The Pittsburgh Press (March 18, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. – On the way up the coast I stopped past LaJolla to see Max and Margaret Miller. My periodic knockings at the Miller door have become sort of a tradition, so now one of them just opens the door and calls to the other, “Here he is again.”
Max Miller, as you well know, writes books. He is on his 14th now, if I have kept count correctly. He had just finished the first draft of his newest one, and felt so relieved over it he decided to take a vacation and ride up to Los Angeles with me.
We put the top down and came ripping up the highway in our camel’s-hair coats and with the sun beating down on our balding heads, and we were the cynosure of all eyes, as Shakespeare would say.
On the way up we told spinach jokes, and finally got around to the more serious question of what each of us was going to do, personally, about the war in lieu of continuing to write our respective brands of deathless literature.
It wound up that we were both in a quandary, didn’t know what we should do or wanted to do, probably couldn’t do it if we tried, and got exactly nowhere with our problem. “I thought maybe you’d have an answer,” Max said. "But I guess it’s the halt leading the blind.”
At any rate, neither of us can see how writing a thousand words a day – even such beautiful words as ours – can destroy any Japanese.
Margaret Miller has caught the writing habit, too, and has recently composed what is doubtless an epic, on sea life. It is a book for children. It isn’t out yet, but will be very soon.
Also, Margaret not long ago sneaked over on Max a magazine piece on the trials and tribulations of being an author’s wife. Her title for it was: “It’s Better Than Working in a Fish Cannery.”
Max still feels like spanking her.
Ocean passes front window
It being a literary day, we stopped in South Laguna to see another author – John Weld by name. We stayed a couple of hours and all praised each other to the skies. It was wonderful.
John Weld writes semi-historical novels. So far he is little known, but he is a painstaking craftsman with a facility for words and a tenaciousness about research – he devotes as long as two years to a book – and I don’t doubt that some day his name will carry great respect.
He and his wife Katie live in one of the most spectacular houses you ever saw. It is a small cottage perched on a shelf half way down the high perpendicular cliff that rises smack out of the Pacific Ocean.
You can’t even see their house until you walk to the edge of the precipice and peek over. Then you look right down upon its roof. You descend by a steep stairway. You walk in the back door, through the house, and look out the front window. And from there you look straight down into the ocean, far below you; and look at ocean northward, and southward, and westward.
The ocean is the highway that passes their front window, but the traffic on their highway is much more interesting than on any concourse for wheels and tires.
Last week on the rocks below their window a huge turtle lay for hours, a gigantic fellow that must have weighed a ton. Such a turtle is almost unknown in these parts.
Yesterday they saw two white whales. And as Katie Weld says, “I always thought Moby Dick was the only white whale that ever existed.”
Occasionally they’re thrilled by a procession of warships and submarines; and when Los Angeles puts on its anti-aircraft fireworks they can see it better than the people in Los Angeles; and one day John Weld swears he saw a regular fictional sea monster swimming past, although Katie laughs at him.
They recently picked up part of a rudder from a wrecked ship on their beach. And just a few days ago a can of Navy paint came floating intact to their threshold. A quart can, in perfect shape. So now the Weld back door and porch – which have wanted painting for many a month – are a nice, new battleship gray.
My job looks wonderful to a lot of other people. Other jobs look wonderful to me. The next pasture is always greener. I envy the Welds and their hidden house by the side of the vastest road on earth.
A sailor has his troubles
Coming out of San Diego on this trip I picked up a sailor who had been there on 24 hours’ leave and was headed for his station back up the coast.
I don’t know the sailor’s name, and he doesn’t know mine. He rode with me less than three miles. But that three miles was proof of how sometimes a man just has to talk.
For in that short time he told me where he was from and we discovered a mutual acquaintance in his home town; told me how proud he was of having advanced through three ratings in less than a year and a half in the Navy; told me he got married five months ago to a swell girl and they had a nice apartment in San Diego, and he had just been down to see her.
But the main thing he wanted to tell – and he told it almost as soon as he stepped into the car – was that this swell girl had told him the night before she was going to divorce him!
“She just said she didn’t love me any more, that’s all she’d say,” the sailor said. “And all the time, every day, she’s written how much she loved me. And just married five months. Ain’t that a hell of a note?”