PITTSFIELD — Among the easels, drafting tables, oil pastels and paint-by-number kits at Miller Supply, there’s an oddly shaped mass of gray metal, slightly larger than a bread box, tucked among papers on a top shelf.
Miller Supply founder George Miller picked up that Norden bombsight for $25 in the 1960s. When he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he had the unassuming title of mess kit repair.
Steve Miller rings out a customer. For 75 years, Miller’s Supply has been the destination for artists in Pittsfield.
Cpl. Miller’s top-secret job was to repair the Norden bombsight, the device that guided B-17s and other high-altitude bombers to their targets during World War II. Thus, that particular relic.
Now owned by his son, Steve Miller, 71, the store at 205 West St. has been in business in Pittsfield for 75 years, with its future uncertain as he mulls retirement. It opened in 1949 on First Street, just a few years after George Miller returned from his service. Today, it’s the largest art supply and picture framing store in the tri-state area.
FINDING PITTSFIELD
During training in the 1940s, an Army buddy introduced a then-single George Miller to his sister, Sally Ruth Leibowitz, who followed him to Odessa, Texas, to get married. He then shipped out to London and she returned to New York City. When he returned, the couple first moved to his native South Dakota to work in two family businesses, liquor and oil.
“My mother being from the Bronx, it was like culture shock,” Steve Miller told The Eagle. “She was miserable.”
For 75 years, Miller Supply has been the destination for artists in Pittsfield.
The businesses were sold and the couple headed to Mexico for a vacation. There, Sally Ruth Miller told her husband she didn’t need to live in New York, but she wanted to live within easy driving distance. They looked on a map, took a spin and landed in Pittsfield in 1948.
George tried insurance first and later took a job with Sam Carr, at Carr Hardware on North Street. They lived in a large house on the corner of Pomeroy Avenue and East Housatonic Street and rented out their spare room.
For 75 years, Miller Supply has been the destination for artists in Pittsfield.
FOUNDING MILLER SUPPLY
At the time, Carr Hardware sold just one item of Ox Line Paints. A traveling salesman and frequent boarder asked George Miller if he’d open a paint store showcasing the whole line. Ox Line Paints, the man assured him, would help him set up shop, backing him monetarily.
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George Miller agreed, opening the first Miller Supply at 23 First St. in 1949. Then, in 1952, the Colonial Theatre went to auction. George and Sally Ruth Miller were among four bidders.
Theirs was the lowest offer, but George Miller promised the seller he would not tear the theater down. That sealed the deal, and Miller Supply relocated one-third of a mile from First Street to the theater on Pittsfield’s busiest block.
“To accommodate a retail paint and art supply business, the orchestra floor was leveled and a drop ceiling was added, concealing — and preserving — the balconies and elaborate architectural details,” according to the history of the Colonial Theatre on the Berkshire Theatre Group’s web page.
Miller Supply sign on the Colonial Theatre in 2002.
THE COLONIAL YEARS
As a child, Steve Miller found going into the unlit areas of the theater a bit eerie. One of his earliest memories is poking holes in wall paper samples that had just been hung by longtime employee Joan Beach.
As a teenager, he began working in the store.
On Super Bowl Sunday 1968, an electrical fire started in an apartment attached to the Colonial. A barber in the building called the fire department.
With its inventory of flammable paint, had it gone undetected, “the building would have exploded,” Steve Miller said.
While at the Colonial, Stockbridge’s most famous illustrator, Norman Rockwell, chose to use Miller Supply to frame his works, and the store became a destination for artists and collectors.
When Sally Ruth Miller died in 1969, George Miller put Steve Miller’s name on all ownership documents. He was then 17.
After graduating from Pittsfield High School in 1970, Miller went to the University of Massachusetts where he first studied math and ended up majoring in management and marketing at its business school. He worked at Miller Supply summers. After graduation, he came back to Pittsfield.
Steve Miller takes inventory at Miller Supply on West Street in Pittsfield.
“I certainly was running the store by the time I got out of college,” Miller recalled, adding that he expected to work alongside his father, but George Miller stepped aside to let him take the reins.
In 1997, state Rep. Andrea Nuciforo announced $2.5 million was available to help restore the theater, but it was a 1998 visit by then-first lady Hillary Clinton that accelerated efforts to do so.
In 2001, Steve and Amy Miller sold the theater to Colonial Theatre Association for $1.1 million.
“The Miller family is credited by all associated with the theatre for maintaining the structural and decorative integrity of The Colonial Theatre until the community was ready to bring it back into service as a community entertainment center,” the Berkshire Theatre Group’s web page reads.
In hunting for a new location for Miller Supply, Steve Miller hoped to stay on the same block of South Street, noting its high traffic volume both by foot and car.
When he hit upon the old Adams Super Market building at 205 West St., he felt its spaciousness and parking lot might help compensate for the loss of that traffic. He purchased it for $390,000 in 2002.
For 75 years, Miller’s Supply has been the destination for artists in Pittsfield.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE
Steve Miller met Amy Ortenberg in high school, although he’d spied her at the piano in junior high orchestra practice. The two married at Temple Anshe Amunim in 1975, where she later became its cantor. They had two daughters, now grown and living out of town. Amy Miller died on June 9.
Neither of Miller’s daughters appears to be interested in running an art supply and framing business in Pittsfield, Steve Miller said.
Near the front of the store, there are reminders of its years and place in Berkshire County: A framed photo by William Teague, a framed poster by Bert Friedman, framed Rockwell prints and a book on a stand chronicling the restoration of the Colonial Theatre, which has a photograph of Steve and Amy Miller in the Colonial when it was Miller Supply.
Through the years, Steve Miller has enjoyed the people he’s met through the business. Although he’s been less inclined to befriend his customers than his more gregarious father, that’s started to happen in recent years.
The COVID-19 pandemic took its toll, though Miller never stopped working and opened for the occasional customer who knocked during the mandated shutdown of 2020. While the business used to have five to six employees, today it has four.
Now 71, Steve Miller is not sure of what is in store for Miller Supply.
He said, “It just never occurred to me to retire.”
