Prized Golf History Collection Takes a Nifty Bounce Toward Preservation

For the duffers, their version of the Library of Congress is out of the rough.

When one of the two libraries nationwide dedicated to the history and culture of golf shut its doors at Industry Hills Sheraton Resort last year, links history buffs feared it was a fatal double bogey for the prized collection.

But after 15 months in storage, the Ralph W. Miller Golf Library will become part of the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s sports library in Los Angeles.

“This is the best possible solution. They have the resources to take it, preserve it and even enhance it,” said Geoff D. Shackelford, a leading golf historian and author who researched five books with the help of the collection.

“It is among the finest public collections of golf history anywhere.”

Making the trip to the foundation library on West Adams Boulevard will be 5,000 books, 1,500 volumes of bound periodicals, 500 video and film volumes, and thousands of photographs collected by Ralph W. Miller, an attorney with a passion for greens and fairways who died in 1974.

Among the tomes is an original 1597 edition of “Laws and Actes of Parliament,” which contains one of the earliest mentions of golf--a 1400s Scottish law outlawing the game because it was distracting people from practicing archery.

Council members in Industry, which owns the collection, agreed to transfer ownership to the foundation, and the volumes are expected to be moved next month. The city acquired the collection in the 1970s from Miller’s family.

“We deeply appreciate the generosity of the city of Industry and the City Council’s desire to keep the collection in Southern California,” foundation President Anita DeFrantz said Monday. The Miller library was ousted in August from its Honduran mahogany stacks at the Sheraton after 22 years.

It was to make way for a renovation of the resort, part of a deal by the city to lease the hotel and convention center--which has two championship golf courses--to Majestic Realty, owned by developer Edward Roski Jr.

Majestic officials contacted the Amateur Athletic Foundation to arrange the transfer to its Paul Ziffren Sports Resource Center Library, said Wayne Wilson, the foundation’s vice president of research and library manager. “We expect researchers will be able to use the materials again next summer, once it is all cataloged,” he said.

With almost 40,000 books, Ziffren is the largest sports research library open to the public in the country. Saundra Sheffer, the Miller collection’s librarian for 12 years, said she is glad it will remain accessible to the public. “We feared a private collector would buy it or, worse than that, it [would] be broken up,” she said. “People come from all over the world to look through the volumes.”

Sheffer said the Miller library was the only one dedicated to golf in the country, apart from the U.S. Golf Assn. Library at its headquarters in Far Hills, N.J.

Visitors could view one of the half-dozen copies of the first piece of literature believed to be dedicated solely to golf: “The Goff,” a 22-page poem published in 1743 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Some memorabilia that once lined the library’s glass displays won’t be taken by the foundation, Wilson said. Among the items are President Eisenhower’s golf clubs; golf balls dating back to the 1800s, with names such as “The Bramble”; and the much-maligned putter of President Ford. What will happen to them is under discussion.