The WSBA’s Two Active Soon-to-Be Centenarians Reflect on Their Prodigious Legacies and Bright Futures

BY SARA NIEGOWSKI

Rodman Bertley Miller:

‘I Saw the Law Change Lives’

Just a few months shy of his 100th birthday—not to mention a few weeks past the 73rd anniversary of receiving his WSBA Bar card—Rodman Bertley Miller’s extraordinary life story is shaped by a common theme: Listen to your heart.

That’s no euphemism in recent years. He underwent a major heart operation in 2012, without which doctors said he would have soon died.

“I have to tell people: If you feel something isn’t right, go get it checked out,” Miller said. “Don’t wait.”

Legal professionals, who can be laser focused on work and other pursuits, are often notoriously bad at prioritizing their health, said Miller. And he should know.

His father, Roy C. Miller, a prominent lawyer at Puget Sound Savings and Loan Association, was 57 in 1949 when he died of a heart attack at his desk at 3 p.m. on a workday. “People came in his office and thought he was napping,” Miller said. “But that’s how he wanted to go—with his boots on, not in a hospital.” Miller was 25 at the time, in his second year at the University of Washington School of Law.

Listen to your heart. But more than any flesh-and-blood failing, the memory of his father is one of a generosity of heart, for his family and community, which Miller has taken great care to continue. Though Roy Miller came from farming ancestry in Ohio, he fell head over heels for the daughter of one of his professors at the College of Wooster, and that professor convinced him to pursue his dream at the University of Washington School of Law. His bride—Marie, Miller’s mother—steeped in the tradition of higher education, was no traditional stay-at-home wife. 

She attended Barnard College and Columbia University, and she supported her husband through his legal studies by working as an executive assistant. 

“Both my parents, they were something,” Miller said. “My mom, she found ways to be active and make sure her voice was heard. She taught me how to read before kindergarten, and when the teacher asked how I knew how to read, I said, ‘My mom loves me.’” 

Listen to your heart. For Miller’s parents, education and service were the language of love. His dad would talk about his cases around the dinner table, and while the issues were financial in nature, they were truly about people and problem-solving, and that intrigued Miller. As top brass at the state’s leading savings and loan association during the Great Depression, Miller’s dad brokered a deal with creditors that gave them more time to collect on loans, saving many people from bankruptcy and avoiding the collapse of the institution and its clients. His father was also active in the legal community, most notably serving as president of the King County Bar Association from 1948-1949.

“I saw my dad change lives,” Miller said. “I saw the law change lives.” 

Listen to your heart. And so it was that another generation of lawyer was born as Miller followed in his father’s footsteps. And then another and another. Miller’s own great love story involved locking eyes with the “prettiest girl in the room” at a Seattle YMCA dance. He took a chance and reached out for her hand as a partner. Her name was Alice. They were married six months later. “She was just, just—the best person and the best wife,” Miller said. Two of their three children went on to graduate from law school, as did one of their two grandchildren, who now practices in Denver. The law is in the Miller DNA.

In his own legal career, Miller spent almost 10 years at a title company out of law school before striking out on his own to offer estate planning, probate, divorce, bankruptcy, and wills—those “things that are really important in people’s lives.” All told, that’s more than 63 years under his own shingle, with hundreds and hundreds of clients. He gave up his office space in 1990 to stay home to take care of Alice when she became ill, and his work slowed significantly. When Alice died in 2007, she left a great legacy of her own. She was a teacher in Seattle Public Schools for more than 30 years as well as a renowned portrait artist who studied fine art at the University of Washington and at the Heatherly School of Art in London.

“She really left her mark,” Miller said—and not only on his heart. “Her work is all over our home and in homes throughout Seattle.” 

Listen to your heart. Miller still officially has two clients in his portfolio, although he expects to transfer work on their estates to another practitioner in the near future and “really and truly call it quits.” It’s not so easy to let go—or, more precisely, to be let go—when your work has been part of the fabric of the community for so long. Miller’s mode of business is more like a code of neighborliness, building clients through long-established connections and service.

“I’ve never spent a nickel on advertising,” Miller said. “If you do a good job for your clients, the business will take care of itself.” 

One example: When he was young, he befriended a neighbor whose family emigrated from Greece. He taught them conversational English by spending time at their home, and decades later—when the sister of his childhood friend accumulated significant real estate—she knew where to turn for legal advice. 

Overall, it’s the satisfaction of helping people through some of their most difficult times and doing a meticulous job for them—that’s what has kept him actively practicing law through to his 100th year. One of his proudest professional moments was when a judge ruled against him after counsel for the defendant gave an opening argument. “May I be heard, even though you ruled against me?” Miller asked. “I have a case here that will resolve the problem.” Miller had acquired an advance sheet, distributed before official publication, that overturned a point of decades-long standing case law. “The judge reversed the decision right there,” he said.

Listen to your heart. A stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps (renamed Air Force in WWII). A father-in-law who was an unlicensed but much-loved dentist in Montana’s Judith Basin County. A legendary hole-in-one on the sixth hole of the Jackson Park Golf Course. A turn as a military jazz clarinetist. There are voluminous stories to illustrate a life filled with people, knowledge, adventure, and love (and perhaps … a bit of cheek? Did he mention that the portraits his wife painted were often of nudes?). 

He counts himself as a “major foodie” these days because “it really helps a lot in life to sit down at the end of the day with a good meal.” He is frequently accompanied by his Pomeranian named Teddy Bear. For his 100th birthday in August, he expects to have a blowout party at Ray’s Boathouse with a band, so show up with your dancing shoes on. 

