EVANSVILLE, Ind. — When he was in high school in Evansville, John Miley’s father went down to the local Sears store and bought his son a $160 wire tape recorder so that the 17-year-old could start taping the play-by-play broadcasts of baseball and football games he couldn’t see.
Now, 77 years later, Miley has donated the 44,000 tapes he created and collected to the IU National Sports Journalism Center for digitization and curation for posterity.
”I was trying to find a place for it before I pass away so that it would live a lot longer than I will,” he said.
And live on it will within a massive restoration and storage project that only an institution like Indiana University could undertake.
”John was really interested in finding a place that would house the collection, preserve it, make it available for current and future generations,” said Galen Clavio, Center Director at IU Bloomington. ”I’d heard about how big the collection was but until you walk into that garage and see it floor-to-ceiling with filing cabinets full of reel-to-reel tapes, VHS tapes, CDs, other forms of media, you just can’t get your head wrapped around how much is there.”
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Sports broadcasts from the Miley collection. -
Sports broadcasts from the Miley collection. -
Sports broadcasts from the Miley collection. -
Sports broadcasts from the Miley collection. -
Sports broadcasts from the Miley collection. John Miley donated more than 44,000 taped sports broadcasts to an IU project.
How much is there includes Super Bowls and Indy 500s and every World Series game played since 1954 and Kentucky Derbys and lots of IU basketball including all its tournament runs and a lot of games that no one but anybody who was there would ever remember.
”This broadcast we have the New York Yankees and the Seattle Pilots,” said Clavio as he read the identifying label on a CD of a 1969 Major League game. ”This is Royals-Red Sox from 1983 from Fenway Park.”
Clavio dug deeper into a banker’s box on his office shelf.
”After that we’ve got a broadcast of the 1969 All Star Game for baseball. This is very much a baseball box. We’ve got Pirates-Expos. We’ve got Mets-Cubs. These are all from 1969. Twins-A’s,” he said. ”And there are other boxes that have college football recordings from the 60s, 70s, 80s. We’ve got NBA basketball. We’ve got college basketball. We’ve got some hockey.”
Miley started massing his collection as a personal mission to record every game he could from his garage in Evansville.
”So I said, ‘Why don’t I tape these things and maybe I will want to listen to them when I retire,’” said the now-93-year-old former business owner. “I haven’t listened to everything I have because I have too much.”
An article in the Sporting News by famed New York sports columnist Dick Young in the early 1970s opened the floodgates and the mailboxes as suddenly Miley started receiving tapes from other collectors all across the country no doubt looking for a fellow aficionado who could appreciate their obsession, too.
”It transports you completely back into that era as you watch it or listen to it,” said Clavio. ”I think the biggest one that I’ve found fascinating was the entire college football collection from 1950 to 1955. This is an era of college football that really helped transform the sport from primarily running the ball and service academies dominating to the modern game that we know today. We’ve heard Notre Dame-Army games, or we’ve got Ohio State-Michigan from within four different years of that span. We’ve got a couple of games where Indiana surprisingly beats Ohio State in that era.”
IU archivist Josh Bennett sits at a desktop computer and downloads CDs of long-ago NFL and college football games and inspects VHS tapes which may contain the broadcasts of a dozen or more college basketball games.
”I have to barcode every single one, which I’ve done,” said Bennett, who estimates he’ll still be archiving the Miley Collection for several years. “Multiply that times 44,000.”
Bennett clicks and drags links on his computer to create a file containing a recording of the day when the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field to capture the 1950 National League pennant.
”Last half of the ninth, Dodgers batting,” described Dodger play-by-play legend Red Barber, his soft Mississippi drawl lyrically wafting across the decades with the Flatbush crowd murmuring in the background. ”And the score is tied 1-1. The Phillies and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Battling like Spartans.”
On the mound was Phillies Hall of Famer Robin Roberts with a tall order of Dodger stars set to come to bat.
”Now facing Pee Wee Reese,” Barber told the radio listeners. ”And the infield, no doubt, will be looking for the bunt with Snider up next followed by Robinson. Trouble brewing now for the Phillies.”
Another random choice from the collection recalls the day in November of 1969 when the unbeaten USC Trojans traveled to northern Indiana to take on Notre Dame.
”You can go into the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, for example,” said Bennett, “and that will pull up every game and that will pull up every game that we have that Norte Dame was involved.”
With a click, Bennett calls up just such a game.
”Its Southern California versus Notre Dame. We’re in South Bend, Indiana, for a perfect football afternoon,” announced the Voice of the Fighting Irish Van Patrick at kickoff. “It’s a good high end-over- end kick and waiting for it is Davis, he takes it on the ten, goes out to the fifteen, goes on to the twenty, gets away from one tackler and is brought down on the 23-yard line where he’s gang tackled by Notre Dame.
”Here’s the I formation again, top of the I,” says Patrick, calling the first USC series of the game. ”Here’s Clarence Davis. Davis has been the leading rusher on this ballclub. He’s having a great year. And Jones on a give to Davis, running off right tackle, got good blocking, comes all the way up to the 29-yard line and he’s brought down by Raterman as he’s brought down at the 29-yard line.”
A 14-14 tie ended USC’s quest for a perfect season that afternoon in South Bend.
”The announcers of the past, most of them anyway, are much more interesting to listen to than the announcers of today,” said Miley. “The announcers of today get into too many things besides the ballgame.”
”Radio play-by-play is an art we try to teach all of our broadcasters because it is so difficult to create an atmosphere, it’s so difficult to get things across without the audience seeing it,” said Clavio who will open up the collection to IU broadcasting students and researchers. ”There’s so many things you can learn from listening to old broadcasts in terms of pacing, in terms of what to say, what not to say, how to say it, that’s what makes this collection such a fascinating and wonderful thing to bring to Indiana.”
Miley said he consulted with IU alum and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and baseball broadcast icon Bob Costas about his decision to donate his archives to Indiana University.
”The only game that I don’t have and will probably never get is the 1939 Rose Bowl between Duke and USC. Duke was undefeated, untied and unscored upon for the year,” lamented Miley, who then a minute later reveled about a rare broadcast he bought of a 1966 New York Mets-Atlanta Braves game from another collector. ”Nolan Ryan came in in relief in the seventh inning, and it was his first time in the major leagues and so here I’ve got Nolan Ryan’s first strike out and of course I have so much of Nolan Ryan its unbelievable, but I do have his final strike in the major leagues also.”
IU has managed to collect only its first one thousand recordings from Miley’s garage with another 43,000 to go.
Many of those were saved on audio tape which may need to be restored before they can be played and digitized.
”There weren’t a lot of people thinking, ‘I need to preserve what I’m hearing on this radio broadcast from the forties or fifties,’ but John Miley did think that way and he was fascinated with making those recordings, keeping them for posterity,” said Clavio. “I don’t think when he started he was going to amass 44,000 plus broadcasts over the course of his life but that’s what he ended up doing.
“He invested so much time and effort into trying to preserve these moments, it was something even the networks weren’t thinking of. There’s radio stations and television stations even at the network level that don’t have copies of these games, but John does, and I think we owe him a debt of gratitude as Americans that he’s been able to preserve so much culture around sports.”
