By ADRIANA JANOVICH
YAKIMA HERALD-Republic
He's billed as "Mr. Inspiration."    But he doesn't look particularly inspirational. He limps on stage. His right arm just hangs there. A crutch elongates his left arm. He wears a leg brace and funny hats.
Then he smiles — that infectious, broad, fetching smile — and delivers self-deprecating cracks and lines such as "Plan to laugh" and "Dream big!"
He laughs at himself and he invites you to, too. He says his right arm is so slim he can wear watches all the way to his armpit, then rolls up his sleeve to prove it. He grabs his guitar and slips into a silly but affirmative song: "I Lobster but Never Flounder."
Life, he reminds people, is a choice.
Yakima's Dan Miller should know: He makes a living inspiring others. The affable author, speaker and former Prosser educator travels across the country encouraging people by sharing his story and sayings, self-dubbed "Danisms."
Since 1990, he's spoken 1,352 times in 45 states and four Canadian provinces to more than 500,000 people. He's sold more than 52,000 copies of his self-published book and his story is in the 2000 book "Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul: Heartwarming Stories for People 60 and Over."
He's spoken to audiences in Yakima 32 times, including nearly 440 people at Westside Baptist Church recently, when he described how he wakes up each morning: "It's a great day. I choose to enjoy it."
He received a standing ovation.
"He's the guy who came from almost the very worst that could possibly be with the attitude that anything's possible," says Chuck Goemmer, a church activities organizer. "The whole concept is that we're of infinite worth."

 

Give Miller a ring. His message echoes the title of his 1997 self-published book, "Living, Laughing and Loving Life!"
It's followed by a giddy laugh, a giggle really. During his talks, that winsome chuckle is practically part of his punch lines. He breaks into laughter barely before the last word escapes his mouth.
Miller, 66, encourages people to take risks, persist, dream, laugh and like themselves. He asks them to reject rejection and refuse to be grumpy.
"I choose to laugh," he says. "I plan to laugh. I expect to laugh. I make sure it's part of my life." But, he says, "I'll never get a laugh at your expense."
He's carried himself through life with humility, humor, hard work and physical limitations. Weak legs. A useless arm. A partially performing arm.
See, Miller was the guy in college who was excused from taking physical education classes but took them anyway because he longed to become a P.E. teacher. He couldn't run or jump or climb a flight of stairs — but he wanted to fly.
He understands what it's like to fall and fall and fall again. He understands what it's like to be stepped over — literally — and put down.

 

That understanding came on a July afternoon nearly 48 years ago, when Miller took his most devastating fall.
It was the summer of 1955, the year that — can you dig it, Daddy-O? — Disneyland opened, James Dean died, McDonald's started, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and people hoped Jonas Salk's new vaccine would stop an epidemic.
Miller was an 18-year-old football champion, basketball captain and track star who had just graduated from high school.
He'd spent that fateful Saturday in the fields, raking hay. His plan was simple: Get cleaned up, hop in his 1951 Ford and drive to Brewster, Wash., with friends for a movie.
He didn't make it to the movie, though — or anywhere but the hospital the rest of that summer. Salk's vaccine, which stopped polio, still hadn't made it to the far reaches of Central Washington.
Before he could finish raking the fields, Miller started feeling sick.
It seemed like the flu. He was feverish. Aching. Nauseated.
He skipped the movie and went straight to bed.
Within days, he couldn't move.
His worried parents took him to a Wenatchee hospital, where doctors gave him the bad news: He'd become one of the country's last acute polio cases.
A month later and the vaccine would've prevented it, but Miller's Okanogan County hometown of Pateros, population 643, wasn't at the top of the national distribution list.
"I missed it by three weeks," Miller says.

