Wendell “Wendy” Miller has lived in Lake Bluff since 1961 and is, as far as anyone can tell, the oldest person living in the West Terrace. But that’s not Wendy’s greatest claim to fame. He has quite a few of those.
A native Minnesotan, Wendy was 30 when he and his wife, Marlene, paid $32,000 for a center-entrance, 4-bedroom model home on Birkdale Road. There they raised four children, Julie, Robin, Muffet and Peter, and built what by any measure can be called a remarkable life. She was a champion golfer who coached the Lake Forest High School girls’ golf team for 37 years and was active in civic affairs. He was an avid runner who brought masters-level racing to the Chicago area by founding Midwest Masters for runners over 40 in the early 1970s.
Fitness running was just beginning to catch on then, after Frank Shorter earned gold for the USA in the 1972 Olympic Games. Wendy also started Club North Shore, a distance running club with courses that started at Lake Bluff Middle School, ran throughout the village and into Lake Forest and back. One of these was the Lake Bluff Marathon.
“Lake Bluff was the hub,” he says.
Wendy worked in Chicago as a financial advisor, and he knew a lot of people in the city who were runners. If he could organize a marathon in Lake Bluff, he thought, why not Chicago?
“We got together and started to think about a Chicago marathon. We had no money and no access to sponsorship, but I had a contact who was a businessman in Chicago and a runner, Lee Flaherty. Flaherty ran a sales promotion company called Flair Communications. He knew everyone. I coaxed him, and he became interested,” Wendy recalls.
In 1977, Flare Communications became the official sponsor of the first modern-era Chicago Marathon, then called the Mayor Daley Marathon after Richard J., who died the previous year. The race was held on Sept. 25 with a $5 entry fee and nearly 5,000 runners.
Today the Chicago Marathon attracts 50,000 runners with a $150 fee and is one of six World Marathon majors and the fourth-largest race worldwide by number of finishers. It’s sponsored by Bank of America and brings in big bucks — the 2023 race contributed a record-breaking $547 million to the city’s economy. The 2024 event is on Oct. 13.
“I happen to feel that it’s Chicago’s most successful sporting event,” Wendy says.
Wendy has run in 40 marathons worldwide, but in Chicago he has mostly been an admin for the big event. “I was too involved in logistics,” he says. “I was race director in the early years before we hired a person to do that job, and I stayed involved after that.”
Now 91, his running days are over. “The fact of the matter is that there is a kind of tell-tale story with running. We fulfilled an age-old American adage that if something is good, more is better. And we all overdid it. Something gives – the hips, the knees, the meniscus.”
“Now, I walk,” he says.
Arthritis has forced Wendy to retire another beloved activity — the guitar, one of his favorite accomplishments. “When I say I play – I can’t play, but I can chord it so I can sing. And I started a band.”
The band through Grace Methodist Church Lake Bluff was called Hillbilly Hobos, a name crafted by Wendy’s friend and West Terrace neighbor adman Cal Gage. The band included Frank Townsend, then head of the LFHS English Department and an accomplished musician who performed with North Shore Symphony.
“We could do a tune, but we had one major drawback,” Wendy remembers. “I was the only one who knew the words to the songs. They were hillbilly songs. I could sing, and Frank could play the rhythm. We played churches around the area, and we played at the Rotary Club and Kiwanis, and I had the ability of taking a familiar song and putting in words that were relevant to the Presbyterians or the Rotary or whoever the audience was.”
At one point they decided the band needed a bass player, but they wound up with a musician who played the gut bucket – an old washtub converted to an instrument.
“I couldn’t put a price tag on the fun I had playing that guitar,” he says, pointing to the instrument in the corner of his living room.