I’ll never forget the darkness of that cave nor the unholy confines of its passages.

Crawling through those narrow tunnels, mountains of rock pressing in from all sides, was like submitting to the black embrace of death itself. 

But it had to be done. 

Somewhere deep inside that cave network, a 37-year-old man was hopelessly stuck, pinned by a fallen rock in a section of a tunnel barely wide enough to allow the passage of a whisper. 

The scene was Mammoth Cave National Park in South Central Kentucky. Trapped deep within the stone bowels of Sand Cave was the legendary cave explorer Floyd Collins — a larger-than-life figure admired by all of those adventurous spirits who are drawn to the exploration of Earth’s most forbidding places. 

So I crawled, twisting and pulling and praying quietly that my small frame would allow me to squeeze through the impossibly tight tunnels with openings barely larger than a child’s lunch box. 

I needed to bring food and water to the trapped man to sustain him. I needed to pray with him; to comfort his immobile form as the rescue efforts continued in the world of sunlight far, far above. 

During six agonizing trips into the cave over three days, I brought soup to feed Mr. Collins through a rubber tube. I brought strings of electric light to push back some of the infernal darkness that enfolded the pinned man so completely. 

It will forever mystify me how the great man sustained his sanity in a place that felt, not like hell, but like the suffocating subterranean world beneath it. 

“Floyd Collins is suffering torture almost beyond description,” I wrote after one trip down into what would become Mr. Collins’ grave. “But he is still hopeful he will be taken out alive, he told me at 6:20 o’clock last night on my last visit to him.” 

Sadly, after 17 days of such hope, Mr. Collins died down there in the darkness, the stones that held him unwilling to surrender the great man no matter how many people prayed and hoped from above. 

My own grief was tremendous. It was no solace at all when I was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for my efforts to save the doomed caver — and for my coverage of the sad affair for the Louisville Courier-Journal. 

William “Skeets” Miller Louisville Courier Journal

But just you hold on a minute here, would you? Now that I think back on that tragic affair that unfolded back in the early part of 1925, I suddenly recall that the brave reporter who tried so heroically to save Floyd Collins wasn’t me at all. It wasn’t me inch-worming my way through tight, corkscrew tunnels to bring comfort and sustenance to the doomed man. In truth, it was one William Burke Miller, a 20-year-old journalist known to his friends and colleagues as “Skeets.” 

You can understand my confusion. After first learning about the life and times of Skeets Miller just a week ago, I’ve been so absorbed by his story, I’ve come to feel like Skeets and I are old pals, separated only by the long decades between us. 

Not, mind you, that I lay claim to Skeets Miller’s particular brand of courage. 

I’ve been a reporter a long time, and I like to think that if my actions were ever needed to save a person in peril, I’d rise to the challenge. 

Run into a burning building to help free a trapped family? Sure, I might do that, if the professional firefighters weren’t there to do a better job of it. 

Drag a wounded soul from a burning car? Plunge into a frozen lake to save a drowning child? Go toe-to-toe with a mountain lion to spare an old lady and her little dog from carnage? 

If needed, I’d be willing to jump into those kinds of frays, you bet.

But would I squeeze myself into a series of narrow tunnels so tight that a person can’t even use his arms to propel himself along? Would I willingly submit to being buried alive for the long, long hours required to make such a journey?  

Would I attempt to contort my body into the crazy pretzel shapes necessary to negotiate the unforgiving twists and bends, knowing that I, too, might become trapped forever at any turn? 

I have my doubts. I have my doubts because I’ve been watching a series of “trapped in a cave tunnel” videos on YouTube and I find myself nearly paralyzed by horror with each new story to come my way. 

I have to pause the videos frequently. I have to get up, move around and shake my arms like a water wiggle just to reassure myself that I’m still above ground and free to move about. 

Those videos are terrifying — worse than any horror movie you can think of, really — and yet this is how I came to know Skeets Miller and to raise him onto the pedestal reserved for those journalists I admire the most. 

What Skeets Miller did over the course of those hard days in January 1925 is near unimaginable for we mere mortals.

Skeets didn’t have to crawl headfirst into that hellscape beneath the earth to aid a stranger. He could have stayed above ground and mingled with the tens of thousands of people who turned out for the rescue of Floyd Collins and nobody would have thought less of him for it. 

But Skeets was a little guy, you have to understand. He stood just 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed 117 soaking wet. Of the legions who came to assist poor Floyd Collins, Skeets was one of a very few who were wee enough to make their way to him. 

And so he went, squeezing his way through god-awful miles of Stygian darkness to reach the trapped caver. In addition to comforting Collins, Skeets spent hours at a time down in that terrible place, removing handfuls of dirt and rock with his own bloody hands in his attempts to free the man. 

At one point, Skeets made the suffocating crawl out of the cave, retrieved a crowbar, and then crawled right back in. That Collins never made it out of that tomb alive is no fault of the young journalist, who put his notebook and pen aside and then worked harder than anybody in hopes of freeing Collins. 

Hundreds of journalists eventually made their way to Sand Cave while Collins was trapped, but Skeets was the only one small enough, or possibly BRAVE enough, to go hands-on with the rescue. 

He worked to exhaustion over several days and dug his hands bloody not because he was a great newsman, but because he was a great human being. It was compassion that drove Skeets on, not the prospect of journalistic glory. 

So Skeets, who made $25 a week as a cub reporter, went away from Sand Cave ultimately deflated by the death of the man he had tried so hard to free. It was probably not much comfort when, a short time later, Skeets was announced as the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. 

If I know Skeets like I think I know Skeets, he would have traded that Pulitzer without hesitation for just one chance to sit in a saloon and drink beer with Floyd Collins, alive and well and free of the pit. 

And here I am, exactly 100 years later, thinking what I wouldn’t give for a chance to have that same beer with ‘ole Skeets himself. What I wouldn’t give for just one conversation with the lad, if only to find out how he came to be made of such tough stuff. 

The journalists I admire most these days, I admire for bravery — the kind of bravery that’s required, in this age of rage, to write about things that aren’t politically popular. A courageous reporter today faces blacklisting, cancel campaigns and worse if they somehow summon the audacity to write things that go against accepted agendas. 

How would William Burke Miller, affectionately known as Skeets, get along as a newsman in these weird times? 

That young man went wriggling headfirst into a place of black nightmare to help a soul in need. He did something most of us would find unimaginable and he did it over and over out of pure benevolence. 

Skeets Miller was a titan of courage, as far as I’m concerned. 

I doubt the cancel mob would leave him shaking in his boots.