A Newsman for All Seasons

And so on. Miller liked facts more than description and believed that details add up to meaning. So we learn that he played the oboe, won a gold (plated) medal and served in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps. "On surveillance, forgot where parked car."

Worked his way up to Miami by the late '50s, arriving when the mob was still big on the Beach and dames wore furs. He charmed the place. He liked to go upstairs and laugh with the paper's owner, Jack Knight. In those days, the newsroom was manned by the likes of Al Neuharth, who was destined for the top of Gannett and a private jet, and Derrick Daniels, who wound up running Playboy Enterprises in a gold lamé jumpsuit during the heyday of Hef.

Miller was the one who wound up winning all the prizes because he was more focused, more organized and more passionate about his calling, which was news. For 20-odd years the Herald sent Miller on every big story in America. He was, the late Herald columnist Charles Whited once said, "the guy you send to cover the end of the world."

He traveled in style. "Nothing's too good for Knight Ridder!" he liked to say as he signed his expense accounts. The stories came down to the details. When he wrote about the Kent State shootings in 1970, Miller learned that a bell had tolled just after the gunfire. He called a professor to learn precisely which note the bell played.

Later he became the paper's talent scout, writing coach and living legend. One young hotshot, now a senior editor at Time, filed a riveting story about a man who committed suicide by running a hose from the tailpipe of his car to its interior.

What kind of hose? Miller asked.

More digging. The kid finally answered proudly, a vacuum cleaner hose!

"Was it a Hoover?"

If you wrote a glowing piece about a good Samaritan, he'd ask if the guy had a girlfriend on the side. On the other hand, when Post columnist Marc Fisher, in his Miami days, delivered the goods on a crooked cop, Miller sent him back to find out the best thing the cop had ever done. When you finally managed to satisfy him, the whole newsroom knew it, because he'd announce, "Good copy, champion!" at the top of his voice.

Some writers took this intensive editing better than others. A story that arrived on Miller's desk reading like the New Republic often hit the presses sounding more like Mickey Spillane. Calvin Trillin of the New Yorker once observed that Miller wrote like he was paid by the period.

Trillin also admired Miller's signature storytelling device, which was known as "the Miller chop."

"He would go along gently for a couple of sentences, set you up, and then poom! A word or two that landed like a blunt instrument," Trillin recalled yesterday.