 

The most feared illness of the day, poliomyelitis blocks motor messages from the brain. Without them, muscles can't move; eventually they atrophy. During Miller's youth, polio — known as "The Crippler" —  killed about 60,000 kids and disabled nearly 2 million more.
The virus left Miller's legs — the ones that, only weeks before, had leaped for rebounds and rocketed around the track in the one-mile race — 80 percent paralyzed. It rendered his right arm nearly useless, his left arm half-functioning. His doctor told him he'd never walk again.
But his doctor couldn't have pictured a patient quite like Miller.
An old black-and-white photograph in Miller's book does, though: There he is — a blond, crew-cut kid receiving electrical muscular treatment in a hospital bed. Even then, he's smiling — a broad, bright, contagious grin.
His humor, he says, helped him endure being prodded and pulled during 100 days of hospital rehabilitation and two surgeries.
He practiced walking in a pool. He learned to eat and write with his left hand. He dreamed of learning to fly, playing golf and guitar, teaching P.E., marrying a nice girl and raising a family.
A year later, Miller left his wheelchair for Eastern Washington University in Cheney. He told his adviser, professor Richard H. Hagelin, that he couldn't do push-ups or pull-ups, climb a rope or jump rope. But he wanted to major in P.E.
"(Hagelin) said 'Let's see what you can do' when he knew I could do nothing," Miller says. "That's what I needed: Someone to give me encouragement when it looked impossible."
Polio delayed Miller's dreams; it didn't stop them. The paralyzed kid who'd dreamed of flying graduated from college, earned a master's degree, became a schoolteacher and principal, played guitar in a band and even shot a hole-in-one in 1996 at the Village Greens Golf Club in Port Orchard, Wash.
And he learned to fly, banking over the Grand Canyon, cruising over California to see Hearst Castle — even completing a coast-to-coast sojourn with his son to celebrate the son's high school graduation.
He got the girl, too.
He met Judy in a cafeteria at college. He asked her out for a soda. He was so excited that he tripped and fell on the way. Judy picked him up. They married Aug. 15, 1959, and now have three grown children and eight grandchildren.
"He's captivating," says Judy, a retired teacher. "He's happy and cheery and pleasant. He sees the good."
Dan calls Judy his "dreammaker." When he learned to fly, she flew with him. Now she schedules his speeches, carries his guitar and microphone and sets up and takes down his stage.
A year and a half ago, the couple moved to Yakima, a central springboard for speaking engagements around the Northwest.
These days, the aftereffects of polio, known as post polio syndrome, are taking a toll. Miller's pain and fatigue, part of why he quit education at 53 in 1989, make travel difficult.
He needs help swinging his guitar strap over his shoulder. He uses a motorized scooter to get around. He's toppled hundreds of times — and those falls have broken ribs and required knee surgery.
But, he says, "I get up every day and I say, 'Dan, you're an awesome dude.' I like myself just the way I am. I made a choice: I never put myself down. Put-downs hurt. Compliments help."
While he was a teacher in Prosser during the 1970s, Miller gave ribbons to kids who beat him at sit-ups. As principal in Leavenworth during the 1980s, Miller started an "I Love Mondays" campaign and sent kids to his office for being good. He won state education awards for outstanding leadership in 1986, 1988 and 1989.
Miller spoke at the memorial service when Hagelin, his old mentor at Eastern, died a couple of years ago. Today he's committed to spreading the late professor's sentiment, the sentiment Hagelin shared with Miller more than four decades ago:
"Let's see what you can do."

 

Ten of Dan Miller's "Danisms":
* Choose to enjoy every day, especially Monday.
* If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly — at first.
* Misery is optional; joy is a choice.
* If it hurts someone, it's not funny.
* Be a "dreammaker," not a "dream-breaker."
* A "dreammaker" is a giver of courage.
* Find a "dreammaker."
* Sometimes you have to be your own "dreammaker."
* There is more than one way to do something right.
* Life is too long to be grumpy.

 

 Visit Miller online at www.danmillerspeaker.com.

e-mail Miller at dan@danmillerspeaker.com