Frank Miller drew editorial cartoons for the Des Moines Register for nearly 30 years before his death in 1983. Much of his humor was delivered with a sly wink that regular readers understood and appreciated. 

An example was his treatment of daylight saving time, which was instituted as an energy-saving measure during World Wars I and II and has been around ever since. During the 1960s, the concept created much controversy and was widely debated in Iowa. Miller responded with a cartoon in April 1966 of a woman tending her garden and telling a passerby, “This extra hour of sunshine is ruining my flowers.”  

That was one of the 180 of his cartoons collected in a book titled “Frank Miller” that the Des Moines Register commissioned following his sudden death from a heart attack. My father-in-law, Knox Craig, a retired newspaper editor and close friend of Miller’s, wrote the copy that accompanied the cartoons. 

My personal favorite is one that appeared in the newspaper on Oct. 2, 1982, one week after the  Des Moines Tribune folded. The Tribune had been the city’s afternoon newspaper for 75 years until the Cowles family, which owned the Register and Tribune, decided to consolidate the separate newsrooms under the Register nameplate.

The Tribune’s 80,000 subscribers were much saddened, and Miller found the perfect way to express their grief. He drew a simple scene, a husband and wife looking out their front window at a bewildered dog on the front lawn. “He misses the Tribune” is the caption. 

Tribune staffers clipped and framed that cartoon. Mine sits on a shelf in my wife’s home office. (We both worked at the Tribune.) Other Frank Miller originals hang in our basement rec room, but we always kept “He misses the Tribune” close at hand. 

Miller gave away many originals to readers. He didn’t charge for them, just gave them to the first person who asked. Often that person was a political figure, who had been skewered by Miller’s humor. 

That was a long time ago, when politics was still a civil pursuit and few officials took personal offense when a cartoonist or columnist poked fun at them.  

Miller could also poke fun at himself.

For years, he drew monthly calendars for the Register that featured Iowa locations. On Sept. 1, 1965, against the backdrop of the Le Mars Opera House, he drew a calendar with 31 days. The next day, there was a correction showing a cartoonist with a dunce cap at his drawing board repeatedly writing “30 days hath September.” A nearby “Smart Alec Reporter” says, “ I knew cartoonists couldn’t spell but I thought they could count.” 

For nearly 30 years, Miller commented on the front page of the Register on issues of domestic and foreign policy, economics, recreation, the arts, the weather and other topics that captured Iowans’ attention.  

During the early 1980s, when lawmakers were considering pari-mutuel betting on horse races, he drew a barnyard scene with a horse wearing an oversized grin and strange look in his eye. Nearby are two pigs, one of which says: “Charlie is excited about pari-mutuel betting coming to Iowa. He hopes to become involved.”  

During the inflation-fueled 1970s, there was a cartoon of a woman grocery shopping. She was sprinting down an aisle grabbing items, followed by a store employee carrying a list titled “Price Increases.” 

Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon he drew in 1963 showing two men staggering on a remnant of a destroyed globe. “I said – we sure settled that dispute, didn’t we,” one survivor says.

One key to Miller’s success, wrote Register columnist Robert Hullihan, was the cartoonist’s understanding of the world. “He knew its truths, its lies, its shabby propositions, its rare moments of grace and triumph and fun, and he knew that most of the time we lose.

“But he also knew that, in Iowa, most of the time we also endure.”