Box returns home

Everything Marsha Miller has left of her father can fit in one, small cardboard box.

There are a few fading naval service ribbons, yellowing military documents and some disintegrating newspaper clippings.

A black and white group photo from a naval ship yearbook shows Burt Miller in uniform with thinning hair and kind, thoughtful eyes.

“He had a great smile,” Marsha said. “He was very intelligent. He could read a book and understand it immediately. He could speak on any level to anyone.”

The cardboard box and its contents were left by mistake at a Costa Mesa apartment complex a year and a half ago when Marsha moved to Orange. Her daughter, who was helping her pack, overlooked the box and left it sitting in the empty apartment.

Marsha didn’t know the box filled with her father’s things was missing until she received a letter in the mail this week from a Costa Mesa man who has tried for several months to find her and return her father’s things.

“I cried for a whole day after I got that letter,” Marsha said

Her current address surfaced after a search of voter registration records earlier this month. The address was a new lead for Costa Mesa resident David Stiller, who had found the name of Burt’s daughter after contacting the deceased veteran’s high school classmates and combing through public records.

A phone number listed for Marsha in Orange seemed to be disconnected. So Stiller sat down and wrote a letter.

“I wasn’t going to give up. I would have gone up to Orange and knocked on doors first,” Stiller said.

Stiller, a retired insurance claim investigator, felt a close connection with Burt — both men served in the Navy. After first reading about the abandoned box in the Daily Pilot in November, he wanted to help. A maintenance man who works at the Costa Mesa apartment complex where Marsha lived for 15 years before moving to Orange discovered the box.

For the past several months, the box has sat in the living room of Korean War veteran James Russell Brown. The maintenance man had passed the box on to him.

Brown called the Daily Pilot last fall to help find whoever left the box.

“I’m happy,” Brown said Wednesday, after hearing its rightful owner had been found. “You guys did a good job.”

Marsha holds memories of her father close to her heart — he died when she was 19. Her parents divorced when she was young and her father’s naval career moved him across the country while Marsha grew up with her mother and stepfather in La Mesa. Although there were phone calls on birthdays and a few visits, she never really got to know her father until she went to live with him and his second wife in the San Diego area when she was 17.

“We had two beautiful years together,” Marsha said.

Two of the tarnished medals in Burt’s box are Vietnam service medals. He died there in 1972 — but not in combat.

Burt had just finished playing a game of golf on a course created from a cleared patch of Vietnamese jungle when he died of a heart attack. The course was famous among American service members for its difficult terrain.

“He had just finished his game of golf, and he was happy,” Marsha said.

After her father’s death, Marsha inherited a trunk filled with her father’s things — including the American flag that was draped over Burt’s casket. The trunk and its contents were lost several years ago when the rented storage space she kept them in caught fire.

She inherited the cardboard box filled with her father’s military papers and medals after her sister died five years ago.

“It’s all I have left of him,” she said.

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected]. BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected].