About the Bill Miller Collection

Around 1970, I was involved in racing at the national level, but also worked in downtown Boston. Near my employment was an antiquarian bookshop. One day, I stopped in to look around and went to the sports section. On one shelf stood about twenty vintage rowing books. With restricted financial resources, I chose ten that looked the most interesting.

One of those was American Rowing by Robert Kelley. An early chapter was titled “The Professionals”. Professionals? I read the chapter and then the whole book in about two days. The stories in that book were amazing. In 1970 I never knew about the immense popularity of rowing and the huge sums of money that supported the professional oarsmen a hundred years earlier.

From that day onward I would voraciously read anything about rowing history. Ten books became twenty, then fifty, then one hundred. I kept going until it was into the hundreds of books. Collecting rowing history objects wasn’t my primary interest.

About 1980 I met Dr. Thomas Mendenhall who was the “dean of rowing history”. Soon after I met Tom Weil, another expert on rowing history. Tom was also an eager collector of everything connected to rowing who began collecting while visiting London in 1970.

Tom and I became fast friends and enjoyed chat sessions discussing rowing history and collecting. Very soon my passion for collecting expanded much like Tom’s. We looked at collecting as saving rowing history objects from disappearing. In the 1970s he had already amassed a huge collection which he kept adding to until his untimely death in 2024. His ten-thousand object collection now resides at the Marist University’s Archives & Special Collections department.

My collection (displayed here) is a fraction of Tom’s but I think together we did a good job of assembling these amazing objects so that future rowing historians can learn about the great days when the general public was hugely excited with rowing (and would wage serious money on those professionals)