By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Whatever they did that day — it’s difficult to imagine there wasn’t at least a little bickering — lead to a 21-year run starting Jan. 17, 1950, for “Meet the Millers,” every weekday afternoon until they retired in 1970.
The program was a melding of the couple’s skills. They’d spent more than 20 years as vaudeville entertainers, he a dancer — even once on Broadway – and she his piano playing accompanist. They retired to Buffalo for health reasons, opening a turkey farm in the Town of Colden.
From the onset, “Meet the Millers” was nominally about “using economy in preparing food,” but housewives tuning in around Western New York were just as likely to be entertained by the sometimes-hostile relationship between Bill and Mildred, and Mildred’s tendency to put Bill in his place regularly.
For better or worse, they were Western New York’s quintessential quibbling couple.
The show grew to include interview segments which aired Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with cooking segments on Tuesday and Thursday. The big-name stars who came through Buffalo stayed at the Statler, and that’s where Bill and Mildred did their show through the 1950s. Stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Bennett were guests through the years.
Starting with their first summer on the air, the Millers made bringing Western New York’s agricultural fairs to TV viewers a priority. As the owners of a 350-acre farm, and Bill’s role as past president of the state turkey growers’ association, the Millers became closely associated especially with the Erie County Fair, from which their show was broadcast live every year. The Millers were in the inaugural class of the Erie County Fair Hall of Fame in 1989.
After the couple retired from television, Bill was elected Colden supervisor and served through the early 1980s. The couple moved to Florida, where they passed away in the early 1990s.
