I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together

Close to how I looked when I found out

Probably one of the most unusual intersections in my life has to be the Brian Miller/Carol Burnett connection.

It starts back in the 1970s, when I attended Torrance High School in southern California. During the first three years of high school, I was a proud member of the Tartar Band, playing trumpet. I found myself going down that path and by the end of the marching band season of my junior year, I was done. Besides, I was an OK trumpet player–but Adrian Miller was excellent. Such control, such perfection.

In my last year with the band, Adrian’s little brother, Brian, entered high school. He played drums and was quite accomplished, even as a freshman. He really looked under control when he got behind his drum set, that little early-growth goatee making him look like a beatnik musician out of the 1960s. As I moved through high school, then headed off to college, I lost track of the Miller brothers. But I heard they continued with their musical careers after our days at THS.

While most of my teenage memories had to do with basketball, high school and girls (one in particular), I also remember evenings at the Hunter household, watching The Carol Burnett Show. She’d come out, answer questions from the audience, then do most of an hour’s worth of skits, with some songs thrown in. But it was the skits, where they’d go into hysterical laughing fits that I remember most. Carol, Harvey, Lyle, Tim, Vicki and there, in the audience, Ernie Anderson.

Flash forward a few decades and my sister Debbie informs me that she’s working with Adrian and Brian’s little sister. That’s when I found out how it all connected. Here’s the short version. After graduation, Brian continued fulfilled his musical destiny by becoming a drummer with the CBS orchestra. As if that wasn’t good enough, he struck up a friendship with Carol Burnett, that evolved and, once she found herself single, it went even further to the degree that today, Carol Burnett is actually Mrs. Brian Miller! No sh…kidding!!

Waking the halls of Torrance High 40 years ago, who knew that one day, one of my classmates would be married to Carol Burnett?

To Carol– a Tarzan yell this week on your 80th birthday. To the unlikely couple, I’m so glad you had this time together.

Tim Hunter