In one corner of Don Millus' office stands a bulky, oaken card catalogue that he salvaged from Kimbel Library before the world went digital. To his current students, it is a strange artifact, as quaint and obsolete as a Victrola—"or a typewriter," says Millus, wistful but amused by the pace of progress in higher education.

Millus is perhaps the foremost exponent of the concept of "tradition" on Coastal's campus today. A faculty elder, he joined the Department of English in 1974. He has lectured here for more than 32 years, teaching literature and specializing in two authors who are foundation stones of the Western literary tradition: Chaucer and Shakespeare. He created, and continues to manage, the nation's oldest annual intercollegiate fishing tournament—itself an offspring of Millus' lifelong passion for one of mankind's oldest pastimes. He has also been an outspoken champion of Coastal's Chaucer-derived mascot, the Chanticleer, who has been threatened with extinction more than once over the years.

Millus was born in Brooklyn and did his undergraduate work at Fordham College in the Bronx. After six years as a seminarian and regent (teacher), he left the Jesuits and went to Yale for his doctorate. ("I decided the people of God shouldn't have to suffer listening to my voice at High Mass," he says.) His studies at Yale were interrupted by Vietnam, where he served as a captain in the U.S. Army. He did his dissertation at Yale on a biblical commentary by William Tyndale, the English scholar and reformer who was executed for heresy in 1536. Millus' lifelong interest in Tyndale, particularly his epochal Early Modern English translation of the Bible, has yielded dozens of scholarly articles and international conference presentations.

Ready to embark on his career, Millus, when asked where he wanted to teach, would jokingly respond: "The University of Kitty Hawk." By now a confirmed fishing addict, he was drawn to the Carolina coast and its saltwater fishing. He eventually found the perfect location for his professorial and piscatory pursuits a little farther south.

His job interview at Coastal Carolina College occurred on an uncommonly warm February day in 1974. "I called my wife Patricia up north and told her it was 75 degrees and sunny," he remembers. "It was a small campus, about 900 students. Anyone could see that this place was going to grow."

Millus originally organized the Coastal Carolina Invitational Fishing Tournament as a ploy to wrangle an invitation for Coastal to participate in the International Tuna Tournament, an intercollegiate contest held in Wedgeport, Nova Scotia. "I started my own tournament and invited Yale and the University of Western Ontario to fish in it," recalls Millus. The next year, they reciprocated and invited Coastal to bring up a team for the tuna event. Millus and five Coastal undergrads took a van to Nova Scotia in the fall of 1975, which turned out to be the last year of the Canadian tournament due to the decline in the tuna-baiting herring population. Left holding the bag with the only college fishing tournament in North America, Millus has kept the tradition going with a laid-back one-day contest each October that attracts teams from colleges around the state. "It's something Coastal does that's unique and different," he says. "Not for money, just for fun."

"All of my idols have feet of clay!"

Given the length of his tenure and the compulsory status of English in the college curriculum, perhaps more Coastal students have taken Millus than any other professor on campus. Many alumni quote his favorite adage: "All my idols have feet of clay!"

Millus loves teaching, and he is stimulated by the relevance of Renaissance literature to life and thought in the 21st century. "The Western tradition has always been moral. It's important that we understand our cultural tradition and are able to speak on behalf of it, especially when there is a conflict between cultures," he says. "If the only tradition that we serve is capitalism, we're in a sorry state. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton help remind us what we are made of."

Although Coastal's mascot didn't originate with Millus (it was the idea of an English professor of a previous generation, Cal Maddox), the Chanticleer has not had a more eloquent or passionate defender during the past 30 years. In the half-dozen or so attempts to replace Chauncy with a more macho and less esoteric mascot, Millus has loudly praised his virtues. "But I give all the credit to Coastal alumni for the Chanticleer's survival," he says. "The graduates love the Chanticleer. When we made the Final 64 in basketball, Chanticleer got media coverage all over the country. What a character he is: a super stud rooster who takes care of seven hens (plus his mate Pertelote), quotes the classics and learns from his mistakes."

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