One of my all-time heroes left our world today. Ernie Harwell, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who used his gifts to transform Detroit Tiger games into works of art, passed away today at the age of 92. Here is a column I wrote last year, when Ernie told us all that he had inoperable late-stage cancer, and that he would soon be leaving his wife Lulu and all his loving fans behind.
I moved to Southeast Michigan on a blind date in the Spring of 1975. When I arrived I was a White Sox fan, mostly because I had spent my formative high school years within easy obscenity-shouting distance of Chicago. Back in those days, probably the best thing about our pathetic Sox was a broadcaster named Harry Caray, who was known for saying "Holy Cow!" Harry used this as a fairly transparent substitute for shouting obscenities .
As that first summer unfolded, two amazing things happened more or less reshaped my life. First, Nan and I decided that the blind date was going well enough to get married, which is bound to make a summer stick in your mind, just about any way you cut it.
Second, I discovered the Detroit Tigers and a baseball play-by-play man named Ernie Harwell.
Ernie was already a seasoned professional broadcaster back in 1960 when he came to work for the Tigers. He had started doing radio broadcasts of major league baseball games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, after he was picked up on a trade with the Atlanta Crackers for catcher Cliff Dapper. This launched Ernie on what was to become a Hall of Fame broadcasting career, and it gave Dapper the unfortunate distinction of being the only professional baseball player in history to be traded even-up for a microphone jockey.
So by the time I first heard Ernie holler, "That ball is LOOOOONG GONE!" after a home run, he had already called something like 2,300 major league ball games. He knew what he was doing.
Now a baseball game is just about perfectly designed for radio. You have occasional bursts of gentle and easily-described action, separated by really long periods of time during which coaches and players carry on silent conversations using cryptic (and generally pretty comical) hand signals, scratch themselves in places only a guy would tackle in public, and spit tobacco juice.
This leaves a whole lot of air time for discussing obscure statistics, telling homespun anecdotes, and making bucolic observations about pretty much anything. And this is precisely where Ernie Harwell was maybe the best who ever sat down behind a microphone. He seemed to know a little something about everybody in baseball, and always had wonderfully insightful stories to tell.
Then there was The Voice. Ernie had the natural speaking rhythm and tone of a grandfather, the really cool one who could always tell you a story to make you smile, and feel comfortable, and believe that at that moment the world is exactly as it was meant to be.
He came to work at the ballpark each day with a verbal tool box of Ernie-isms that I never got tired of hearing. If a batter took a called strike, Ernie would likely say, "...he stood there like the house at the side of the road and watched that one go by." He would describe a double play as "...two for the price of one for the Tigers." Of course, with his faint Atlanta drawl he always pronounced it "Taggers."
If a foul ball went up into the crowd he would inform us that, "A young man from Lake Orion (or Traverse City, or Mason, or Port Huron, or whatever) caught that one." I wonder how he knew?
During that first summer in Michigan, and for about the next twenty summers after that, I spent nearly every evening with my little transistor radio, listening to Ernie tell us that "...the pitcher and catcher are having a confab at the mound," or, "...that last pitch just caught the outside corner - Mr.Chylak said so." And I treasured every word.
I met Ernie Harwell in person once. It was toward the end of his career, and he was all alone walking along the concourse near the press box in Tiger Stadium wearing a Greek fisherman's cap. I was struck by how small a man he was, and by the intelligent kindness in his eyes. I introduced myself, shook his hand, then babbled on and on about how much I loved listening to him.
He listened patiently and thanked me for my kind words. Then he basically interviewed me, asking all sorts of questions about my column and my life, listening to each answer as if I was somehow the most important person he could possibly be talking to, rather than a star-struck fan who had accosted him in front of the hot pretzel stand.
A few years back Ernie retired from broadcasting. True to form, in his good-bye comments he knew just the right words to help all of us deal with the end of an era that we had hoped would somehow go on forever. Here is my favorite part:
"Thank you for letting me be part of your family. Thank you for taking me with you to that cottage up north, to the beach, the picnic, your work place and your backyard.
"Thank you for sneaking your transistor under the pillow as you grew up loving the Tigers.
"Now I might have been a small part of your life. But you have been a very large part of mine. And it's my privilege and honor to share with you the greatest game of all."
Ernie, your natural humility may lead you to think of it like that, but I'm here to say that you were a far greater part of all our lives than you may be willing to imagine. And now as you move on to your next great adventure, you should know that we are all better, richer, and happier because you were kind enough to spend all those years chatting with us.
So thank you Ernie. We will never, ever forget you.
Copyright © 2009, Michael Ball
What I've Learned So Far... by Mike Ball is a syndicated feature. If you enjoy this work, please contact your local newspaper's editors and ask them to carry it.
So sad to hear he's passed. I can recall many hours in the garage holding a light for my father to work on his cars while listening to the Tigers on WJR.
