Barbara Lee Miner

1926 - 2025

BARBARA LEE (KAISER) MINER

June 15, 1926 – August 25, 2025

Barbara Lee (Kaiser) Miner was born on June 15, 1926, in Los Angeles, California, a city just beginning its transformation into the sprawling metropolis it is today. She entered the world during the Jazz Age, when prohibition, speakeasies, and flapper fashions shaped popular culture. Los Angeles itself was blossoming into the capital of the new movie industry, with Hollywood's Golden Age on the horizon. Undeterred by prohibition, Barbara's father, Ralph, brewed his own beer during this era, and young Barbara once told her kindergarten class that she had gone with him to buy malt "for ice cream sundaes, but I knew it was really for beer." Luckily her kindergarten teacher only found it funny.

Barbara began dancing early in life. Though it is hard to imagine today, her mother, Sarah, never drove, so the two often walked or relied on Los Angeles' now-vanished trolley system to reach Barbara's performances across the city. After one recital at a movie theater, she was invited to audition for a film role. She advanced to the final round until Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck himself asked permission to dye her hair blond. Ralph refused, and the role went instead to a little girl named Shirley Temple.

As the Great Depression took hold, millions of Americans struggled for survival. Barbara's family was fortunate that Ralph secured steady work with Standard Oil, which relocated the family to Bakersfield. There Barbara thrived, becoming a majorette who twirled her baton in grand parades that were symbols of hope and community pride in an era marked by hardship. One of her proudest moments as a majorette came in 1939, when she led the parade that opened the San Francisco World's Fair (the Golden Gate International Exposition) which celebrated the brand-new Golden Gate and Bay Bridges and California's place as a gateway to the Pacific.

At sixteen, Barbara caught the eye of a handsome young man named Ed Miner. She said yes to his invitation to go out because he had a car, but it quickly blossomed into a lifelong romance.

History once again touched Barbara's life when, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, America entered World War II. Ed enlisted in the Navy, and like many women of her generation, Barbara experienced the uncertainty of wartime separation. When Ed's ship was damaged and returned to port in California, the two seized the moment to marry. After Ed's safe return from the war, they joined the millions of young couples who built families during the postwar "baby boom." Their first child, Jerry, was born on November 19, 1946, followed by their daughter, Judy, on November 1, 1949. Judy also married her high school sweetheart, Richard Gill Pfeifer, who quickly became like another son to Ed and Barbara.

By the 1970s, Barbara and Ed were grandparents. They welcomed their grandchildren – Angie (Angelia) Pfeifer Flanagan, Jennifer (Miner) Huff, Brian Pfeifer, and Elizabeth (Miner) Enns – into a family rich with love, adventure, and tradition. To her children and grandchildren, Barbara always seemed as glamorous as a movie star, but she was also deeply hands-on: riding bikes, taking them to the family cabin on Huntington Lake, and filling summers with the freedom to climb rocks, hike, swim in the lake, and tell stories. Above all, her gift was storytelling. Her family grew up nourished not only by her care, but by the way she connected the past and present.

Barbara's heritage stretched across some incredible moments of American history. Her uncle was among the U.S. Naval officers lost with the USS Cyclops in the Bermuda Triangle during World War I. Her paternal grandmother belonged to the Studebaker automobile family, innovators of early American industry. On her mother's side, ancestors crossed the plains with Brigham Young during the Mormon migration. Her mother and aunts fled morman Utah for Los Angeles, where her aunt performed in vaudeville and burlesque during its heyday. And in her immediate circle, she was the proud wife of a World War II veteran and the mother of a Vietnam-era Army veteran. She devoted countless hours to genealogy, weaving the lives of her ancestors into family stories that ensured their memories endured. And that legacy will always live on.

Barbara's lifetime, nearly a century long, spanned extraordinary transformations. Born in an America led by President Calvin Coolidge, she lived to see seventeen presidents take office. She witnessed the hardships of the Depression, the unity of the WWII Homefront, the rise of television, the civil rights movement, the moon landing, the women's movement, the dawn of the digital age, and even the global pandemic of COVID-19. From trolleys in Los Angeles to smartphones and video calls with her grandchildren and great grandchildren, she truly saw the world change.

On August 25, 2025, Barbara passed away in Las Vegas, Nevada, surrounded by her loving family, as the beloved 1940s song We'll Meet Again played on the radio.

She was preceded in death by her father, Ralph Kaiser, her mother Sarah (Kjelstrom) Kaiser Porterfield, her beloved husband, Edward Earl Miner, and his family Earl J Miner and Blanche (Miller) Miner, and her son Jerry Allen Miner.

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