Vera Derby Miller

Biography

Howard W. Derby (1894-1966) was the son of California Methodist minister, George Derby (1863-1922). A member of the California National Guard, he served in Mexico and in France from 1916 through 1918. In 1933, he married Vera Mae Reaume and settled in San Francisco, where he was employed as an insect and rodent exterminator. Derby occasionally penned local history articles---notably on the Arcata area where he spent a part of his childhood. An active Methodist layman and member of the Parkside Church, Derby worked as research assistant to Northern California-Nevada Conference Historian, Leon L. Loofbourow, author of In Search of God's Gold (1950), a history of the Methodist Church in California, and Cross in the Sunset (1956), a history of the Northern California-Nevada Conference.

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