Cam Miller remembers coming to Wilmington in the 1980s, a loaded family station wagon heading north on Interstate-71 from Kentucky.

Watching the Bengals practice “was better than a trip to Kings Island.”

Miller and his family “made a day of it” in our town.

“I have a very fond memory that I often tell when I speak,” said Miller, who is a well-known videographer, musician, historian. “I was a scrawny, red-headed boy and painfully shy. Getting autographs was very hard for me. One particular day at camp, I was in the scrum of autograph seekers, barely keeping a hold of my pen and program. The great Anthony Munoz was walking up to the line to sign. His eyes caught mine and he parted the sea of fans, bent down to my level and made sure I got the first autograph. He rubbed my wavy red hair and smiled, thanking me for coming out. I have never forgot that act of kindness.”

Miller has put together a film of the Bengals time in Wilmington, a look from the beginning of the team’s training camp at Wilmington College. The Cincinnati Bengals held their preseason training camp from 1968 to 1997 at Wilmington College.

“The Bengals in Wilmington: A Short Film By Cam Miller” can be viewed at (youtube.com/c/Cammillerfilms/featured.

Though backyard wiffleball, basketball and football were favorites of Miller and his brothers growing up in northern Kentucky, filmmaking was his passion.

“I have always had a love affair with the arts, be it music, film, writing,” he said. “But film and storytelling were really something I felt passionate about. I was drawn to it. As a kid, I’d make my own Star Wars films and compose the soundtracks on a Casio keyboard. I would read books on directors, or ‘making of’ books. I would watch documentary films on the process. It really fascinated me. And not just directing, but editing, composing, cinematography, sound effects. I loved it all.”

Miller has “always been obsessed with history.” He was hired by the Cincinnati Reds at their Hall of Fame and Museum in 2004. In 2005, the Reds museum wanted a video of past hall of fame players to play in the museum lobby on a loop.

“I volunteered my services,” Miller said. “They liked it so much, they asked if I’d be interested in making a short film to play in a kiosk for an upcoming 1919 Reds exhibit. That was the film that really started it all for me. I gave it an old-timey silent film aesthetic and played a piece of Reds inspired sheet music from the era that hadn’t been heard since 1919 in local saloons on player pianos. I started getting asked to produce more and more videos, both with Reds and other entities. I decided to make it a full-time thing and the rest is history… literally.”

Miller put together a film on the original Bengals of 1937. He said “most people had no idea there was a Bengals before the Bengals. And even more people didn’t know that the 1937 Bengals were named after a line of stoves and that Paul Brown took the name Bengals as a nod to that early AFL team for the current version we root for today.”

Whether it was the Reds, Bengals or another historical film, Miller has opened his video vault to anyone.

“I put them on YouTube freely. It’s important to me that these stories are told,” he said. “If not us? Who? I think we have an obligation to pass forward what we know and what we have learned. After all, we can’t know where to go if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

But why the Bengals and their time in Wilmington?

“Last year, I was honored to show my ‘Riverfront Remembered: The Jungle’ film at a premiere event for charity that included many former Bengals,” Miller said. “Talking to some of them, there were many stories about the Wilmington years. I thought it would be appropriate to remind folks of that incredible history through a short film. Training camp was so much different back then. It’s important to remember what players and fans experienced.”

And Wilmington, for Miller and so many others, was a memorable experience.

“It was so incredible. It wasn’t just seeing the players up close, but the experience of watching them train fascinated me,” he said. “It was a side of the NFL you rarely got to see. I remember the Coke at the concession stands always seemed to just taste better and seemed colder. The people were super friendly. The town was so neat to me. It was so different from what I was used to.”