July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
Eads donates basketball collection (11/21/07)
By By JACK RONALD-
Box after box after box.
Les Eads pulled one after another out of the back of his SUV last week, handing them to volunteers who carried them into the Jay County Historical Museum.
Scrapbooks, scorebooks, clippings, photos and endless memorabilia were stacked up on a table, hundreds of items, all of them focused on one thing: Basketball.
Jay County basketball, to be specific.
"I'm going back to when the schools first started," said Eads, a Portland barber who helped broadcast local games for more than 40 years.
Eads estimates he broadcast between 1,800 and 1,850 games during 43 years at WPGW.
"I also collected every program from every game I did," he said.
The collection, he added, just seemed to happen. "One thing led to another," he said.
And now, it's time to put the collection into the hands of the whole community.
"Everything will be gone through item by item and given a number," said county historian Jane Spencer.
"I've been thinking about this for two years," said Eads. "I decided this is where it's gonna go. Our kids thought it belonged here in Jay County."
The Eads archive represents a remarkable collection of local sports history. "I have every team in the county, every year, their record, and their coach," said Eads.
He traces his love of basketball to listening to the radio while growing up in Wayne County and Randolph County. By the time he was in high school in Redkey, Eads was already tape recording play-by-play of games for the coach to use as a scouting report.
"I began to get hooked on it," he said. "It was until '51 or '52 that I really started collecting stuff. ... I never bought anything."
That includes scorebooks.
Eads didn't think the "itty-bitty boxes" in most scorebooks provided enough room to record a game accurately.
"I've always made my own," he said. "I wanted to do it my own way."
"He just has all sorts of neat stuff," said Spencer. "We're going to put it all in three-ring binders in acid-free protectors, and we're going to have a shelf of Jay County basketball history."
For Eads, that's the way it should be: Shared with the community so that future sports fans can enjoy it.
As for Les, he doesn't need to hang onto all that stuff. He has the memories.
He can tell you what he was doing on the night of Jan. 25, 1963.
That's when he broadcast his first game.
It was Dunkirk vs. Geneva at Dunkirk.
Dunkirk won.[[In-content Ad]]
Les Eads pulled one after another out of the back of his SUV last week, handing them to volunteers who carried them into the Jay County Historical Museum.
Scrapbooks, scorebooks, clippings, photos and endless memorabilia were stacked up on a table, hundreds of items, all of them focused on one thing: Basketball.
Jay County basketball, to be specific.
"I'm going back to when the schools first started," said Eads, a Portland barber who helped broadcast local games for more than 40 years.
Eads estimates he broadcast between 1,800 and 1,850 games during 43 years at WPGW.
"I also collected every program from every game I did," he said.
The collection, he added, just seemed to happen. "One thing led to another," he said.
And now, it's time to put the collection into the hands of the whole community.
"Everything will be gone through item by item and given a number," said county historian Jane Spencer.
"I've been thinking about this for two years," said Eads. "I decided this is where it's gonna go. Our kids thought it belonged here in Jay County."
The Eads archive represents a remarkable collection of local sports history. "I have every team in the county, every year, their record, and their coach," said Eads.
He traces his love of basketball to listening to the radio while growing up in Wayne County and Randolph County. By the time he was in high school in Redkey, Eads was already tape recording play-by-play of games for the coach to use as a scouting report.
"I began to get hooked on it," he said. "It was until '51 or '52 that I really started collecting stuff. ... I never bought anything."
That includes scorebooks.
Eads didn't think the "itty-bitty boxes" in most scorebooks provided enough room to record a game accurately.
"I've always made my own," he said. "I wanted to do it my own way."
"He just has all sorts of neat stuff," said Spencer. "We're going to put it all in three-ring binders in acid-free protectors, and we're going to have a shelf of Jay County basketball history."
For Eads, that's the way it should be: Shared with the community so that future sports fans can enjoy it.
As for Les, he doesn't need to hang onto all that stuff. He has the memories.
He can tell you what he was doing on the night of Jan. 25, 1963.
That's when he broadcast his first game.
It was Dunkirk vs. Geneva at Dunkirk.
Dunkirk won.[[In-content Ad]]
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