1964: Uncle Richard and NBC's Big Sports Deal
My Uncle Richard was on the top of the world...and then he fell hard. I'm pivoting to stories like this in 2026 and hope you stay with me.
I’m back after a year off from tracking the financial playbooks behind college athletics. I’ve spent the last year writing an academic article about Sacramento’s biggest sports fan in the 1990’s - Mayor Joe Serna Jr. He fought the good fight to get the Kansas City Kings to Sacramento and to keep them here. But he also failed trying to land the NFL Raiders and MLB’s Giants and A’s. My time in the archives reminded me how much I enjoyed digging up records and resurrecting forgotten figures - from the ordinary to the famous, from orphans to millionaires.
I am pivoting. I am taking the same investigative rigor I used to analyze NCAA finances and applying it to these forgotten narratives. From now on, The Dustbin Historian will be a place where we unearth the scoundrels, the heroes, and the complicated truths that the sanitized history books leave out.
The “Dustbin of History” isn’t just about famous rascals and Gilded Age bets. It’s about the gap between the stories we tell the world—on NBC letterhead—and the hard evidence left in the shoebox. For example…
First up will be a story about my Uncle Richard Barnett. The above excerpt is form Richard’s letter to my grandfather, written on David Brinkley’s Journal stationery in 1964. Richard was at the top of the world. He was living in McLean, Virginia—just down the street from the Attorney General—and prepping for a new role at NBC Sports Spectacular. He was going to cover sports in Ireland, Germany, and Russia. To any outside observer, it was the ultimate sports “big deal.”
I knew Richard hit a rough patch later. But I had no idea how bad it was until I spread out the evidence my grandfather had so meticulously preserved.
Next to the glossy NBC letter was a different kind of “receipt”: a handwritten timeline from the mind of a former engineer on graph paper. It wasn’t tracking broadcast schedules; it was tracking drunk driving arrests, car crashes, and time served in Sacramento, Mariposa, and Woodland jails.
I will return next week to complete Richard’s story. There is a lot more in Granddad’s folio.
We’re moving from the box score to the archive. I hope you’ll join me for the hunt.
Bill Farley, PhD DustbinHistorian.com
P.S.: Of course if a story falls in my lap about college athletics that I can’t resist I’ll post in a special “off-topic” space open to all.