87-Year-Old Is a Radical Dude : Jack Miller of Laguna Beach has opposed the status quo for most of his life.

LAGUNA BEACH —  Like many of his contemporaries, 87-year-old Jack Miller likes to relax in a rocking chair in his living room. Unlike most of them, though, he keeps a brightly hued poster of Che Guevara on the wall behind him.

During nearly every weekend of the Reagan years Miller and other somewhat less august citizens maintained a vigil at Laguna’s Main Beach, protesting U.S. intervention in Central America. He’s been legally blind for several years, but that didn’t stop him from marching--aided by a white cane--in protests held near South Coast Plaza immediately prior to the Gulf War.

“The day we went to war the protests died. Everybody suddenly got patriotic, except me,” Miller said with a laugh.

What scant eyesight he has left has gotten even worse since then, and he wears powerful hearing aids in both ears. Sometimes he speaks with the slight stammer that made Jimmy Stewart so endearing. And, boy can he speak, eloquently and pointedly, about a wealth of contemporary issues. Like many people with nearly a century of memories, he also can digress down some curious, endlessly detailed byways. Suffice to say that, should this journalism thing ever fall through, I now know how to lay sewer pipe, fill in a septic tank and place a lien on the effected property if the owner doesn’t pay.

For most of his life Miller has been in the loyal opposition to the status quo, protesting labor conditions, the Vietnam War, nukes, the plight of farm workers, the Panama invasion, toxics dumping and infant formula-pushing in the Third World, corporate influence-wielding and other machinations of the “wealthy 1%” he feels calls the shots in the country.

He has no intention of clamming up now, though his modes of expression may change. He said, “Picket signs seem to be passe these days. I may not go out and demonstrate like I did before. My time is quite limited, because one thing blindness does is slow one down terribly. You make mistakes, you lose things. You should see how messed up my bank balance is.”

Instead, from his comfy Laguna house, which he built himself in 1936, Miller tunes in KPFK and fires off letters to the President, senators and congressmen. “I don’t know that it does a heck of a lot of good. A congressman will send a form letter back--’We’ll keep your views in consideration when we vote. . . . ‘--but I know damn well he’s going to vote for it if I’m against it,” he chuckled.

He exercises other subtle forms of protest as well. Before we spoke last Friday he’d lunched as he usually does at a senior citizens’ center.

“I sit at a table where there’s a white paper place mat thing. I have a big black felt pen, because that’s the only thing I can read, and on my place mat today I wrote ‘Bush is trashing our constitutional guarantees of the wall between church and the state.’ It covered the whole mat. I really think Bush is leading us into fascism, or worse.

“If six people read that, that would be pretty good for me. But the people who sit around me know me and only want to talk about more personal and local stuff. They like chatter. They don’t like to think.”

Miller said he always questioned things.

“I think I was a radical when I was born. My father was a socialist, as many people were then. I was born near Salt Lake City, and my parents were Mormons and almost all my relatives. But, strangely, I was born with a sort of independence of mind. I just didn’t want to believe everything I was told.

“I’d ask, ‘What is God?’ and my mother would say, ‘He’s a supreme being that lives in heaven up in the sky.’ Well, I never quarreled with my mother--I loved her very much--but I thought maybe somebody was giving her some false information. I looked up in the sky and couldn’t find any sign of any god or of anything you could call heaven.

“One day our mother was going to take us to get baptized (Miller was the oldest of five brothers). She explained that the preacher would take you out in the water, push your head below the surface, say a prayer and let you up. Well, I didn’t like the idea of anybody pushing my head down in the water, and I thought, ‘If he wants to say a prayer, why don’t he just say his prayer and not bother me about it?’ So I managed to go out and get lost instead on our farm that day,” Miller recalled.

He was born in 1904, and his early political impressions were colored by the news of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in which the Colorado National Guard slaughtered 33 striking miners at the behest of mine owners. The Miller family was living in Salt Lake City when the legendary IWW labor leader Joe Hill was convicted of murder in a highly questionable trial and executed. Miller’s father, a carpenter, had also briefly edited a socialist newspaper called the Inter-Mountain Worker and was active in trying to secure a new trial for Hill.

Lured by a postcard showing orange-laden trees, the family moved to California in 1921. By the time the Depression hit, Miller had a wife who was deathly ill and a son to care for. Providing for them limited his activism for a time, though he maintained a keen interest.

“During the depths of the Depression, I read in the newspaper how people were starving because the welfare office wouldn’t help them, and how the Communist Party sent a delegation to the welfare office to stay there until the people were taken care of. The police rousted them out. When I read that, I thought, well, those Communists are on my side if they’re trying to get those people some food to eat.

“I was never a member, though I didn’t differ with them very much, I can tell you that. I came to know a number of Communists and they invited me to their meetings. I listened to what they had to say and sometimes took part in the discussion. To a beginner, it’s kind of complicated, this Communist doctrine. It’s kind of complicated to the ones who have been in it for a while too, as Russia has just showed.”

A carpenter and contractor (he eventually built scores of houses in Laguna, along with his own), Miller found there also were limits to applying the doctrine to daily life.

“One friend of mine who was a Communist said he knew carpentry work, so I hired him, and right away he started politicizing the workplace, saying the carpenters ought to be paid so much more than they were getting, their hours should be shorter and stuff like that. I just couldn’t stand for that kind of agitation. I couldn’t survive it. After all, I was in a capitalist business competing with other capitalists. So I let him go,” he said.

In the early years of the Vietnam War, Miller didn’t actively engage in protests because he was working for the Navy, as he had in World War II. He still went to anti-war meetings and discussions.

“People I knew told me that when the FBI comes, they come in pairs and dressed like insurance salesmen, in nice suits. Sure enough, I arrived home for lunch here in Laguna one day, and there were these two guys who looked like insurance salesmen waiting across the street. They presented their badges and said they’d like to have a talk with me. I wasn’t about to talk to the FBI. I knew you couldn’t trust them. They’re really the political police of this country,” Miller said.

Though agents never approached him again, he said he did spot them following him around town, photographing him. Since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, he’s never requested to see his FBI file, saying “I don’t need them to (tell me) what I did.”

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s Miller visited Cuba and the Soviet Union, and says of the former, “I think it’s marvelous. I think Fidel Castro is one of the best persons in the world, the way he’s handling Cuba. People used to be starving there before the revolution, and that isn’t the case now. And before Castro, Cubans couldn’t afford to have a doctor; they were only for the foreigners and the rich. Now they have more doctors per capita than any country in the world. It’s a poor country, but that’s because they can’t trade with the United States.”

Though he’s spent over half a century espousing such views in a county famed for its conservatism, Miller said it has never caused him trouble with people.

“I know not to go telling everybody what I think, but I never mislead anybody. I’d tell people what I believe, and that might be what they’d call pure Communist propaganda. But I always had a reputation for being a good man. I still have it, because I’m honest. I don’t cheat or lie, and the people I know respect me,” he said.