A few words about Ernie Harwell

Ernie Harwell died Tuesday. He was 92.

His name may not mean much to folks around here, but to this lifelong Detroit Tigers fan, it means so much.

Harwell was the radio, and sometimes TV voice of the Tigers. He called the games when the team won the World Series in 1984, and he called the games when they were cellar-dwellers.

Ernie was old-school. He was humble. He was gentle. He was honest. He wasn't a publicity hound. He was a baseball man with a distinctive, reedy Southern lilt, not a school-trained broadcaster with a voice washed of all personality who simply schilled for the team. 

He understood the cerebral nature of the game, the peaceful way in which it can be one minute, and the thrill it can give the next.

Ernie called Tigers games for AM powerhouse WJR for more than 30 years, calling by his own count more than 8,300 games in a Hall of Fame career that included being traded by the Atlanta Crackers minior league team to the Brooklyn Dodgers for a catcher.

He'll be forever known in the Motor City, not just for those laudable traits above, but for signature phrases. When one of the Bengals hit one out, he'd say "it's long gone!" If someone fouled one off, he'd say it was caught by "a man from Cheboygan," or one of numerous cities in the Michigan, Ohio and Ontario listening areas.

My favorite: When a batter took a called third strike, Ernie'd exclaim, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road."

These were phrases that evolved over time. He didn't make them up as a young broadcaster trying to advance his career. That's the way Harwell was. Real. Natural. Traditional. That's so important in baseball.

I had two brushes with him. 

One came just a few years ago when he signed copies of one of his books at my son's middle school in Grand Blanc, MI. I bought one for my dad, who was from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak and the man who gave me my live for the team with the Old English D, and Ernie nicely obliged, even jotting a short, personal message to the distant old man of a fan in El Paso.

The other came several years earlier. Ernie always opened his first spring training broadcast with the same biblical passage. When you live in a very cold state like that, those words evoke a particularly warm feeling inside, even when you know there's going to be more snow and more cold before real baseball weather returned (my friend Andy Heller always jokes that Michigan gets two weeks of summer).

I listened to one of those broadcasts early in my run at the Flint Journal and I wrote a column about it, which, if memory serves, they ran on the front page. A few days later I got a very nice, handwritten note by Ernie, whom I'd never met before, thanking me for the kind words.

I don't know who sent him the column. God knows tons of them have been written about him. He certainly didn't have to write me a thank you note. If anything, I owed him one as a fan and as a human being.

But that's the kind of class guy Ernie Harwell was. The cancer with which he was diagnosed last year finally took him. But he'll live in my and thousands of others' memories for a very long time.

So long, Ernie. RIP.

Comments

[Robert]

Thank you Doug,

This is an excellent remembrance and tribute to a great man. Thank you for sharing.

[Jaime]

This is a great story, with an excellent personal touch. I grew up outside of Los Angeles, and for me it's Vin Scully, so I know the personal feelings a fan feels for the voice of his team.

[Jerry Phillips]

Thanks old friend for your remembrances of Ernie Harwell. We in Michigan are a full of memories today at his passing. I ran down a lot of 9 volt batteries on the old transistor radio listening to him describe Tiger's games over the years as only he could. Sad to know that our "voice of summer" has been stilled.

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Jerry Phillips

[Jamie Chesna]

Nicely done, Doug. Always a pleasure to read and learn from all these years later. You're a great mentor and even better friend.

[William Hammond]

Ernie was a great human being who lived his life as an example of what everyone should stive for. I would often listen to Ernie (and Paul) with the TV on and the volume turned down. And when I was at the stadium I would have Ernie on an earphone. One of my great memories was sitting in Tiger Stadium (the real one) as the Tigers won it all in 1984! The day of the parade I went down to Michigan and Trumbull and asked Ernie for his autograph. After signing he turned and gave it to Jim Fetzer, Tom Monahan and Jim Campbell for each of them to sign. He was just that way, never arogant, always thoughtful. He will be missed and always very much loved.

Bill Hammond