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The Millar family: Alex, Ethel, Paul and Lizzie. The couple's youngest child, George Dana, was born after the photo was taken.
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Meanwhile, that first hard winter, reality intruded on his vision. An epidemic of measles swept the campus, followed by chicken pox. Many of the students fell ill and had to be nursed. There was, of course, no infirmary. Alex caught the chicken pox and was laid up for some time.
Baby Ethel was born on Feb. 6, 1891, with both grandmothers in attendance. By early October of that year, the college had 115 students and more coming in all the time. Lizzie and Alex had another child in October, 1893, my grandfather, Paul Harwood Millar.
On March 16, 1891, George Millar broke his leg playing football. He paid the doctor a dollar for setting it. At first George seemed to recover quickly—his father made him a crutch and, about a month later, gave him the money to buy a “graduating suit.” That summer, against their father’s better judgment, Alex appointed George to the Hendrix faculty. Several students objected. George was “very unpopular,” and they let Alex know it. The appointment was hastily withdrawn. It was, as Lizzie wrote her mother-in-law, “a bitter pill for George to swallow,” yet she thought that in the long run, it might build his character. George did not seem inclined to correct his faults “without something stronger than advice.” What George needed, she thought, was “to be thrown upon his own resources among strangers.” Unfortunately, no one seems to have recorded exactly what George did to alienate the students. Were they all such pious young Methodists that they were offended by his joking and his mooning after girls? Or did they object to something deeper, a nit-picking, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that sometimes comes through in his letters?
Whatever the reason for George’s rejection, the family confronted a dilemma. What was to become of their beloved problem child? Should he enter the ministry? And, if so, should he do it as a Methodist or as a Presbyterian? Should he study law or medicine? Alex wrote Vanderbilt University to try to get George a scholarship, but his brother disappeared that summer and refused to answer letters. By the time he showed up again, the time to enroll in college was past and his family was frantic. Alex defended George: “All he needs now is experience and a living,” he told his mother.
The loss of George