Beverly "Bev" Miller

Cecelia Beverly Miller (née Johnston) passed away peacefully on July 8, 2026.

One of the first babies born at the then new General Hospital in Everett on August 18, 1926, Beverly’s life and deep roots in the Everett community are a microcosm of the last 100 years. She lived in Marysville as a young girl long before roads, much less I-5, connected the cities. Her grandfather was one of the founders of Darigold. For decades she lived in a home overlooking Possession Sound and the Everett waterfront where lumber mills and pulp & paper mills brought the city to life and maintained it through the depression. She attended Washington Elementary School – the same building where she lived for the last 7 years of her life. She still has paper grocery bags from Olson’s and Top Foods.

She grew up in a time when the roles of women were often narrowly defined. However, Beverly never let that define her. She worked – as a piano accompanist for a violinist, as a “pill girl” at an Everett drug store after high school, in a bank while in college (she got the job partially because she found the social life of college too mundane), as a flight attendant and then reservations agent for United Airlines, and eventually back to the bank where she rose to the rank of Head Teller after she was married. She was curious, independent, an adventurous traveler, while being deeply committed to, and, active in the Everett community. She was a Charter Member of the Assistance League of Everett (now Luma NW) a group she actively engaged with late into her life. She continued to knit baby blankets and hats for kids born at Providence until a month before she died. The latest count is she hand knit an estimated 700 baby blankets and over 1,000 hats over the years.

A voracious reader, Beverly was a 50+ year member of the Woman’s Book Club in Everett. Months before she died she lamented that she had read all of the books in the Washington Oaks library that were of any interest to her. She never had time or patience for what she considered “fluffy” books, always preferring books where she felt like she could learn something simply by reading them.

Beverly loved to learn. Her never-ending quest to learn showed up if you ever had the audacity to watch Jeopardy with her where she would persistently know all of the answers before you. She was also a walking thesaurus of crossword puzzle answers – only stumped in recent years by more modern culture references. Beverly also loved to teach – piano lessons to neighborhood kids, how to properly set a dining table to her granddaughters, obscure knowledge gleaned over her travels – she was a sponge for information.

Beverly loved music and loved to dance. She started taking group piano lessons at her elementary school before starting private lessons when she was ten. In middle school the orchestra needed a tenor saxophone player so she played the tenor saxophone. In high school she awoke at 5am each day to practice piano for two hours and her fun and best friends all centered around band. Her senior year the high school orchestra performed a piano concerto for the spring concert so she could perform the solo. She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Music and continued to play the piano her entire life.

Her lifelong love for travel was piqued in the summer of 1945 when she spent a summer studying at Teacher’s College at Columbia University. Highlights of that summer included seeing 19 different Broadway shows – she still has all of the Playbills – and celebrating in Times Square when the Japanese surrendered, something she said was a highlight of her life. Her travels over the years took her to countries largely untouched by tourism and countries that no longer exist anymore. She also loved travel closer to home – especially if it was on a boat in August aboard the Pat-CB.

Beverly was adored. As a young child by her grandparents and Uncle Chuck, by the boys from home that wrote to her during WWII and courted her by mail, by her beloved Pat – meeting him on a blind date in September 1946 and never looking back, by her extended family, and by her extensive network of friends in Everett. Beverly had a special relationship with her own grandmother, something she carried on with her own four granddaughters. Her home on Grand Ave was filled with treasures from her travel and was the site of Thanksgiving sleepovers, Book Club luncheons, Apple Cup parties, cocktails on the back porch, and decades of family holiday gatherings.

Beverly was proudest most of her two kids, Bonnie and Steve, and her four granddaughters, Katie, Kelly, Carly, and Kyla. For the granddaughters, getting to tell anyone in Everett that you were Bev Miller‘s granddaughter remains a badge of honor.

Bev is preceded in death by husband Pat (2008) and daughter Bonnie (2020). Beverly is survived by her son and daughter-in-law Steve and Dru Miller; her son-in-law Tom Ronan; granddaughters Katie Ronan, Kelly (Sean) Hafner, Carly (Casey) Dell, and Kyla (Garrett) Woodward; and great-grandkids Regina and Thomas Hafner, Cayden and Conley Dell.

In lieu of flowers, donations on Beverly’s behalf can be made to Luma NW (formerly Assistance League of Everett) or the Woman’s Book Club Endowment Fund.