Now 78, he's shed the vices -- alcohol, speed, pot, cigarettes -- that fueled whirlwind parties and whorehouse trips to Mexico with fellow raconteurs in the 1960s, and all-night singalongs with Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker in the 1970s. Vices prodded Milner to go, go, go, as Jack Kerouac might say. The "diet" pills lent fiery spirit to debates and debauchery that rolled for days and nights in bars and living rooms from Austin to Washington, D.C. Vices weren't the only fuel. Something unexplainable hurtled Milner toward the unknown. The need to find it -- even Milner is unsure how to define it -- kept him barreling down the party trail at the expense of his writing, and led to eventual mental and physical collapse in the late 1970s. It no longer beckons. Milner is content to stay hunkered down in his south Fort Worth house, rising early, watching tv, working on his novel or his newspaper column, and hitting the sheets before the sun fades. Milner was asked to go on a short road trip for this story, a jaunt to jog old memories and, perhaps, rekindle a mini-quest for it. Milner refused, unwilling to roam from his comfortable routine. Doctors replaced his kneecaps two years ago. Surgery curtailed his daily walks, he gained weight, his legs didn't heal completely, and walking became difficult. He feels lucky, though. Old running buddies are battling worse -- emphysema, heart problems, worn-out kidneys. Some have already lost the fight, such as Brammer, who wrote 1961's The Gay Place, about Austin politics, and died in 1978 after succumbing to drug addiction and an exasperating inability to pen a second novel. Expect no regrets from Milner about faded youth and unfulfilled dreams. Playing championship football in pigskin-crazy Lubbock, working for some of the most independent and colorful newspapers in the country, championing civil rights in the South, traveling and reveling in a 1949 Cadillac hearse transformed into a sleeping van, and befriending some of Texas' most gifted and charismatic writers and musicians -- these things make it hard to look back in doubt. "I lived a full life and enjoyed it," he said. "I did a lot of stuff and I've got a lot of good friends. Now I want it to be dull."
The white-brick house is covered in green ivy, giving it a comfortable, cottage look, and promising a cool, dark interior. Inside, rooms are neat and clean, thanks to Gail Milner's vigilant attention for the past 20 years. Out back, though, clutter dominates a small added-on room, where Gail's contributions to cleanliness are off-limits. Her husband spends part of each day in this messy room, sitting at his word processor, thinking weighty thoughts, chasing them to shrewd conclusions, and corralling them in perfect phrases. At least, that's the goal, if not always the end result. The ex-athlete still cuts an intimidating figure; his large frame, thick cheekbones, white beard, and ruddy complexion make him resemble an aged Ernest Hemingway. He's a bit of a contradiction -- reclusive yet friendly. In conversation, he thinks a long time before speaking, and then talks slowly. But he smiles quickly and chuckles often. These days, writing is as much about money as purpose. Jay Dunston Milner's hearty life didn't include socking away retirement funds, and he continues to write a column for Cox News Service and to pursue the elusive second novel. Proceeds from his 1998 book came in handy. "Most people are fully retired by now, but I didn't put my money back like I should have," he said. "Confessions made me a thousandaire but that didn't last long." Money is important, but Milner is hardly obsessed with spending marathon sessions at a word processor in a closet-sized office. Life's to be enjoyed. Some writers consider their offices sacred territory. Milner's desktop is scarred by two pieces of wood, nailed clumsily and at odd angles on either side of his keyboard. "My grandson likes to hammer nails in boards," he explained. "He's also good at sharpening pencils." The second novel's focus on college politics stems from Milner's teaching stints in the 1960s and early '70s at Texas Christian University and Southern Methodist University, a period of some fulfillment but mostly frustration. Satisfaction came from teaching eager journalism students, many of them called to the profession after being inspired by the works of Milner's contemporaries -- Shrake, Cartwright, and Jenkins, all local sportswriters in the 1950s and 1960s who went on to literary fame. Milner hired two friends as SMU teachers -- the addled but still stirring Brammer, and Peter Gent, a former Dallas Cowboys receiver and fledgling novelist who would later write North Dallas Forty. Former Dallas Morning News editor Bob Compton called Milner's reign "a golden age for the SMU journalism department." Print journalists and teachers can make an impact but seldom get the recognition of published authors, said Compton, who hired Milner for freelance jobs in the 1970s and worked with a half-dozen of Milner's former college students. "Jay did some good work for me and was well known among people in the business because of people he trained and people who came in contact with him," he said. "But most journalists aren't very prominent except among other journalists -- unless you're a talking head on tv." Milner's frustration came from butting heads with administrators who didn't share his philosophy of journalism education and fought his attempts to change the curriculum. Milner can still muster a roar. He'll skewer university politics in his book, and he bemoaned the modern news media recently while eating eggs, bacon, and pancakes at the IHOP on University Drive. Newspaper chains and corporations have almost killed independent daily papers that were once backbone to the nation's freedom, he said. "I wonder sometimes if it's not just me being an old curmudgeon, but journalists these days are leaving too much unwritten," he said. "They're too Chamber of Commerce. Papers aren't turning over enough rocks. It has to do with the big corporations buying up all the papers. The medium-sized local dailies are the ones that used to really report the news." The slide began, he said, when modern technology helped improve profit margins at newspapers, attracting corporate bean-counters with little emotional attachment to journalistic ideals. "A paper is not free if a person interested only in profits is looking over your shoulder," he said. "In order to maintain maximum profits, they think you have to toe the line and not offend, when probably the real job of a newspaper is to offend certain elements of the population." Journalism wasn't Milner's original career choice. He grew up a country boy in the desolate high plains near Lubbock in the 1920s and 1930s, and was a football standout at state champion Lubbock High School. He served a hitch in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, where he developed a cigarette habit but saw no combat. After his discharge, a recruiter offering a football scholarship at Mississippi Southern College came calling. The na•ve Milner said, "Is that Ol' Miss?" The recruiter said, "Some people call it that." Milner discovered later that Ol' Miss and Mississippi Southern were miles apart in distance and stature, but he enjoyed the small college, majored in education, had a solid college football career, and was drafted by the National Football League. The Pittsburgh Steelers sent a letter offering $9,000 a year, a decent sum for the times. "My knees were so sore by then I didn't even answer the letter," he said. He coached high school football for a couple of years in Mississippi, but the emphasis on winning was intense, and he was restless. "I thought, 'It's crazy to have my whole career in the hands of a bunch of teenage boys,'" he said. In his youth, Milner had cherished Jack London novels and once received compliments for an essay written in junior high, so he decided to pursue journalism. He considered it a noble profession when done well -- "journalism with a capital J," he calls it. The American in Hattiesburg, Miss., hired him as reporter in 1950. He worked stints at the Associated Press and at a small newspaper in Jackson, Miss. Those jobs led to a managing editor's position in 1954 at Delta Democrat-Times, owned by one of the country's most fearless publishers, Hodding Carter. Milner wrote editorials on politics and civil rights issues and later fictionalized much of his experience for his first novel. The Big Apple looked mighty shiny back then, and in 1958 he became a reporter at New York Herald Tribune, another spitfire publication that supported the reporter's mantra -- comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. |
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