News-Record.com

Malcolm (Tex) Miller says from his bed at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital that when someone asked him how he fell, he replied, "Down."

Despite intense pain, the man who local photographer Les Seaver-Davis calls "the grand ole dean of Greensboro photographers" has kept the sense of humor that was crucial during the 50 years he spent photographing people, not all of whom were pleasant.

Now 88, Miller has been stuck at Cone since falling and breaking his hip the day after Thanksgiving. The heeling has been slow and painful. e says it will be a spell before he leaves Room 4501 at the hospital to return his Maple Street home in the old Revolutionary Mill village.

Miller is the last of the three partners who founded and operated Martin Studios downtown from 1947 until 1992. He and the studio's namesake, the late Carol Martin, took the photos and Miller's brother-in-law, the late Clarence Tucker, worked the dark room.

The studio prided itself on versatility. Martin and Miller shot everything from the Greensboro Debutante Ball to the arrival of a new tractor-trailer truck at a local trucking terminal.

Martin, as the News & Record's first photographer starting in 1937, took early photos of what's now the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro golf tournament. He was later joined by Miller. They often shot from a platform atop the studio's "woodie" station wagon.

Their photos make for a visual history of Greensboro starting from the late 1930s until well into the 1980s, when both photographers began to slow down with age.

Nothing missed their lens, including the opening of the first McDonald's in North Carolina on Summit Avenue in the late 1950s.

After the studio closed and just before his death, Martin donated more than 350,000 negatives he and Miller had shot to the Greensboro Historical Museum.

The museum produced a Martin/Miller exhibit in 1999 that remains up. In 1999, museum archivist Stephen Catlett chose selected photos for a book, "Martin's and Miller's Greensboro." Catlett followed it with a second book of Martin and Miller photos in 2002, "Dateline Greensboro: The Piedmont and Beyond."

Miller grew up on now-vanished Silver Street, which he describes as the "tail end" of the Revolution Mill Village, where houses were mill owned. He learned photography as a boy hanging around the Proximity YMCA in the neighboring Proximity mill village.

Miller later worked as a loom fixer at Revolution, moonlighting by taking photos of sports events around Greensboro. He also photographed for the Textorian, the mill newspaper.

One day at the mill in 1944, he got a telephone tip that changed his life. The caller said First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was at the Southern Railway Station waiting to change trains.

Miller grabbed his boxy and bulky Speed Graphic camera and rushed downtown. He found Roosevelt in the station's Red Cross canteen seated between Coca-Cola crates. He doesn't remember any Secret Service agents. No reporters or other photographers were there. No one asked Miller for a press credential.

When he asked the First Lady if he could take photos, she said fire away. After Miller took solo shoots of her, Roosevelt insisted the Red Cross workers be included.

Miller immediately telephoned what's now the News & Record to ask if it was aware the First Lady had had been at the station. The answer was no, followed by yes when Miller asked if the paper would like a photo.

Miller got a credit line with the photo, but no cash. When he showed the newspaper with his name under the photo to his fellow mill workers, they wouldn't accept he took it. Mill boys didn't mingle with First Ladies.

The newspaper later called to say their full-time photographer, Carol Martin, was overwhelmed with work. They offered Miller a part-time job as Martin's assistant.

That began a 48-year association with Martin, including their newspaper years and those at Martin Studios. Miller shot ordinary people and the well known, including the slapstick comic team, "The Three Stooges, " and Bob Hope.

"I still think of Carol a lot," he says of his old sidekick, who nicknamed Miller "Tex" after hearing him talk at length about the "texture" of photo paper.

Before his tumble, Miller still attended meetings of a local association of photographers, but he hasn't taken any photos-for-pay since the studio closed.

"I got out when the time was right," he says, referring to the era of digital cameras that began not long after the studio closed.

He says he could have adjusted to digital, but he liked film cameras, especially those large Speed Graphics. They produced such remarkably clear images.

"Sometimes I look at pictures I made," he says, "and think they are so good I can't believe I made them."