Community Education
Hugh McMillan gave a damn, and so should you
If we live long enough, some of us will have the chance to reinvent ourselves, and live several lives before we die. Hugh McMillan was one of those people.
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Most of those who attended his memorial service on June 18 knew him as the energetic old guy with a camera, who loved to talk and push people to do things. But he lived a whole different life before he ever arrived in the Key Peninsula community of Home in 1978, the year he retired from the CIA.
He would have been delighted by the number of people who showed up Sunday. More than 100 people attended the The Give a Damn for Hugh memorial at the Peninsula High School gymnasium. Hugh died on Feb. 10 at the age of 96.
Representatives from Peninsula School District, the Key Peninsula Fire District and the Key Peninsula Lions Club shared stories of how they met Hugh and their years of friendship together. So did U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor.
Grandson Cameron, son Lance, Hugh and Janice.
Canada-born, Tacoma raised
Hugh’s son Lance opened the service with details about his father’s life. His grandson Cameron closed it with a request that audience members share stories with one another about Hugh. The Peninsula High School Navy JROTC performed an honor guard presentation for Hugh, a Navy veteran of World War II.
Hugh was born in 1926, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His parents had immigrated there from Scotland. They had to immigrate once again, to the United States, when Hugh was 3 years old, because his father was blackballed in Canada for labor organizing, Lance said.
Hugh was drafted into the Navy after graduating from Lincoln High School in Tacoma in 1944, but he never saw combat and was released from duty after the war ended. He used his G.I. Bill to go to college, and graduated from what is now University of Puget Sound.
He met Janice Grosser there, and they became college sweethearts. He graduated in 1950, and continued his studies in graduate school at University of California-Berkeley, and pursued a doctorate at the University of Washington. The CIA recruited him soon after, in 1952. As soon as his training was over in Virginia, he flew Janice there, and the couple were married the following day.
An NJROTC honor guard during the memorial service for Hugh McMillan.
CIA career
His career in the CIA took Hugh, Janice and their two sons all over the world, and through some harrowing historic events.
“In 1965 we lived through the India-Pakistan War, and in 1967 the Arab-Israeli War broke out, and he was trapped in the U.S. Consulate,” Lance said. “He organized the evacuation of more than 900 American citizens, and received his first CIA Intelligence medal.”
Janice shared the Arab-Israeli War story with me one evening after one of the couple’s famous July 4 parties a few years ago. (She died Aug. 1, 2021.) She told me that while she and the children evacuated, Hugh stayed behind to destroy documents before the doors were breached. He somehow also organized and executed a plan to get all of those American citizens evacuated.
While he was doing that, the government sent her to Greece, where she waited, hoping that her husband would join her. She was given money, she said. Lots of it, by the government. Once they arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Greece, she waited in line with the other wives for the next allotment of money, and arranged for a place to stay.
Hugh never took a compliment without mentioning his wife. He was quick to give Janice the credit.
She spent just as many years being a CIA wife as he did being an agent. Hosting all of those parties as a “diplomat” gave them access to people and conversations. Janice said she would get a feel for people right away, and thwarted danger at one point during a party by alerting Hugh. And she had been right about it.
“We lived through a coup in Greece, and another in Turkey, but for us that was just how we lived,” Lance said.
A document from Hugh McMillan’s career in the CIA.
Losing a son
Lance said his family settled on the Key Peninsula after his father retired in 1978, and his parents had no plans except to live a quiet life. Soon after, tragedy struck when his brother, Marshal, died in April of 1979 in a boating accident.
“Dad was bitter and angry. He would stand on the deck, screaming and cussing at the water, drunk. It was a dark time. But a friend suggested that he become a volunteer firefighter, which led to him becoming a fire commissioner,” he said.
He was also a founding member of the Key Peninsula Lions Club.
