Mark Miller was the boy next door – to Gerry Meehan.
Meehan is one of the seminal figures in Buffalo Sabres history. Fifty years ago tonight, in the opener of their second season, he debuted as their second captain. And Meehan would go on to be their fourth general manager.
As it happens, Miller wasn’t a hockey fan until Meehan joined the Washington Capitals and moved in next door to Miller’s family in Bowie, Md. Miller was 14 at the time. The Caps were in their early years as an expansion team that lost a lot, while Meehan was a journeyman on his sixth NHL team. That might not seem like a likely road to hero worship. But today, at 57, Miller believes he has the largest collection of Meehan memorabilia in the world. And roughly two-thirds of it is related to the left winger’s time in Buffalo.
“I remember when we were going to have a new neighbor, I asked the realtor, ‘Do they have any kids?’ ” Miller says. “And she said, ‘Yeah, and not only do they have kids, but he is a professional hockey player.’ And that sounded pretty cool. But I just didn’t know anything about hockey at the time.”
He does now. Miller is a forever fan of the Caps, with room in his heart for the Montreal Canadiens and the Sabres, too. He likes the Canadiens because they were the NHL’s dominant team – in the midst of a run of four Stanley Cups – when he began to follow hockey in the late 1970s. And he likes the Sabres because, well, they are the team most closely associated with Meehan, his forever player.
Seventy-five years ago, for more than a month, Buffalo had four professional sports teams all known by the same name.
The realtor was right about kids: Meehan’s son Danny was a couple of years younger than Miller. They became buddies, and pretty soon Miller got invited to come along and sit in the family section for Caps games.
“We got to sit close and hang out with the wives and their kids and go into the locker room,” Miller says. “And when Caps players would visit next door, I would go over and get all their autographs.”
That was the beginning of his life as a collector. Today, he keeps his collection in the man cave of his home in Silver Spring, Md. – and, as he tells his story, he is surrounded by those artifacts.
“One year for my birthday, (Meehan) gave me a Rick Martin hockey stick, which I have right here in my basement. It is one of my prize possessions. That made me a fan of Rick Martin and the Sabres and the French Connection and all that. But also, because it was a gift from him, it just meant so much to me.”
Miller began going to Caps games with his own family, too, and he would often buy hockey cards at the souvenir stands, always hoping for a Meehan card.
"Larry Hillman is a member of a club of just 11 players who skated for both the Buffalo Sabres and the Buffalo Bisons. That alone should make him a fan favorite hereabouts. But there’s even more to love about him," writes Erik Brady.
“I wasn’t interested in assembling sets at the time. It was more just looking at the cards and trading them and keeping them in a shoebox. Then I got in the habit of buying whole sets. I would go to the Capital Centre and buy a whole set of Topps cards. I bought the 1979-80 set for $11 (about $40 today). It had the Wayne Gretzky rookie card.”
That set Miller on a course of collecting Gretzky stuff, too, even if the Great One didn’t live next door. He recently sold his Gretzky collection, plus some other choice items, for more than $10,000. The centerpiece was that rookie card.
Miller will never sell the Meehan collection. Someday he plans to give it to the Meehan family. Danny Meehan told Miller that his father wasn’t much of a collector when he played, nor was anyone else in the family, and so they would be happy to have the memorabilia whenever that day comes.
Miller has two signed and framed Meehan jerseys – a Sabres one in blue with No. 15, and a Caps one in white with No. 14. He has an original charcoal drawing of Meehan by Charles Linnett, who put out a series of hockey lithographs in the 1970s. And he has a full-page color illustration of Meehan that ran in the Buffalo Evening News in 1973.
You can see the collection for yourself on Miller’s website: gerrymeehan.com.
“No one else had it,” he says of the domain name.
We share a state and a country with the Yankees, but we share a region with Toronto – and so much more, Brady says.
No one has else has a collection like his, either.
“I didn’t want it to get scrapped. And I just felt like the Meehan family should have it,” he says.
Think of it as a way to say thank you to the neighbors who set Miller on a path that led to his life’s work. Today he is vice president of communications at the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health foundation in Maryland. He got his start as a writer for the newsletter of the Caps fan club when he was in high school – and has been writing and editing ever since.
“I remember I was sort of the oddball who was obsessed with hockey and would bring hockey magazines to school and talk about the game I just went to,” Miller says. “Nobody I knew was really into hockey” other than the Meehan boys, Danny and Adam.
“I think I played street hockey with them every day," he adds. "It seemed like nobody else in Bowie, Maryland, cared about hockey.”
That was then. Now the Caps are a big deal in Washington and its suburbs, mainly because today’s Caps win as regularly as the Caps of yore lost.
“In the Ovechkin era, they are always competitive and always in the playoffs,” Miller says. “But I still have a fondness for the original ’70s Caps.”
And, of course, for an original Sabre.
