Are we ensuring the voices of yesteryear aren’t forgotten?
I recently came across a beautifully written obituary for Mike Paradise — a name that, if you loved harness racing in Chicago, you probably said with a smile.
Mike spent 50 years around the sport before his death at 83 last summer. Fifty years is a long time to do anything. It’s a lifetime when what you’re really doing is inviting other people to care.
He began as a sportswriter and handicapper for a couple of Chicago newspapers — the kind of job where you learn to love the small details: the muffled sound of tickets being punched at the mutuel windows, the way a certain driver sits just so in the bike. Later, he moved into publicity roles at Sportsman’s Park, then Balmoral and Maywood. But “publicity” doesn’t quite cover it. Mike was less a promoter and more a translator. He translated the language of sulkies and fractions into something everyday people could feel.
For decades, he brought racing to the masses. He pushed for daily coverage on Windy City television news, promoted race-night concerts that filled the grandstand with music and curiosity, and helped create and co-host a nightly harness racing show on Chicagoland’s SportsVision — Chicagoland’s pioneering pay television channel. I can only imagine how many fans first fell in love with the sport because of him. How many fathers took sons. How many people felt, for a few hours under the lights, that they belonged to something.
For me, that person was Jack Kiser.
I was a kid growing up near Philadelphia in the late 1970s and early ’80s. My cathedrals weren’t Balmoral or Maywood; they were Liberty Bell and Brandywine. And my gospel came in the pages of a bare-knuckled tabloid newspaper: the Philadelphia Daily News.
Jack Kiser was the harness racing writer there, and he was before his time. Acerbic. Biting. Sharp. Skilled in a way that made you read every word twice. Controversial? Oh, yeah. Accountable? Always. If he missed, he owned it. If he believed something, he said it … and he believed a lot of things. Today, he would have had a massive social media following. Back then, during the Carter and Reagan years, his devotees — and they were legion — showed up on the Delaware Valley track aprons, where it seemed that Jack’s graded handicap was tucked under the arm or stuffed into a back pocket of every two-dollar bettor.
Racetrack management — and more than a few horsepeople — often detested him. At the 1976 United States Harness Writers Association (USHWA) banquet, honored guests Joe O’Brien and Billy Haughton, eminently respected legends of the sport, launched into a tirade about Kiser that culminated with the suggestion that Kiser be barred from the press boxes of every track in America. Kiser, in a response published in the Daily News a few weeks later, did not apologize. He lit a match.
“…What burns Haughton and O’Brien is that I don’t fill my columns with fluff pieces on the great honest people in the sport,” he wrote. “Well, I never believed that honesty should be praised. It should be expected, even demanded, from everyone. I love harness racing. I honestly do. It is my sport because I selected it. It is much stronger than its leaders believe.”
And that’s why the masses loved Jack. It wasn’t just about picking winners. It was about feeling seen. Someone was watching the races closely enough to tell the truth — or, at least, the truth as he saw it. Someone was doing the homework. Someone cared enough to argue.
I was 9 years old in the spring of 1976. Precocious. Sports-obsessed. The kind of kid who read box scores before breakfast. When I read Jack, harness racing didn’t feel like a dusty oval somewhere far away. It felt alive. Adults were fighting over it. Truth and words mattered. And I had to know more about it. Kiser’s columns pulled me in.
He left the paper after 30 years in 1987 and passed away in 1993. But, as with Mike Paradise, he evangelized for harness racing in his own way.
Paradise and Kiser — by all accounts, two vastly different people — share one unfortunate commonality: Neither has been enshrined in the Harness Racing Communicators Hall of Fame. Both should be.
There have been 85 individuals enshrined in the Communicators Hall of Fame (CHOF) since its inception in 1983. Housed within the walls of the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, in Goshen, N.Y., it exists to honor outstanding communicators in harness racing and Standardbred breeding, as determined by a yearly election. According to the bylaws of the USHWA, the members of which elect the Hall’s honorees, “a living nominee must have been active in communications about harness racing for at least 20 years. A nominee who is deceased must have been active in harness racing for an extended period of time.”
Over time, induction classes have been capped at two. Some of that was practical. The museum had only so much room, and space, like time, runs out. To her credit, Janet Terhune, executive director of the Harness Racing Museum, addressed that in 2024 with the creation of the CHOF kiosk — a modern solution that honors the past while freeing space for the future.
The other limitation is less architectural. It’s human.
We remember who we see: the columnist still filing copy, the broadcaster still calling races, the colleague we chatted with at last month’s banquet. Recency bias isn’t a flaw so much as a reflex. It’s easier to shine a light on someone still standing in front of us than to search the shadows for someone who has been forgotten over time.
And don’t misunderstand me. There is something beautiful about honoring people while they can sit in the audience and hear the applause. If we can give someone their flowers while they can still smell them, we should.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: The sport we love was built, in large measure, by people whose bylines are no longer seen on a regular basis.
I’m thinking specifically of writers like Evan Pattak and his wife, Pohla Smith (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) — both Hervey Award winners — or the great Neil Milbert, long of the Chicago Tribune, who is still freelancing at the age of 86. (Neil was the writer of the obituary I mentioned at the top of this piece.) And a friend who is as central to harness racing as anyone I know suggested to me the names of Tom Durkin and Dave Johnson, names that echo in grandstands and memory. Men whose calls at the Meadowlands turned one lap and less than two minutes into something operatic.
Until 2010, USHWA had a Seniors Committee — a body not unlike Major League Baseball’s Era Committee — tasked with reconsidering candidates no longer on the main ballot. It existed for a simple, powerful reason: to correct oversights; to revisit names that time, circumstance, or shifting attention had pushed aside.
Bringing it back would not diminish the current honorees. It would strengthen them. It would say that excellence does not expire simply because the newsroom has closed or the microphone has gone silent.
I’m told such a restoration may already be under consideration. If so, count me in as a full-throated advocate. Because halls of fame are not just about celebration. They are about memory. And memory requires intention.
Paradise and Kiser may be different in every visible way. But they — and others like them — share this invisible thread: They gave their professional lives to telling the story of harness racing.
The least we can do is make sure their own stories are not left untold.
Mike
This column appears in the March 2026 issue of Hoof Beats, the official magazine of the USTA. To learn more, or to become a subscriber to harness racing’s premier monthly publication, click here.