped. You’re right brain, left brain right?
We got to be more creative there than if I had worked for an automobile manufacturer or something where you're the same thing over and over and over and over again.
That’s quite the change to go from a nuclear physics facility, where accuracy and attention to detail are critically important, to writing, where there’s more leeway as far as creativity and sometimes leaving things out. It’s always tough for me to go from accounting to writing or photography or whatever creative thing I’m attempting. If I do it in the same day, I can literally feel my brain resetting when I try to shift into writing mode. It’s like driving all day in 5th gear on the highway and then working down into off-roading mode, low gear, airing down tires, etc.
But I also see where that career helped her become a good writer quickly. She learned deadlines, details, getting things correct. All that helps to have the technical side almost on autopilot while you work on getting the creativity and story going.
You can also check out the CEBAF home page here: CEBAF. I read a bit of it, but then it mentioned “quantum chromodynamics” and “quark-gluon plasma” and my brain melted.
Joe Harris and discovering baseball
Are you a baseball fan? Did you know a lot about baseball going into writing the book?
Not a huge fan. I grew up in Pittsburgh, everyone from Pittsburgh has to be a Pirates, Steelers, Penguins fan. Joe played for the Pirates in the World Series. I like to go to the Squirrels games a couple times a year. I don't watch it religiously, but I like, there's something interesting going on that catches my eye.
Did you go to games as a kid? Were you in Pittsburgh or nearby?
I grew up in Pittsburgh. We didn't go to games, but I do remember my dad going to Forbes Field when they tore it down and taking a brick.
So he liked going to games.
When he could afford it.
So that was the 60’s and 70’s when the Pirates were good. The Steelers were good, too, then.
Ohh, the Steelers were fantastic then. That was the Iron Curtain and Mean Joe Greene and Terry Bradshaw. And they had five Super Bowls.
And you had Willie Stargell, Roberto Clemente.
Yeah, they were good.
So you just followed them casually then. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Three brothers, one brother is three years older and a set of twins a year younger than me. But our family was into stock car racing.
Are there tracks out in Pittsburgh?
Oh yeah, there was Pennsylvania Motor Speedway and then there was a track called Heidelberg that my parents always went to, and that's gone now. But they were dirt tracks.
Yeah, I love those. Did you like those?
No, because it was so loud and so noisy. I didn't like it.
That's my favorite part, it's just them roaring around. They closed a lot of the dirt tracks here. There’s plenty of dirt here, though.
Plenty of dirt, it’s Arizona. Come on.
They just turn them into apartment buildings now. Richmond’s got a track, too.
We have a race track and they do two NASCAR races every year here. See, we have a little bit of everything here, a little bit of baseball, a little bit of racing.
So you had all the research already done by another relative. Did you know Joe Harris or was he gone before you could meet him?
He was gone, he died the year I was born. But a couple of our cousins had met him and then I found out more stories afterwards that I could have put in. So that was one of the cool things about the book was, and I don't even know how this happened, but people found out about it… so Joe had nine brothers and sisters, two sisters and the rest brothers, and the families from those people would contact me and they would say, ohh I found out about your book and I think I'm related to you. One of the guys is now an usher at PNC Park. He invited my son and me to come and go to a game, and we did that last year. We got to meet The Pirate Parrot, see some of the pierogies that run around the bases. He was telling me that his pap, which would I guess would have been Joe's brother’s son, would go with Uncle Joe to the ballpark and Babe Ruth would buy him ice cream.
So it wasn’t all stuff that you could like look up a box score and see that that did happen.
Yeah, I would look up the newspaper because back then they covered baseball really well. And I could look up if he made a really fantastic play or something, and I could put that in the book. And then there were some family stories and I wanted to put those in. Maybe they're true, or maybe it's just the stories that we've always told each other.
That's wild. When you started writing, you didn't know much about the game of baseball did you?
I had a couple people read it afterwards to make sure I didn't say anything stupid. The book got picked up by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). They have an award every year for books about the Dead Ball Era. I had to send it to seven different reviewers to read to see if I was gonna win this prize. I had two mistakes. One was a baseball play, I don't remember exactly what it was. But the other one was, when he played for the Washington Senators, I said that his baseball uniform had pinstripes, and they said no, that was not true. So therefore it could not win this award for the being one of the top baseball books about the Dead Ball Era. I did go back and change that description, but I felt pretty good that I only made two mistakes.