Above all else, he reminds you to listen to your heart: it may save your life, and it is certainly the only way to build a life worth living. 

---

Thomas Frank Paul:

The Call of the Sea

The sea, it seems, was Thomas Frank Paul’s destiny. The deep blue has shaped his life and practice in ways that he can now appreciate—on the precipice of his 100th birthday, still practicing law—as being utterly world-opening. 

It called to him from the beginning. Paul was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1925. His father was master of the local dredge, keeping the channels navigable for ships rolling in from the Pacific. When he was kicked out of the Boy Scouts at an early age for “impertinence” (of which he recalls: “It didn’t serve me well then, but it has served me well throughout my career”), the Sea Scouts were glad to take him in. He spent his teen years as a deckhand working on the dredge. And when he graduated from high school at the age of 17, he enlisted straightaway with—of course—the U.S. Navy. 

“I was attached to the Fourth Marine Division, we were in the first wave of the battle for Iwo Jima,” Paul said. “We were out in the ocean, approaching the island, and there was Mount Suribachi and these black sandy beaches—it looked like a vacation destination. Little did we know.”

His plans post service took a slight detour from the water. He graduated with a psychology degree from Washington State College (now Washington State University) and returned to Aberdeen where he worked as a police officer for three years. “I started to realize it was kind of a dead-end job, especially in that town,” Paul said. “I started to get to know some of the lawyers working there, and their lives seemed to be going pretty well.” That’s how Paul decided to go to the University of Washington School of Law. 

When he graduated in 1958, it just so happened that the first firm to offer him a job was a premier maritime establishment. And so Paul returned to the sea—for the long haul.

“It was a perfect match,” Paul said, and, indeed, he would go on to serve his entire career there until he “retired” in 2014 from the firm currently known as LeGros Buchanan & Paul.

“Well, I thought I was retiring, and I did leave the firm,” Paul explained. “But I just kept getting phone calls. I have people who want to talk out issues. I am practicing, but not billing. I am not sure how that works out.” 

It’s hard to shake a reputation of preeminence in a highly specialized field, and Paul has deep connections throughout the national and international maritime communities with people who still want his advice. After more than 65 years on the job, Paul has seen, and litigated, just about everything—hundreds of successful jury and non-jury cases involving ship collisions and allisions, groundings, sinkings, cargo damage, salvage, liens, fires, wrongful deaths, and personal injuries. He has argued before the Ninth Circuit and had cases accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court. For the WSBA, he served on the Mediation Panel and Fee Arbitration Panel. Nationally, among many other duties, he has served as the chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Admiralty and Maritime Litigation and on the American Association for Justice and the U.S. Maritime Law Association. 

The maritime industry and culture have seeped into his marrow, and the stories he can tell are prodigious, spanning Seattle to Shanghai, often including on-site visits to marooned freighters and barges, involving negligence that cost, at best, millions of dollars or, at worst, human lives. 

There is the infamous tale of Rolf and Ruth Neslund that looms large in Seattle lore. In 1978, Rolf was piloting a 550-foot freighter when he rammed it into the old West Seattle Bridge, rendering it inoperable until a new span could be constructed. Several years later, everyone thought Rolf had absconded back to his home country of Norway; it turned out he had died a grisly death at the hands of his wife.

Paul was right in the middle of it, representing the shipowner in the negligence trial. Of the Neslunds, he remembers, “My image of them was of a truly loving older couple, sitting on the davenport in my office holding hands. Well, apparently not!” 

While he did not do much plaintiff work, one of his proudest accomplishments was a more than $7 million settlement for a shipyard worker whose crane fell, and he was stuck in the cage underwater for so long that he sustained a brain injury. 

What Paul remembers most about the maritime industry, however, is how it quite literally opened the world to him—and his wife and three children, who often were able to accompany him. 

“The traveling was wonderful,” he said. “I got to go all around the world, and I got to meet people and see the inner workings of foreign nations in ways that were not accessible for many.”

How many times did he travel to England? Too many to count on fingers and toes, especially when you add in travels to the rest of Europe and Asia as well. There was the time he attended a maritime conference meeting in—in—the Eiffel Tower. Or when he spoke about cargo claims to a packed auditorium at the Taiwan Ship Owners Conference in Taipei. Or when the English government called him in to unwind a complicated hydrofoil agreement involving Boeing and Belgium. 

His work put him on the front lines when the U.S. and China established formal diplomatic relations in the late ’70s and ’80s. He has a vivid recollection of being closely followed by a “tail” when he visited Shanghai with his wife. And he was personally asked by the U.S. government to lead a people-to-people diplomatic mission there in 1988.

Paul is still traveling the world with his children (his wife passed away several years ago) and has no plans to slow down his active lifestyle. His self-proclaimed hobby is soaking up the sun. As an example, his itinerary for 2023 included trips to Puerto Vallarta, Saint Lucia, and Las Vegas to bask in the rays. Shortly before his 94th birthday, he took a helicopter tour of an Alaskan glacier. He commemorated his 80th and 90th years on Earth by jumping out of an airplane—a feat he fully plans to replicate when he turns 100. And he took the field at a Seahawks game on Oct. 29, 2023, when the organization honored him for his military service. It’s all part of the continuing life adventure for Paul.

“People always want to know my secret,” Paul said. “My dad would give us each a big spoonful of cod liver oil when we were little. Maybe that’s the secret. It probably has nothing to do with anything, but it’s all I can come up with.”

Alternatively, he swears by two cocktails before dinner—currently a Jameson or a Manhattan—which has been his practice for more than 65 years. 

“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” he said. “At my age, you don’t want to mess with a winning formula.” 

---