George A. Miller, SPUR board member from 2015 to 2022, member of the Finance Committee, and past member of the Ballot Analysis Committee, died on February 4, two days before his 90th birthday, as he was preparing to rejoin the SPUR Board of Directors for another term.
George was one of a kind — a deep thinker, an urbanist, an environmentalist, a brilliant investment strategist, and an irreverent raconteur who was smart enough not to take himself too seriously. Friend of international leaders in business and government, university presidents, politicians (but never a donor), and anybody who was interesting, he first quit giving “recommendations,” then “opinions,” and settled with sharing “thoughts” as he ever grew in wisdom and wit.
On the SPUR board, as in life, George was wise enough to know that his influence was inversely proportional to the number and length of his comments. He described a SPUR board meeting as “a graduate seminar where everybody does their homework.” George was an active thought partner in SPUR’s work on water resource planning, transportation, and other region-wide issues. Always generous to SPUR, when then-CEO Gabriel Metcalf approached George to help fund development of the SPUR Regional Strategy, his reply was, “If not us, who? If not now, when? So I figured it out in about two minutes.” Thus George became an early supporter of SPUR’s multi-year initiative to envision the future of the Bay Area.
On ballot analysis, George’s opinions on the myriad propositions on every San Francisco ballot reflected what he referred to as “gamos” — George A. Miller Aphorisms — which he had emblazoned on a series of black T-shirts: ”The Other Guy May Be Right,” “Which Way Would You Rather Be Wrong?,” “No Solution? Then It’s Not a Problem,” “Everything Ain’t the Alamo,” “Turn the Dial, Don’t Flip the Switch,” “The Sahara Is Not a Drought. This Is Not a Crisis,” and myriad others.
At lunchtimes, he could usually be found at Sam’s Grill, where he fashioned himself as the Gin Steward. Started in 1867, Sam’s is the fifth oldest restaurant in the country, and quintessential San Francisco, with its fresh seafood, old-school dark wood curtained booths, waiters in tuxedos, and a room full of characters. When the restaurant was in danger of closing a decade ago, George rallied some friends to take it over. “We just try to not lose too much money,” was his business philosophy. He and his wife, Janet McKinley, lived in the Jackson Brewery building in SoMa, which they saved from demolition when it was red-tagged after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and converted into condos.
A child of the great depression, George appreciated what was “enough” to live on and then pledged to “make a difference” with the rest. He developed a modified version of the giving pledge by donating 50% of his income to donor-advised funds as a tax efficient strategy. In addition to SPUR, George and Janet actively supported pioneering micro-credit programs in Asia and Africa and programs at UC Berkeley, including the Miller Scholars, which helps low-income students transfer from community colleges, the Cal Band, women’s basketball, and the Bancroft Oral History Center, where they underwrote oral histories with SPUR leaders such as Joe Bodowitz, Jim Chappell, Anne Halsted, Rick Laubscher, Michael Teitz, and Will Travis.
George believed that money is most useful when it is in motion and working for the benefit of others. His “estate plan” was simple: Give everything away, live to be 80, have a double vodka, and die broke. He beat his goal by ten years, and we are all the richer for his life.
Download the Bancroft Library oral history with George
*Jim Chappell is the former president and executive director of SPUR.