By Bartee Halie

NBC gave Roger Miller, the hottest solo act in show business, an hour a week of prime-time television on Sep. 12, 1966.

The Depression baby was still in diapers, when his father died in his twenties from spinal meningitis.  Unable to care for her three sons, Roger’s desperate mother gave one each to a trio of brothers and disappeared from her children’s lives.

That was why Roger Dean Miller grew up on a farm in western Oklahoma instead of his birthplace, Fort Worth.  H...