“Distinctive, original, fresh in in tone and manner, with a quaint whimsicality of feeling and expression.” —The New York Times Life on the Western waterfront has always fascinated Max Miller, a special reporter for the San Diego Sun. Embraced by all the waterfront folk, he has joined them on their cruises, has learned the mystery of their crafts, and knows them like brothers. Max himself has become a part of the waterfront. Not a fishing boat ties up to the wharf without Max Miller getting the story. Not a submarine comes in, or an airplane soars out over the water without Max Miller being invited to go. He is one of the first men to climb up the ladder of the Pacific lines, especially when celebrities are aboard. A combination of newspaper reporter, philosopher and poet, the author writes his charming sketches in his “studio” upstairs in the tugboat office, where he can look out over his domain. But reporting is not simply a job with Max Miller, it is the greatest pleasure of his life. He delights in setting down his impressions of the Western shore, where life is a constant flux and reflux, seasonal, immutable and yet ever exciting—the departure of the Sardine Fleet, the hunt for elephant seals for the zoo, the sailing of the California fruit liners. I Cover the Waterfront was first published in the early 1930s and has since gone on to become a classic. It is as memorable for its unique stories as it is for its individual style—so keenly sensitive to the personalities of men and to the romantic environment of the harbor and deep-sea life. Max Miller, was a reporter for the San Diego Sun and, after the publication of I Cover the Waterfront, a prolific author who wrote about the military, Southern California, and Baja California. He lived in La Jolla with his wife and died in 1967. I Cover The Waterfront Stories From The San Diego Shore By Max Miller Skyhorse Publishing Copyright © 1932 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-62914-454-2 CHAPTER 1 I HAVE been here so long that even the sea gulls must recognize me. They must pass the word along about me from generation to generation, from egg to egg. Former friends of mine, members of my old university class, acquaintances my own age, have gone out to earn their six thousand a year. They have become managers, they have become editors, they have become artists. Yet here am I, what I was six years ago, a waterfront reporter. True, I am called a good waterfront reporter in this city, as if the humiliation were not already great enough in itself. I shudder at the compliment, yet should feel fortunate in a way that so far I have escaped the word veteran. When I am called not only the best waterfront reporter but also the veteran waterfront reporter, then for sure all hope is dissolved. And I need look ahead then, only to that day when the company presents me with a fountain pen and a final check. I am nearing twenty-eight, and should I by accident be invited to a home where literature is discussed, or styles, or Europe, the best I could do would be to crawl into the backyard. There I could sit tossing pebbles into the fountain until the hostess found me out. If she compelled me to come back into the house and join the conversation, my topics would have to be of sword-fishing, or of lobstering, or of hunting sardines in the dark of the moon, or of fleet gunnery practice, or of cotton shipments. The predicament has passed beyond my control. I am one of those creatures who remain permanent, who stay in one place, that successful men on returning home may see for the happiness of comparison. I am of the damned and the lost, and yet I do know more than I did six years ago when I first came here, a graduate in liberal arts. I existed my first season on this waterfront buoyed by that common hope of mankind that by next year I would write a book, a novel composed of the characters I met. Quite tidily, too, I would insert my own silent sufferings, such as eating at the lunch counter downstairs where the sugar bowl is always chucked with brown lumps. These fishermen will dip coffee spoons back into it for the third or fourth helping. But instead of writing of this, I learned instead to take the lazy man's course and drink my coffee without sugar. The second year blended into the third. The characters I had picked out for my novel gradually became more blurred to my complete understanding. Nobody was definitely good, nobody was definitely bad. The more I knew of them the less positive I became of which stand to take, and for a novel a writer does need a villain; a writer needs several of them. Even Evangeline, the brown-haired waitress, proved a disappointment to my plans. I had selected her to be the waterfront harlot. I had a drab death already prescribed for her, a death in which she would fling herself from the tugboat pier with only the silver moon as witness. The gentle bosom of the bay would cleanse her of her sorrow,