Families of steel

VINEYARD, Utah County — Perhaps no one else saw the Royal Princess moored on the east side of murky Utah Lake all these years.

Most people saw an ugly smoke-belching, fire-breathing monster mucking up the sky. Gwen Miller saw the crown jewel of the high seas.

Miller and her husband, Chip, used to steal away after sunset to a field near the lake when they needed a break from the kids. Their favorite spot was under an old maple tree just off the road. They'd sit there talking and watching the rows of flickering lights and smoke wafting from the stacks.

At night, when it was all lit up, Geneva Steel looked to her like a big cruise ship.

Nearly everyone close to her — father, husband, father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, daughters — worked, at one time or another, aboard the ocean liner in her mind's eye.

The Millers don't drive around the backside of the mill anymore, now that the nighttime glow is gone.

Geneva hit an iceberg of imported steel and debt. And its demise ended an era in the steel industry for four generations of the Miller family.

Gwen Miller can't quite bring herself to jump overboard yet. "I don't want to say this is the end of it."

Maybe her father-in-law, 82-year-old Art Miller, summed it up best.

"My head tells me yes," he said. "My heart tells me no.

With apologies to poet Joyce Kilmer, he said, Art Miller wrote an ode to Geneva Steel based on Kilmer's poem "The House with Nobody in It."

Whenever I walk to Orem

Along the D&RG track

I always pause a minute

Then I stop and I look back.

Members of Art and Jackie Miller's immediate and extended families spent the better part of their lives associated with the mill the federal government commissioned during World War II.

They lived through good times and bad. They, especially Gwen Miller, scratched and clawed to revive the plant when it came within hours of closing for good 16 years ago.

Says company chairman Joe Cannon, "They've got Geneva in their blood, there's no question about that."