“I’ve never had a sensation like that,” she says.

Looking back on her 88 years of life in the 20th century, Miller says that single moment on July 20, 1969, stands out from all the rest.

“It touched my heart and whole being,” she says.

One of the most shocking moments was when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Miller was in a drugstore in downtown Salisbury eating ice cream with her younger sister, Carolyn, and a cousin when they heard the news.

“We just got up and went out and got in the car and took our cousin home,” she says. “And all this time, we never said a word. We were just in shock.”

All three of Miller’s brothers served in World War II, “so it really affected the whole family,” she says.

Though a first cousin was killed, her brothers all made it through safely.

“It was a time of thanksgiving and gratitude that God had spared them,” she says.

Hearing about two young men walking into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, with automatic weapons and killing fellow students and a teacher was also shocking for this longtime schoolteacher.

“It’s very sad,” she says. “Something has gone very wrong in our country that these children have to react with violence. It’s a sad commentary.”

Miller, who retired from teaching in 1973, has seen a lot of changes in education in her life.

Growing up, she attended a one-room schoolhouse on the South River, where her aunt taught her for two years and her grandfather for one.

“My grandfather was one of these fellows, he hit first and asked questions second,” Miller says. “When I say ‘hit,’ he had this switch ...”

The oversized geography books they used back then made good protection from the switch. “My granddaddy wasn’t very careful,” she says. “He might be aiming for that person over there and hit you, and so you were ready with that geography book.”

Like her classmates, Miller wanted to be the one selected to walk the quarter-mile to the well to bring back water for the class.

“Another thing I remember,” she says, “is that we’d always try to get right in front or right behind the big, pot-bellied stove that was in the middle of the room. You would either freeze on one side or burn up on the other side, wherever you were sitting.” Students walked to school back then.

“When it was snowing, we’d always have a snowball fight going to school,” she says. “When it was raining, we had rubbers or rain shoes, but most of the kids did not. That was before the days of galoshes.”

Looking back on those days, Miller says she believes they had “the best of both worlds.”

“The older children were asked and expected to help with the younger ones,” she says. “So therefore, we learned from helping others. And if you’ve ever taught, you know that when you teach you learn more than your students do.”

Miller’s father, George Luther Miller, worked for the railroad, and the family moved to Spencer when she was in the seventh grade. She attended Spencer schools after that, graduating from Spencer High School in 1929.

The stock market crash the following October preceded the Great Depression, a time that Miller remembers because of the people who came by their house offering to work for food.

“I never saw my mother turn anyone away from our door,” she says. “These young men would come in and they would want to know if they could chop wood or if they could mow the yard, anything for a meal, and she would feed them.

“I don’t know where she got the food because we were living on not much of anything. She had five children to feed at the time.”

Mary Barringer Miller had six children in all, the youngest of whom was not quite 4 years old when she died of uterine cancer at age 45.

Mary Miller went to Duke Medical Center for radiation treatment, but it failed to stop the spread, and she died in April 1935, six months after her diagnosis.

“If they had gone ahead and operated, maybe they could have saved her,” Miller says. “Just look at all the things that we have now. Back then, all they knew to do was either operate or radiation.”

Miller, who graduated from Catawba College in 1933 with a double major in biology and history, had taught for a year in the mountains and was teaching in Davie County the year her mother got sick.

She finished out the year after her mother died and then gave up teaching and moved back home to help with Carolyn, her 14-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister.

“It wasn’t easy, and sometimes I was not a very happy camper,” she says, “but it was something that had to be done. I was reared in a society that what you had to do, you did.”

Looking back, Miller has no regrets.

“I feel that I have been able to touch a lot of lives,” she says. “Some good has come out of the teaching I did and the looking after Carolyn. God’s been awfully good to me.”

After six years at home, Martha Miller returned to teaching atGranite Quarry, spending the summer in Connecticut helping to make airplane engines for Pratt and Whitney.

Carolyn went with her, but Miller sent her home when she decided to stay on at the company instead of returning to Granite Quarry School.

The end of the war meant the end of her job, and she returned home right before V-J (Victory over Japan) Day on Sept. 2, 1945. She was downtown for the V-J celebrations when the principalat East Spencer asked her what she was going to do next.

“I told him I thought I was going back to school and change my certificate to librarian,” she says. “He said, ‘Well put it off and come out and teach for me this year.’”

Miller, who never married, went to the school the next day to talk to him about it and ended up taking the job.

“I tell people now I went out for one year and stayed 20,” she says.

She started out teaching at East Spencer High School, then switched to the eighth grade after nine years.

Eleven years later, she decided she wanted to be a guidance counselor and took a job counseling students at China Grove and Landis elementary schools.

After a year, Miller says she realized she had made a huge mistake.

“I was not happy at all,” she says. “I needed back in the classroom, so I went over to South Rowan and taught for six years and retired.”

Today, former students greet her wherever she goes.

“My favorites,” she says, “are the big, tall, bearded men who come up and say, ‘Hello Miss Miller, you don’t remember me, do you?’ I say, ‘No, I don’t. I didn’t teach any old folks.’”

Miller, who lives on Colonial Drive, says she has attended three reunions of East Spencer High School classes. It was very rewarding, she says, to hear her former students thank her for the influence she had had on their lives.

“And they were so happy their children had gone on to college and were doing well,” she says. “They would just be beaming. So it wasn’t all in vain.”

Though she enjoyed being a teacher, Miller says she is pleased that young girls growing up today are not limited to a certain profession because of their sex.

“When I came along, the only thing we were sure of that we could do was be a teacher,” she says.

Her hope for the next generation is more contentment.

An affluent society such as this one often leads to a “me generation,” Miller says. “I guess the more we have, the more we think we did it and that God has not had a hand in giving us what we have. “Winston Churchill said we were never as great as we were when we were on our knees.”

Miller says she attributes some of the problems with today’s youth, particularly the violence, to the breakdown of the family.

“Parents are going to have to decide if they’re going to have children that they have certain responsibilities,” she says. “I found as a schoolteacher that some children have to be told they are loved. They don’t pick it up.”

When she was growing up, Miller says she never doubted she was loved.

“My mother and father could not have done the things they did for me if they hadn’t loved me,” she says. “That was just simple logic as far as I was concerned.

“I can’t ever remember my mother ever spending a lot of time telling us she loved us. She showed us. She lived it.”

Mothers today might be trying too hard to work and give children the things they want instead of the things they need, according to Miller.

“I think your average mother feels like she almost has to work,” she says.

“But who am I to say?” Miller adds. “That’s just an old maid talking. My mother always said if you wanted to know how to raise a child, just ask an old maid or a bachelor and they could tell you.”

Miller, who moved in with sister Carolyn Blount eight years ago, says she’s proud to be alive for the millennium.

Other than arthritis, she doesn’t have any serious health problems and has only been in the hospital once in her life. She had been to the doctor complaining of exhaustion when he discovered her hemoglobin count had dropped dangerously low.

The medicine she had been taking had apparently caused a bleeding ulcer.

“He said he had never had another patient like me,” she says. “The only thing I said to him the whole time I was in there was, ‘Can I go home,’ and ‘Get me out of this zoo.’”