Francoise Michel Miller

Marie Rose Anna Françoise Michel was born May 28, 1929 in Chicoutimi, Québec. This is a town in the northernmost populated area of Québec at the time, on the Saguenay River that flows from Lac St. Jean. She was the oldest of 8 children. She loved mathematics and when she graduated from high school, she worked at the Banque de Montréal where her father was the Bank Manager.

Feeling the need to meet some new friends, she joined the town band in Arvida, playing the flute (“badly,” as she said.) She was the only woman in the band, but she was soon introduced to the tall handsome English-speaking sousaphone player from Ontario, Adam Miller. They were married in 1953 and moved to Rochester, NY. Adam was working on his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Rochester. Françoise helped him and took care of their young family, daughters Michèle and Janette. They moved to South Charleston, West Virginia in 1961, a year after their son Allan was born. There, Françoise went back to school to Morris Harvey College and received her M.A. in Mathematics in 1970. She began work as a teacher. She loved working with young people and was very interested in incorporating technology into the math curriculum.

Adam and Françoise moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1973, where Françoise continued her work in education at the Indianapolis Public Schools, as an administrator in the Indiana Consortium for Technology and Computers in Education. She retired in 1997 and moved to California to be near her children, and to care for her husband in his failing health.

In Palo Alto, where she lived for 17 years, she volunteered for the Stanford Medical Center Auxiliary from 2012 to its dissolution in 2016, where she served as President for the last two years. Travel was her passion! One of her ambitions was to travel to every continent. She had a lot of fun trying to reach this goal with the Cupertino Senior Center. Her visit to Antarctica was canceled due to bad weather – otherwise she would have achieved her goal.

Perhaps one of her favorite places in the world was Pacific Grove, California. For years she would rent a house for months at a time there. She finally moved to Canterbury Woods in 2019 and had a wonderful time. She told her family she wished she had come much earlier. She enjoyed her friends and “being treated like a queen.”

Françoise leaves behind her children, Michèle (Mark Hollar), Janette (Bruce Bondurant), and Allan (Susan Lee) Miller; grandchildren Rose Bondurant and Marion Hollar; and her brothers Normand Michel and Frédéric Michel, and sister Claudette Michel, along with many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her husband Adam Miller and siblings Bernard Michel, Pierre Michel, Jacqueline Laberge, and Camille Arsenault.

Donations may be sent in Françoise’s name to Covia.org to the Covia Foundation, designating the Employees’ Emergency Fund. We also support the Montage Health Foundation at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula for the excellent care they took care of her.