Waterfront Pages

I COVER THE WATERFRONT--Max Miller--Button ($2.50).

Outside the windows of Reporter Miller's "studio" above the San Diego tugboat pier, sea-sophisticated seagulls flap their tapered wings, crick their necks at the oldtimer seated at his desk within. Word has passed along about him for six seagull incubations, egg to egg. He is the book editor and waterfront reporter on the San Diego Sun, Max Miller. When he thinks of how far his waterfront assignments have gotten him he feels slightly gulled himself.

Reporter Miller had aimed to novelize the waterfront characters. Six years these novel people came & went, but all he could do was to celebrate their passage in front-page reports. In atonement to them, and to himself, he has collected what disconnected stories merited his personal front page. One of the stories:

A Portuguese tuna-clipper returns to port after riding out a "chubasco" (tropical) storm off the Mexican coast. After two days & nights at the wheel the skipper, marooned in his pilot house, began to long to pray. The boat's tiny chapel was well aft, had to be reached across the open deck. Somehow the skipper made it, only to find the chapel empty of its gear. Desperate for something to pray to he tore a calendar off a locker wall, prayed to the figure printed on it. A few hours later the storm went down. Reporter Miller takes a look at the calendar, on the chapel's altar still--it is an ancient picture of Alfred Emanuel Smith.

Each year Reporter Miller accompanies an expedition to the Mexican island Guadalupe to collect elephant seals for the zoo. This capture, though it sounds adventurous, does not excite him much. More exciting are the thousands of wild goats which infest the island, and two men who live there the year round. They slaughter only the billy goats. The hides go to the U. S., the meat to the Mexican Army. Parts which the Mexican Army does not want the men grind into fine powder, sell to the Chinese for an aphrodisiac. A wealthy old man has a cabin on the island, in the hills where the goats are thickest. He gets his aphrodisiac by sniffs-each year his yacht leaves him there, takes him away refreshed.

How Reporter Miller interviews famous transients ("Slim" Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, Babe Ruth et al.), how the silvery grunion come out of the sea with the spring tides to dance on their tails on the beach (TIME, May 9) are among other waterfront marvels. One moonlit night, when he was lying on a solitary beach, a baby sea lion came and nestled beside him for warmth and company. An hour they lay, then Reporter Miller trudged off to work, followed by the baby sea lion's lustrous, wondering eyes.

The Author. Born in Michigan (1901), Reporter Miller worked on his father's Montana ranch, started newspaper work young, as the "furthest thing from farming" he could think of. During the War he volunteered, raised his age by fibbing, his weight by draughts of lemonade before the medical examination. On being graduated from the University of Washington he went to Australia, worked for the Australasian Syndicate reporting post-War conditions in the South Sea Islands. After a bad dose of malaria, he joined the San Diego Sun, apparently for keeps.

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