It was a February morning in 2020, but if you closed your eyes and used your imagination, you could easily be transported back to perhaps the most special time in local basketball history.
Seeing Larry Miller back in the place they used to call the Lincoln Gym earlier this week was like being put in a time capsule and returned to those special nights when the place was packed and the line for tickets seemed to stretch through half of Catasauqua.
The gym floor and walls inside Lincoln Gym feature different colors than it used to when it was the home for Catasauqua High basketball games in the Miller era in the early 1960s, but it looked familiar and felt comfortable for the guy considered the Babe Ruth of Lehigh Valley basketball.
Miller was back in his home gym, now part of the Innovative Arts Academy Charter School, to be interviewed as part of a half-hour special being put together for Service Electric Cable TV.
Danny Marakovits, a longtime friend of Miller’s who played on local playgrounds with the local legend and later played and coached at Northampton, conducted an interview at halfcourt of the gym.
Miller did the interview with Marakovits and The Morning Call in part to promote an upcoming book to be called: “It’s Miller Time” by Stephen Demorest. Stephen’s wife, Nancy, came up with the idea of writing the book after she grew up as a big fan of North Carolina basketball and Larry Miller and decided to reach out and connect with someone she always had admired.
The Demorests have visited Catasauqua several times in doing research for the book.
Even though he lives just a few blocks away from Lincoln Gym, Miller said he hadn’t been back to the place he used to call home for a long time.
“I really didn’t know what to expect coming in here,” Miller said. “I heard it was unoccupied for several years and they were fixing it up, but coming in here and seeing it makes me feel like it was just yesterday that I was playing here.”
Asked if he could put his emotions into words about seeing his favorite gym again, he said: “I really can’t. It’s overwhelming, really. I have so many memories of this place.”
Miller said the gym was pretty much intact and looked like it used to when he and the Rough Riders were among the top sports draws in the Lehigh Valley and routinely filled Lincoln’s 1,100 seats as many fans were left outside wishing they had tickets.
“I remember that locker room and running out on the floor always with a big crowd in the stands,” he said. “I remember the ticket line for the games back then went up and down Peach Street. I remember we had a court on the playground outside the gym, too, and that was fun.”
Of course, basketball fans remember what took place inside the gym where Miller earned legendary status in scoring a District 11-record 2,722 points and grabbing 2,062 rebounds in four seasons at Catasauqua. He led the Roughies to three straight District 11 championships during those years.
In his final game at Lincoln on Feb. 21, 1964, Miller left an indelible mark on the place with a record-breaking 65-point performance against Stroudsburg. It broke his own Lehigh Valley League record of 53 points set the previous year.
Along the way, Miller’s exploits earned him fans from well beyond the boundary of Catasauqua.
“Larry Miller didn’t belong just to Catty, he belonged to the entire Lehigh Valley,” local sports historian Evan Burian said in a previous Morning Call story. “I went to the games and I am from Emmaus. People from Allentown, Whitehall, Northampton, everywhere around here were going to the games because they knew this guy was great.”
In the state playoffs, half of the town of Catasauqua attended games at Hersheypark Arena and the Farm Show Arena in Harrisburg.
He was one of the nation’s top recruits in 1964, helping to generate a national following for Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina. He scored 1,972 points and pulled down 834 rebounds in three varsity years for the Tar Heels and led UNC to two Final Fours. In 1968, he was one-fifth of an all-time great All-American squad that included Pete Maravich, Elvin Hayes, Wes Unseld and Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
In his rookie season in the ABA, he scored 1,328 points and had 599 rebounds. Three years later, on March 18, 1972, as a member of the Carolina Cougars, Miller set an ABA record when he scored 67 points in a 139-125 victory over Memphis.
All of these amazing facts have been documented before.
What Miller wanted to get across in the book was what it was like growing up in Catasauqua in the 1950s and early 60s.
“It’s really about going back to that whole era and I’m just the driver of the bus,” he said. “Catty was a working-class town back then, so we talk about that and then North Carolina and helping to recruit African-American players for the program and so on.”
Miller, who returned to live in Catasauqua in 2003, said that while he’s proud of the past, he hasn’t dwelled on it.
For many years, he declined invitations to return to North Carolina for various events.
But in 2017, he returned to UNC for ceremonies honoring Smith’s first three Final Four teams from 1967-69, and Miller received one of the biggest ovations of any player when introduced.
“It all started with the book,” Miller said. “I was just sitting in my backyard and enjoying the peace and quiet by my garden where I love to be and Stephen and Nancy Demorest stopped by and visited for 30 minutes. Three years later, we’ve got a book about to come out.”
The book got Miller to revisit the past more than he had previously wanted.
“Since then, I’ve been back to North Carolina five or six times and I take some people from here with me,” he said. “We call it the ‘Carolina Experience.’ We spend a weekend down there and the people who have never been there before really enjoy it.”
When he visits Chapel Hill, people enjoy seeing Miller.
“I still have some fans down there, I guess,” he said humbly. “I guess we’ll find out how many when this book comes out.”
Miller also has dozens of fans throughout the Lehigh Valley who consider him to be the area’s greatest basketball player and one of our best all-time athletes.
“Seeing Larry play a basketball game was an event; we had never seen anything like it,” said Northampton native Dave Rank, a member of the Innovative Arts board of directors. “Larry was just a phenomenal athlete. I was fortunate to see LeBron James play in high school in Ohio and he’s the only I could compare to Larry. The story goes that Larry could jump so high that he could pick a quarter off the top of the backboard and leave two dimes and a nickel.”
Rank said Innovative Arts building owner Abe Atiyeh plans to rename the gym in Miller’s honor at some point; an event that would likely outdraw almost any local high school game.
Miller, meanwhile, says he is enjoying life at age 73. He got to see the new Catasauqua High School building for the first time this week and said “it’s like an airport hangar in there; it’s very nice.”
He’s reflective and appreciative of where he’s been and where he came from.
“The town has changed, but there’s a lot of people around here who helped me along the way,” Miller said. “I still get together with people like Bobby Nemeth, who took me under his wing and got me playing in pick-up games against the Allentown Jets. I had a lot of great influences around here, none bigger than my father. It was just a great place to grow up.”
Keith Groller can be reached at 610-820-6740 or at kgroller@mcall.com