While those civic duties are something many people endeavor to do, Hugh went beyond. There will never be another Hugh McMillan. We can say that about everyone in our lives, really. There will never be another you, or me. But, when it comes to Hugh McMillan, the Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula communities feel his absence.
He was an inspiration. A force of almost other-worldly energy. He developed a passion for the positive and looked for it in everyone he met. Whether you were a teacher, a writer, a politician, or a parent, he found a way to lift you up and leave you feeling better than when he arrived.
“He would be so complimentary of what I was doing that when he walked out the door I felt so good, and when he complimented you it really meant something,” said Jonathan Bill, who was the drama teacher and is currently a history teacher at Peninsula High School.
Lance, Marshal, Julie and Hugh McMillan during the CIA years.
An evangelist for kids, schools
Hugh’s drive to spread good news led him to volunteer his time as a photographer and writer covering every school event, ball game, school play, scout ceremony, or anything else that kids were involved in that he could attend. He could traverse the peninsulas like no other, camera dangling from his neck, ready to proselytize to anyone he met, in between his assignments that he had given himself, the importance of supporting the schools, and communities.
Hugh was a dogged proponent for the children of the Peninsula School District. He wrote a column called Kids Corner for the Peninsula Gateway newspaper for 30 years, and wrote various articles for the Key Peninsula News as well.
Lance remembered his dad’s lifelong passion for photography.
“He always had a camera,” Lance said. “It was uncommon for him to take family snapshots. Instead, he captured the natural surroundings and everyday people in the places that we lived. We don’t have pictures of him. He was always behind the camera.”
I rarely saw him without a camera dangling from his neck. He seemed to have cloned himself. He could be on one end of the Key Peninsula for an event, and yet submit a photo from another event later that day in Gig Harbor.
Photos on display at the memorial service showed Hugh Mcmillan engaging in one of his lifelong passions, photography.
Inexhaustible Hugh
I’ve never met anyone quite like Hugh. He was brilliant, of course, a night owl, and he had a way of getting things done that I’d never witnessed. As I watched him convince people to give to a cause, to canvas for a candidate, to join the Lions Club, to nominate a community member for the annual Citizen of the Year award, and just show up in general as a citizen, it was clear that he was more than a motivator. He was an advocate.
If he believed in a cause, a person, a candidate for public office, a way to make something better for the community, he’d engage people in conversation, and do everything he could think of to get the gears turning for change.
“He arranged with a neighbor who was a state trooper to train people for the Citizens Against Crime group on the Key Peninsula,” Lance said, listing his fathers lifetime honors like being Gig Harbor Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year in 2010 and Rotary Star in 2014. “He could bring disparate groups of people together to accomplish things.”
For years Hugh rolled around with a Give A Damn bumper sticker on his blue Honda CRV.
One thing that frustrated Hugh was apathy, Rep. Kilmer said.
“He was a man who gave a damn about his country … he gave a damn about community … he gave a damn about his family. He was a person of hope, and he was invested in making things better.”
Kilmer presented the family with a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol in honor of Hugh.
Give a Damn
Hugh’s grandson Cameron concluded the memorial with a story of how his grandfather wanted to change things for the better. That extended as far as a sneeze. He said instead of, “Bless you,” that Hugh preferred the Turkish response, which when translated means: “May you live long.” The response to it is: “May you witness it.”
“My final words to Hugh were in Russian: ‘Do svidanya’ because of another important Hugh-ism,” Cameron said. “He never wanted to say goodbye to anyone. ‘Do svidanya’ means ‘until we meet again’ and I never knew my grandpa to let someone say ‘goodbye’ in his presence without fervently pointing out that you should ‘never say goodbye unless you won’t meet each other again!’ ”
Hugh McMillan definitely showed us what it means to be a good citizen. It would take a large group of people to accomplish everything that one man did in his time as a resident of the Key Peninsula. And that’s just what he would want: All of us to fill his shoes. Get out there and Give a Damn.
The McMillan family invites the community to share stories of Hugh with the community by clicking here.