Miller Drug patriarch mourned Store owner recalled as unstinting altruist

BANGOR – The flag at Miller’s drugstore on State Street flew at half-staff Monday in honor of its founder, Abe Miller, as family, friends and employees began the process of adjusting to his death.

Miller died peacefully at Eastern Maine Medical Center on Sunday evening, hours before his 96th birthday. Miller and his wife, Frieda, opened the store, which has become a Bangor institution, in 1939. She was at his side when he died, according to family members.

“I’m proudest of my father’s charity work in the community,” said son Bill Miller. Abe Miller retired from the business at age 89.

Abe and Frieda Miller made significant charitable contributions to area institutions, including to the Bangor Nursing Facility, Camp CaPella, United Cerebral Palsy of Maine, the Phillips-Strickland House, and the Lions Club’s Abe Miller Eyeglass Project, which provides glasses for those in need.

The Millers received several awards for their philanthropy, including the Chamber of Commerce’s Norbert X. Dowd Award in 1999. That same year, the Bangor City Council issued a proclamation recognizing the contributions the couple made to the community.

Married in 1933, the Millers celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary Sept. 10. They were a team and soul mates, Bill Miller said. “He called himself Mr. Frieda” because of her outspokenness and his tendency to be quiet and soft-spoken, Bill Miller said.

The store, Bill Miller said, began as Miller’s Cut Rate Store and “sold everything but drugs.” It was open from 7 a.m. to midnight. It also was a luncheonette, a popular spot with the doctors and nurses of what was then Eastern Maine General Hospital, who came to have a milkshake and one of Frieda Miller’s egg salad sandwiches. The store became a drugstore when Bill Miller came home from pharmacy school in 1957.

“[Abe Miller] was very welcoming,” said Gov. John Baldacci. “He and Frieda were a team. They are one of the foundations, the fabric, of the Bangor community. He was a great role model with high standards.” The governor said he plans to attend Miller’s funeral.

Across the street at Frank’s Bakery, owners Theresa Sites and Bernadette Gaspar were saddened by the news of Miller’s death. The sisters said they had known Miller all their lives. Their parents, Joseph and Walteen Soucie, opened the bakery in 1947 across the street from Miller’s store.

“It was like having another set of parents,” Sites said of Abe Miller and his wife. “They were Jewish and we were Catholic, but that didn’t matter because they were multireligious. We’re better people for having known him. Abe had a gracious heart.”

“He had a wonderful presence and sense of humor. His legacy to the community is generosity,” Gaspar said. “He was like our father, who did quiet giving that no one ever knew anything about.”

Bill Miller said that in the 1940s, a woman came into the store crying. She said she needed a hospital bed for an ailing family member, but did not have the money to pay for one. Abe Miller, an Elks Club member, went to the club that night to play poker with his buddies. The men raked a certain percentage from each pot and used the money to pay for a bed for the woman’s loved one.

“They did that for years,” Bill Miller said, and in the process, provided money to pay for other hospital beds for people in need.

“His legacy to me,” he said, “is a good work ethic and a sense of charity.”

Miller’s funeral will be held at 1 p.m. today at Beth Israel Synagogue, 144 York St. Miller’s drugstore will be closed from 1-2 p.m. today.