Profits & Passions Ted Miller Frame of mind By BOB ROZYCKI

Profits & Passions
Ted Miller
Frame of mind
By BOB ROZYCKI

Picture a picture frame and what do you picture?

Ted Miller

In today's offices and homes chances are the frames are sleek, metallic, with little if any detail. Or maybe they're just plastic screens with changing digital images.

Visit a museum or church to see when picture frames were picture frames with elaborate frills, curves and gold leaf. They were masterpieces created by artists that rivaled the artistry of the paintings they framed.

Who created these masterpieces? Just turn them around, Ted Miller says, providing they’re not hanging in a museum and you trip the security alarm. Chances are the name Metzger Brothers will be inscribed.

Miller, president of DataKey Consulting L.L.C. in Mount Kisco, should know; his great-grandfather Henry Metzger started a picture framing business in 1887.

Miller was aware of the artistic work growing up in Ann Arbor, Mich. His mother grew up in the business as her father, Edwin, continued on with the family venture. Mom was a psychology professor at the University of Michigan. Ted Miller had other pursuits, including electrical engineering and economics degrees from Tufts University in Boston as well as an MBA from Boston University. He worked for Fortune 400 companies in the Boston area traveling the world. While working for Teradyne Corp., he and a select few others were chosen to be students of renowned professor Shoji Shiba at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. During those three years, Miller learned everything “not taught in business school.”

His career served him well and Miller has repaid in part by serving as a guest lecturer at the MIT Sloan School, the Center of Quality Management in Cambridge, Mass., and the international PDMA conference. He now sits on the board of directors of The Business Council of Westchester.

It's no easy task cleaning and oiling the close to 100 hand-carved picture framing molds dating back to the 1850s through 1920s.

To deal with the grind of work and school, Miller was an avid bicyclist, swimmer and runner. That combination spelled stints in triathlons for him during his 20s and 30s. Along the way he met and married Abigail Adams, a direct descendant of President John Adams. About five years ago the couple moved to Chappaqua and Miller started his consulting company. Entrepreneurship runs in the family; his sister Amy runs a successful ice cream company in Texas called Amy’s Ice Creams.

Today he keeps fit by running and trying to keep up with his 2-year-old daughter.

Back in the early 1990s, Miller began thinking of the legacy of the Metzger Bros. and how the work that was performed had become a lost art. Rather than just let the knowledge, history and secrets slip away into oblivion, Miller decided to do something about it. He grabbed his video camera and sat down with his grandfather. The 95-year-old related to his grandson the history of the business as well as the process of making frames by hand.

Miller learned that before the frames could be created, molds would have to be made. Into the molds was poured a “secret recipe” a mixture of different components that now resides in a safe in Michigan.

His grandfather died in 1996.

The artisans of the company carved a lot of molds; Miller has between 900 and 1,000 that he has in storage at an undisclosed location in Connecticut. He oils them every couple of years to preserve their integrity. Their worth? Who knows, he says. He cares very little about that, he’s more interested in preserving them and the process. He also inherited a large number of tools that are used in the frame creation.

Members of the Metzger Brothers circa 1907. Ted Miller's great-grandfather Henry Metzger, who started the business in 1887, is in the back row second from the right. It was this group that hand carved the molds and really made a large business out of it.

And while his talk with his grandfather lasted some 90 minutes, the time and memories will last a lifetime.

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