That's a very strict standard. Did you know about SABR before you wrote the book?
I knew from my cousin, the one that did all the research, that they existed, the Society for American Baseball Research. But I didn't know anything about them before that.
Do you know why you put in that he had pinstripes on?
I really thought I read it somewhere, but the guy at the SABR said that he thought I was describing a Giants uniform. I looked at a lot of newspaper articles from back then, and maybe it was them playing against the Giants or something and I mistook it. So it was my mistake.
It's hard. I wrote two westerns. And you write everything and then you have to make sure whatever you wrote existed at that point. I still got things wrong that people happily pointed out.
Yes, they're happy to pick out those things, right? So you know what I'm talking about.
How did you get in touch with Graig Kreindler?
When I did the book and was kind of putting it out, I had a writing coach that I hired and she was like pick one social media and put your book out there. You need to post on Tuesday and Friday; Tuesday about the book and then Friday something about you or something inspirational to get your name out there ‘cause nobody knows who you are.
So I started to post things about the book and about Joe Harris. I guess through one of the hashtags we started, cause he paints that era of ballplayer. So then I started asking him some questions about the Negro Leagues because Joe did play in one barnstorming season they played against the one of the Negro Leagues in Pittsburgh. So Graig was like, ohh yeah, here's some pictures. So Instagram's been great for that kind of thing, right. He was real helpful and I think I may have sent him a book, too, to thank him for that.
Note: just don’t use Instagram to find a girlfriend. It just doesn’t work.
Interview #24: Award-Winning Baseball Painter
Did you become a baseball fan after doing that project?
I really did. The Pirates, they started out so well last year and then they… So yeah, I am more of a fan now. We go to several Flying Squirrels games. I like watching it and it's really a good time, good pastime.
But you didn't go when you were growing up?
No. You know, we really couldn't afford it. I think we listened to it on the radio, but we didn't really go to games.
So baseball wasn't really a thing in your life until you started writing about this.
Yeah, it was later. Yeah, I would say, you know, the 70s teams, when Roberto Clemente played for Pittsburgh, everybody was a Pirates fan then. And my mom had a bar when I was growing up. You always had the games on TV or on the radio. Guys would sit around the bar and listen to it.
What do you think keeps you going to games and being more of a fan, more engaged now?
I like different characters, and that's probably from the writing background. I wanna go see (Andrew) McCutchen, I was at the game where he got his 200 home run, and now it's 300. And then I love that that they called that one guy up from the minors (Drew Maggi) and he was really, really good last year at the beginning, but then they dumped him. That's what I pay attention to. When Josh Bell played for the Washington Nationals he started a book club. Every month they would show the book on the Nationals scoreboard, he wanted people to read more. So I like those kinds of stories.
So you wrote this baseball book and then you had all these other people that you met because of it. What’s that been like, meeting new people through baseball?
I just love it. My number one fan is my dentist. He found out that I wrote the book and I don't know how many copies he bought and how many people that he's talked to about it, it's been so interesting. It is a big, big part of people's lives, even if it's in the background, it's still a big part. I think it's just always gonna be America's game, right? I met a guy through Instagram that writes baseball poetry. He's a really great guy to talk to and keep up with and we send each other Christmas cards now.
Were you surprised by that? Like, how much baseball means to people?
I think I was surprised. I know there's diehard fans for everything, right? But the breadth, there's no person you can say, well, that's the kind of person that watches baseball. I mean, it's everyone, it's women, little kids like it, and poets and dentists. Everybody has a team but there's no hard feelings about… or maybe I shouldn't say that, ‘cause I think the Phillies, if you go against them…
It was very cool to hear Joyce go through her progression from wanting to write a book about a family member from long ago to becoming a baseball fan and involved with others in the baseball community. Though her life seems to revolve around racetracks of all kinds (stock cars, electron beam accelerators, greyhounds), she developed a love for baseball with all her research and the people she met because of the book.
