Master of the Mission Inn: : Frank A. Miller, A Life. - Paperback

by Maurice Hodgen (Author)

This captivating story recounts Miller's local and state-wide political impact, his influence on the planning and appearance of his home town, his peace advocacy, his almost endless creativity for civic improvement and his penchant for ceremony. At his death the city of Riverside halted for fifteen minutes. Beyond being known as "the man who built the Mission Inn" Frank Augustus Miller's personal and public life have been shrouded in obscurity since his death in 1935. This new biography, based extensively on unpublished sources tells the fuller story of a colorful life. The narrative traces Miller's sometimes conflicted journey toward personal and intellectual maturity, first in frontier Wisconsin then in Riverside California. Readers trace Miller's lifelong growth and his driving sense of "firstness." They sit with him among presidents and princes, travel with him in Europe and Asia, agonize with him in the loss of his first wife and share his happiness in his marriage to Marion Clark. Author Maurice Hodgen has lived in Riverside California since 1968, has guided tours of the Historic Mission Inn since 2001 and has published on the Mission Inn as a National Historic Landmark and Miller's Asian interests as expressed in hotel architecture and decoration.

Author Biography

Even while guiding his first group-tour as a docent at the Mission Inn author Maurice Hodgen suspected that there was more to the hotel builder, Frank Augustus Miller, than he had heard in his thirty some years in Riverside, California. This curiosity launched him into searching in local archives then to going further afield to California and Wisconsin to libraries and locations where Miller had grown up, visited or made his influence felt. Graduate training in social history and a business career provided invaluable tools to tackle this first biography of Frank Augustus Miller since his death in 1935. En route to this biography Hodgen published about the hotel logo adopted by Riverside California, the remarkable pipe organ at the Mission Inn, several fascinating decorative items in the hotel, the Mission Inn as a National Historic Landmark and on Miller's Asian interests as expressed in hotel architecture and decoration.