Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
Overview:
Miller, who sold self-published joke books and triumphed in a legal case about his constitutional right to sell them, died last year at 76.
What do you get when you cross a Frog with a plaque? A permanent memorial for a Eugene legend.
A new marker near the University of Oregon campus was unveiled on Sunday to provide a permanent memorial for David Henry Miller, the prolific Eugene joke book seller better known as ‘Frog.’
Miller, who died last year at age 76, was a fixture around town since the 1980s, both for his self-published joke books and for his legal scuffle with the city of Eugene over his constitutional right to sell them.
He sold his “groan-worthy” joke books at the Saturday Market, the Holiday Market, on 13th Avenue near UO campus and at the Oregon Country Fair. He brought in customers with a rubber chicken and a consistent pitch — “Have you seen the world’s funniest joke books?” — that now adorns the plaque in his honor.
The memorial is located on 13th Avenue on the street-facing side of a concrete bench in front of Port of Subs next to the Duck Store. The location was one of Frog’s spots for selling his books.
After Miller died last November, people who knew him started thinking of how they could best remember him. The plaque was organized by three previous managers of Eugene’s Saturday Market, who wanted to install some kind of permanent memorial to Miller.
For Beth Little, who managed the Saturday Market from 2000 to 2014, permanently memorializing Frog is about remembering someone core to what makes Eugene special.
“There’s something about Eugene where we have characters, players in our Eugene movie,” she said. “Frog is right there at the core of it. You just can’t separate the identity of Eugene and its eccentricity with its eccentric characters.”
The first idea was a full-size statue of Miller, sitting in the spot he always did, but “but our eyes were bigger than our pocketbook,” said Bill Goldsmith, market manager from 1988 to 2000. Donations from supporters of the project instead led to the plaque.
It includes a QR code that passers-by can scan to go to FrogsJokes.org, which dispenses random jokes of Frog’s in MP3 format. Kim Still, the third former Saturday Market manager, put together the website, digitizing cassette tapes of Frog’s jokes to add. Little said they plan on adding more of Frog’s jokes to the online collection as a record. (As the plaque is in public, they have tried to keep the list to largely family-friendly jokes, an occasionally difficult task given Frog’s catalog.)
“It was important that we get some way for his voice to live on,” Goldsmith said. “It’s such an important part of the experience that you had when you would encounter Frog. It’s a shame that people don’t get to hear it anymore.”
Remembering Frog
A small group of friends and fans of Frog gathered on Sunday for the unveiling of the permanent memorial to Miller, sharing memories and laughs about the one-of-a-kind street vendor — and his legal fight against the city.
In the 1990s, Miller was ticketed multiple times for selling his joke books without a license, which was then a violation of Eugene’s municipal code. With the help of local attorney Rebecca Davis, he sued to appeal the ordinance violations, a case that ended up in the state court of appeals as 1994’s City of Eugene v. Miller. The court ruled in Miller’s favor, declaring that the city’s sidewalk vending ordinance was an unconstitutional limit on free speech.
David Rogers, a longtime close friend of Frog’s, recited the lyrics to a song he wrote for Frog’s memorial at the Sunday plaque unveiling:
The college administrators and the Chamber of Commerce squares / They tried to ban him out right, but they got caught unawares / This clown could fight back with the help of a good lawyer / Why slink out the back when you can march right through the foyer?
That “good lawyer” was there, too. Davis, the attorney who represented Miller in his freedom of speech case, was present at the unveiling with her significant other, Alan Roberts, Frog’s booth partner at the Oregon Country Fair for years.
The two were friends with Miller long after the case was resolved. (Their friendship included a stint when he lived with them in their house after he had been evicted.) Part of the agreement for his legal expenses was that Davis would get a copy of each new joke book he published.
“He was a force of chaos,” Roberts said. “A friendly force of chaos.”
