Eddie Miller, 89; Ace Chowhound Ate His Gut Out

Edwin Abraham Miller was born in San Francisco in June 11, 1918, and raised in Oakland. His parents had a traveling vaudeville act.

As a young man, he realized his stomach capacity left his friends in awe. He took pride in swallowing dozens of hot dogs and beers during baseball games.

"I liked extra-inning games," he once said, "the longer the better."

He wound up in New York during the Depression and became a regular at horse tracks. He said many track clients subsidized his food "training."

Broadway literary fixtures Mark Hellinger and Damon Runyon also befriended Mr. Miller. They liked sending him into French restaurants to clean them out of desserts. "That's for fun, to shake people up and give them a laugh," he told the Times.

He also claimed to have socialized with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and appeared in a skit in George White's "Scandals," a popular Broadway revue, in the 1930s.

As his name grew along with his stomach, he said he became resigned to the equivalent of autograph requests -- eating demonstrations.

"Look, a guy comes up to you and says, 'Hear you think you're a big eater, huh?' Or maybe a friend wants to show you off to his wife, 'Hey, Boz, eat a jar of white horseradish for us.' What are you going to do? You got a reputation."

Newspaper columnists such as Herb Caen ate him up, and he attracted countless puns and alliterations ("guardian of the girth," "chow champion") from headline writers.

He kept a W.C. Fields quote framed in his living room, "Nothing exceeds like excess." He tried to live up to the motto not only in his gusto for food, but also with his collection of 8,000 pop records, as well as pranks such as giving dinner hosts 50 dozen roses that would fill up every available vase, jar, bathtub and sink.

In 1946, he married Janice Bidwell, a former princess of the Pasadena Rose Bowl, apparently winning her over with what a friend said was "a sea of perfume, furs and diamonds." Ten years later, she suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her an invalid until her death in 2001.

They had three daughters, two of whom survive: Virginia "Cooky" Logan of Napa, Calif., and Candice Blackman of Pleasant Hill, Calif.; and four grandchildren. Another daughter, Janice "Honey" Miller, died in a car accident in the 1970s.

He gave up trying to compete after his daughter died, and his weight gradually plummeted to 170 pounds.

In his prime, he told an Oakland reporter that the greatest regret of his life was never to have met Diamond Jim Brady, the legendary big spender also known for his appetites.

"There was a man," he said of Brady, who died in 1917. "But I think I could have taken him. I understand he was strong, mighty strong in the meat department but he was vulnerable in the pastry. Me, I have no weaknesses."