NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS

The once-over-lightly of Max Miller's life, from a childhood in Everett, Washington, with cow-tending and newspaper-peddling, to Monatana, where his father located as a homesteader. Then high school- the Navy at just eighteen, with the first world war, working his way through the University of Washington, and newspaper-reporting in Melbourne. His itinerant career carried him from Australia to the Solomons, back to the waterfront beat in San Diego, China, Hollywood, Pearl Harbor and the Navy in the last war -- and again a reporter in California. Casual, effortless, sometimes funny.