Ruth Miller

Monday, January 8, 2018

CHESTERFIELD, Mo. -- Ruth E. (Elizabeth) Miller, 96, widow of Beatty P. Miller, died Thursday, Dec. 28, 2017, at Friendship Village Chesterfield.

Born Nov. 20, 1921, in St. Louis, she was the daughter of Cora Wissmann Hoffmann and Luster Gustav (L.G.) Hoffmann. In the 1930s the family moved from St. Louis to Osage County when her father, L. G., purchased his mother's farm, just west of Mount Sterling.

After attending Owensville High School for one year, Ruth was graduated from Linn High School in 1939. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, she travelled to San Antonio, Texas, with her sister and cousin to marry her high school classmate, Beatty Miller.

In the early years of their marriage, the couple lived in St. Louis but moved to Sikeston in 1949 where Beatty worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance until they returned to the city in 1992. Always active in the church, they were members of the First Baptist Church of Sikeston and upon their return to St. Louis joined Parkway Baptist Church at Olive and Ross.

The couple had two children. Pre-vaccine, a son, Curtis, born in 1950, suffered complications from a light case of childhood measles at age 3 and died close to his 10th birthday. Ruth nursed Curtis faithfully for more than seven and a half years and garnered a fair amount of medical knowledge in the process.

After her husband's stroke in the spring of 2005, Ruth cared for Beatty at their home in Town and Country and later when they moved into Friendship Village Chesterfield in 2006 until his death in 2012.

An accomplished seamstress, Girl Scout leader and camp counselor, homemaker and cook, known for her superb pies, she sold pie crust to the family's country neighbors as a teenager.

Ruth is survived by her daughter, Carol Miller; Carol's husband, George Thacher Guernsey IV, and her one sister, Cleo Hoffmann Steffens, all currently of St. Louis.

Memorial services are set for 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17 at Parkway Baptist Church, with burial and graveside services that afternoon at 3 p.m. at Useful Cemetery on Hwy. 50 between Mt. Sterling and Linn in Osage County.


Any memorial contributions in celebration of Ruth's life may go to: Annie's Hope, Suite 104, 1333 W. Lockwood Ave., St. Louis 63122, (annieshope.org) or to the Friendship Village Employee Assistance Fund, Friendship Foundation, c/o Kate Myers, 15201 Olive Blvd., Chesterfield 63017.

Paid obituary