Also, I did not know about that SABR book award. That’s wild that because of one mistake, it was deemed ineligible. I feel like every third article I read on ESPN these days contains some kind of mistake. Also SABR is based in Phoenix, I had no idea. I’ll go check them out.
And what better player to draw someone back into being a baseball fan than Andrew McCutchen?
The Greyhounds
How’s the dog doing?
The greyhound! He's laying on the floor beside me.
And you got him when?
So I started, so probably been 25 years now, I started doing greyhound rescue. That’s why I wanted to write the second book, which was the memoir. I don't know, I felt called to write that one. I had a little mixed breed dog and I did this thing with her called dog dancing, canine freestyle. So you teach the dog to do some tricks, like to spin, to weave between your legs, to stay away from you maybe 8 feet away from you, to cross their paws, different things. So you teach them to do all these things and then you pick a piece of music and you cue the dog to do the tricks at certain points in the music, so then it looks like the dog is dancing, but really doing the tricks that you tell them to do at the time you tell them to do it. And so at the time, I was at this dog training club and I had this friend, and we both did this. But my dog was a mixed breed and at that time, the mixed breeds couldn't do any kind of competitions because the AKC, you know, they had to be purebred dogs and blah blah blah.
So then that dog passed away. So I thought, well, I'm a big woman, I'm tall. I'm gonna get a greyhound. And at the time, which was many years ago, they were just killing them when they were done racing, they had thousands of them. At the time I was in Hampton, the Greyhound Group was in Richmond, contacted the guy in Richmond and I said, you know, this is what I wanna do with this dog. Do you think a greyhound would do it?
And he wasn't too sure, but he said, you know, I'll see if I can find you a younger one and maybe you could do it. And so I got this female black greyhound ands he was very hard to train because they are just used to running and then sleeping. But I did manage to train her and then I got sucked into the Greyhound adoption group. And because I lived like an hour and a half away from the main group, if they did any kind of adoptions by where I lived, I went and did their home visits. I'm just gonna come and show you, bring my dog with me, show you how big they are, cause they're big dogs. They have a hard time with steps, things freak them out like ceiling fans, things they have never seen or been around before, like hardwood floors; they need rugs. And so I would go to these people's houses and tell them, you know, this is what you need to do to get your house greyhound ready. It was amazing the things that people would say to me and show me. One guy was like, ohh, come outside, I'm gonna show you the box; I have my border collie chained up to this box and I'm gonna chain the greyhound over here and I'm like, no, you're not.
The one I have now is my sixth greyhound. I would foster them and sometimes I would keep the ones that I foster. I got a puppy; they had five greyhound puppies that if they didn't witness the breeding, they couldn't register them to race, so they were gonna just kill the puppies and our adoption group took the puppies. I got one and oh my gosh, that was like training a velociraptor. I would never do that again.
Hard was it to train the dog to do the dancing?
It was pretty difficult. It took a number of months where, if you were training a border collie or something, it would maybe be weeks.
Are they just stubborn or they're just not bred for it?
They're just not bred for it. But they're wonderful dogs. They keep them with their litter mates until they're 18 months old, then they start training them to race. By the time they're two, they usually know if they're gonna be good or not, so you get a lot of 2-year-olds come up for adoption. And then once they race them, they'll be like four or five years old and come up for adoption.
They're mostly quiet and don't need a lot of exercise. Maybe once a week you take them to some park and let them run around and they're happy.
There's only two tracks left in the United States, and they're in Wheeling, WV. So now the whole discussion in the greyhound community is like, what's going to become of the breed? the ones they breed for show aren't the same physique as the ones they breed for racing. Show dogs have a more slanted back, kind of like a German shepherd, and the bracing greyhounds have the great big butts because they use their rear ends for propulsion.
When we moved into this condo, they had a 20 lb. dog rule. I had to bring him and the HOA board had to approve him before we could buy this place. We lived here two years and they were like, your dog is the best dog. He never makes any noise. The little dogs bark every time you walk down the hall.
I am a terrible dancer. And I guarantee Bauer would be terrible at it, too, we’ll stick to trying to catch tennis balls. But I am glad organizations like the ones Joyce volunteers for exist, because those dogs have such short “careers” that it’s great they have the opportunity to find a good home in retirement.
Be right back, gonna see if Bauer can learn to dance…
