Milwaukee's Jason Mishelow has been collecting memorabilia from Negro league baseball since he was 13 or 14.
He’s 33 now, and one of his recent finds has landed him on PBS’ "History Detectives" in an episode airing tonight at 8 on Channel 10.
It was a piece he’d discovered on eBay, one of his regular spots, where, he says, "you can still get some things at fairly good prices."
What he bought was a scorecard for the Jackie Robinson All-Stars game, in which black and white athletes played together before Robinson became the first African American to play in the majors in the 1940s.
He searched through books about Robinson and found no record of such a game. It raised questions in his mind about when the color barrier was actually breached.
"I sent the story in to 'History Detectives' two or three months after I received it," he recalled. He got interest from the producers, who began doing research. They flew him out this spring to Cooperstown, N.Y., the site of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
"Which was probably the best part of it, a free trip out to Cooperstown," said Mishelow. "The funniest thing about that, they pretend the house they're filming in is your house."
Mishelow, an attorney for a non-profit organization, lives in Sherman Park.
It was during the day of filming in Cooperstown that he met Tukufu Zuberi, one of the faces of "History Detectives."
He hasn't seen the final segment.
"I know some of what they're going to say," Mishelow said.
"But I'm not sure what they're going to show."
In a Milwaukee media footnote to tonight's "History Detectives," Mishelow's brother is DJ Brett Andrews, who left WXSS-FM (103.7) in May for KKRZ-FM in Portland, Ore.
"My wife jokes that the one of us who wanted us to be on national TV the least is the one who is made it first," Mishelow said.
The former Milwaukee radio voice tweeted to me over the weekend that despite the fact that his brother beat him to national television, Andrews is "still way cooler than him!"
Noted Andrews: "he's the smart one, I'm the entertainer!"
We'll let them fight it out.
In the meantime, here's PBS' promo for tonight's "History Detectives"
On TV: Word is expected shortly from CNN confirming that Piers Morgan will take over Larry King's 8 p.m. slot this fall.
- Media Life Magazine polled ad buyers and came up with the believable conclusion that Fox's "American Idol" will likely have its final first-place season starting in January, thanks to the departure of Simon Cowell.
- Multichannel News reports that AMC is finally going HD for Dish Network subscribers. There's no word on when DirecTV will start offering shows like "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" in high-definition.
- Veteran CBS News correspondent Harold Dow has died at 62. For the past 20 years, he was a correspondent for the network's "48 Hours."
Call them the pre-Emmys: Her high-rated host gig on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" earned Betty White an Emmy Award. It's the fifth Emmy for the 88-year-old White.
Neil Patrick Harris picked up an Emmy for his visit to "Glee" in the first installment of the TV awards, the "Creative Arts" Emmys, held over the weekend. He also won for hosting the 63rd annual Tony Awards. Those were his first two Emmys.
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has the complete list of winners.
The taped Creative Arts Emmys will air at noon Friday on E! Entertainment Television.
NBC's live Emmy broadcast kicks off at 7 p.m. Sunday on Channel 4, following a one-hour red carpet special.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
