Writing the story of Wessa Miller

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – You’ve seen the cartoons where somebody gets an idea and light bulb goes off over his head.

That didn’t literally happen to me the night I first thought about trying to find out whatever happened to Wessa Miller, but it really was something very much like that. The story that resulted from it appears in the Charlotte Observer and on thatsracin.com.

I was at home, late on a Saturday night, poking around the Internet looking for interesting or fun facts about the history of the Daytona 500. I looked back at some of the stories about Dale Earnhardt’s victory in the 1998 race, and remembered the story about the Make-A-Wish girl who gave Earnhardt a lucky penny the day before the race.

I can’t say I remembered the 6-year-old girl’s name, but I saw it in some of the second-day stories about Earnhardt’s historic win.

About 10 days earlier, we’d been at Dale Earnhardt Inc. on the preseason media tour and I had walked around the lobby looking at some of the display cases there. In one about Earnhardt’s 1998 victory in the sport’s biggest race I saw a picture of the little girl and remembered her story fondly.

But nothing clicked. It wasn’t until I saw it online again that Saturday night at home that I started thinking about her.

I have to be honest. My first thought was, “I wonder if she’s still with us?” It has been 10 years.

Sadly, too many of the children who have their wishes granted by the marvelous Make-A-Wish aren’t around to have their stories told 10 years later.

My next thought was how do I find her?

I went to Google and typed in her name. I found a blog, or something of that nature, written by a professional wrestler in Kentucky who’d met Wessa and her parents at some kind of fundraiser after they had been to meet Earnhardt. I have no idea who the wrestler is or how old that blog was, but it was a lead.

The blog named a school in Fedscreek, Ky. So I went to whitepages.com and tried to find a listing for Booker Miller or Wessa Miller there. It wasn’t going to be that easy, though.

I sent e-mails that night to a couple of people at Dale Earnhardt Inc., hoping somebody there might have a contact.

Max Siegel, DEI’s president, offered to do anything he could to help me. Kevin Woods, one of the team’s public relations people, suggested I try the Make-A-Wish folks in Charlotte, who wind up handling a lot of NASCAR-related wishes.

I got in touch with Amy Laws at that office. She contacted the Kentucky chapter and found an address and phone number for the Millers. By Monday night, I was calling their house.

Juanita was serving supper when I first called. We arranged for me to call back later that evening and I did. I talked to Booker first, then to Juanita, then to Wessa for a few minutes, then to Juanita again. When I looked up, we’d been on the phone more than an hour.

I was going back through my notes, shaking my head and wiping a few tears from my eyes, when Juanita called me back with one more story. I thanked her, shed a few more tears and went downstairs.

“If I can’t write this story,” I told my wife, Katy, “they need to ban me from ever using a laptop again.”

I woke up at 3 the next morning and went back upstairs. I wrote the first draft of the story in about three hours. I did my Sirius NASCAR Radio show and then flew to Daytona.

I’ve been here since, and I’ve talked to Juanita Miller a half-dozen times on the phone since then. I sent her a copy of one version of the story to make sure I had the details right. I called her back to check with her and she thanked me.

“I hope the Lord blesses you for wanting to write Wessa’s story,” she said.

He already has, ma’am. He already has.