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As a new college graduate, I was lost about whether it made sense to dedicate myself to a writing career that felt precarious, fraught with frustration, and non-lucrative at the time. In search of guidance, I started writing letters to my best friend Rudy’s Dad, Norman C. Mike “Mel” Miller.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who at the time was the national editor of the Los Angeles Times, I sought advice from him in those letters on whether and how to pursue a writing career. I didn’t even really know what journalism was nor what a writing career meant. I was searching, adrift, and full of exactly no confidence. I would eagerly await Mel’s responses because I knew what he wrote would be sage and that he cared about me because he knew me well.
Countless times, he had watched Rudy (Scott Miller) and me play Little League basketball, baseball, and football. I slept over at Rudy’s house many times, watching “Happy Days” on Friday nights. Rudy’s Mom Molly – we called her “Elf” – who may be the nicest person I have ever known – would get us Hoagies and Elios Pizza, and the next morning, make the best French toast I have ever had, soaked in eggs.
Mel’s letters didn’t have the condescending tone of a man who had spent dozens of years as a journalist for America’s greatest newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. The tone was straightforward and elegant, unpretentious and down-to-earth.
“Your writing is clean and smart,” he wrote in one letter. “Keep it up.”
I don’t know if he really thought that. I do know that at the time, I didn’t believe I wrote cleanly and sharply. But it felt good that a master of the writing craft shared that feedback with me.
I wonder this morning – this melancholy day after Mel passed away – if I would have had the courage to dedicate my life to a tumultuous and terrific writing career had Mel not written in that letter, “your writing is clean and sharp; keep it up.”
He gave me hope when I felt hopeless. He gave me belief when I didn’t believe in myself. He let me know I had something to offer the world through writing. It’s striking to ponder what impact one simple sentence expressed by one person to another can have. It can change the trajectory of a person’s entire life. Mel did that for my life in his special way. He let me know I had enough talent to keep pursuing a writing career when I did not believe I had any talent whatsoever.
Mel got this nickname because he looked like Mel Cooley on the “Dick van Dyke Show.” He was a man like no other I have ever known. What stands out is that he said fewer words than anyone I have ever been around. Full stop. It wasn’t him to just run his mouth or bloviate. The last thing Mel needed was to hear himself talk.
Instead, he read. And when I say he read, I want to be clear about this. There may not be a person who has ever read more newspapers more often for as many consecutive days and years and decades as Mel. He grew up in the age of newspapers and until his last days, immersed himself in those papers, which now feel so far long gone as news has almost entirely migrated online.
Mel stayed with his newspapers. They were his friends. Day after day, after day, Mel would peruse the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. When I would be at his house for a sleepover, he would be sitting at the dining room table with his stack of newspapers, turning pages, thinking, in solitude. This didn’t happen sometimes; it happened all the time.
The man was and forever will be, in my mind, the quintessential journalist, a newspaper man to his bones. A journalism major in college, he wrote for his college newspaper and then went all out in the field his entire professional career and beyond.
Being a journalist, which I know something about having been one at times, is much harder than people may realize who haven’t lived it. One of the toughest parts is going out and covering a story about some topic you have no context for and then having to write coherently about it within two hours. You feel lost and unsure you understand. Time pressure is intense. In those situations, it feels diabolical and mean. Meet the deadline or lose your job.
Then you file your story, and the editors start hacking away at it. It’s a rough day in every way for the reporter. Not to mention thankless. You get brutalized and pushed to your limits mentally and emotionally.
Competition among reporters to get the best stories, write the most attention-grabbing ledes (opening lines), and write the most colorfully and smoothly is ferocious. It’s intellectual combat.
I saw this firsthand as an intern with the Washington, D.C., Bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Employed in that newsroom were dozens of the most competitive and smartest reporters in the United States. They had been through all the journalistic gauntlets and smaller newspapers, and survived and excelled to reach this esteemed bureau, leaving behind thousands of other journalists who still toiled at the smaller outlets. Talent gushed from that newsroom. Competitive fires burned so hot that it was intimidating to be around. Every day it was this way in the world of Big League Journalism.
The man in charge of all these accomplished, battle-tested and wicked bright people was Mel. He had risen higher than all of them, which gives you insight inside how competitive a person he was.
The place where you could see that was on the tennis court, a sport Mel played often for decades. He was a nice man, but he sure wanted to compete and did. You don’t rise in the world of high-stakes journalism without being incredibly intense and dedicated. You get there by reading all the important newspapers religiously every day. You commit your heart and life to the craft. You want to win. You want to write the best story. You want to hit the best shot. All this Mel did.
The world is different today with Mel gone, less than. They talk about the men who served in World War II as “The Greatest Generation.” To me, Mel carries the flag for “The Greatest Generation of Journalists” among other journalistic giants such as Bob Woodward, Jack Germond, Fred Barnes, and so many others.
There are few from that generation practicing the craft anymore. Like Mel, many have passed on. The newspaper business is more of a relic, like a dinosaur, something that used to be but no longer is. Mel used to be a role model of how a newspaperman should approach his craft and career. Today, he’s gone, which feels symbolic of the newspaper industry itself. The rise and fall of empires, newspapers themselves, and the journalistic career of Mel.
Newspapers were good and always will be, no matter how few of them are left. In the same way, Mel was good and always will be. He stood for hard work without blowing his own horn. It was what Mel did that counted to him and everyone in his life.
So much restraint he showed. Imagine all the times he felt compelled to speak up when someone said something he knew was wrong or stupid or unfair, yet stopped himself. It wasn’t talking that Mel believed in most. It was reading and writing and thinking, and competing.
Mel was my kind of guy. His passing reminds me that life keeps passing by. Trends come and go. Industries rise and fall. People are born, live their lives, and then they die.
Sometimes we feel good about someone we knew during our lives. Sometimes we respect them for how they acted, not what they said. Sometimes we feel sad that there aren’t more people who are quiet about themselves and just work hard to be great at what they do.
This is a day to remember one of the great Americans for the way he lived his life, what he did – not what he said – the inimitable Norman C. Mike Mel Miller, the ultimate “man of few words.”
A tip of the cap to you, Mel. You showed us how to live. May there be in Heaven all the newspapers you want to read whenever and wherever you want.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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