Okoboji and Statewide, Iowa – A Democrat who represented the Fort Dodge area for 16 years has published a memoir that begins with her childhood during the early years of the civil rights movement and ends with her hopes for the future.
Helen Miller was first elected to the Iowa House in 2002 – just three years after she and her husband moved to Fort Dodge.
Miller was born in 1945 — the day before World War II ended.
Miller, who is 79, started writing the book about four years ago, after attending the Okoboji Writers Retreat.
Miller writes about the riots that erupted in her hometown of Newark in 1967 and other milestones in the civil rights movement, including her endorsement of Barack Obama before the 2008 Iowa Caucuses. Miller, who is an attorney, spearheaded a summit in Waterloo in 2015 that featured bipartisan leaders working on criminal justice reform at the national level.
The company was run at the time by brothers Charles and David Koch, prominent Republican donors who supported criminal sentencing reform. After Miller left the legislature in 2019, Republican Governor Kim Reynolds appointed her to chair the Iowa Board of Parole.
The title of Miller’s book is “I Can’t Swim: A Memoir.” Her late husband was a physician in the military and a former commander of the hospital at Langley Air Force Base. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1999 and the couple moved to Fort Dodge, where he joined a medical practice.
