Voice of the Tigers and Hall of Famer turns 90...

Here's to Ernie Harwell, the long-time announcer for the Detroit Tigers and Hall of Fame broadcaster. Ernie is the only announcer ever to be traded for an active player...

Friday, January 25, 2008
Tigers EXTRA: Voice of (close to) the century
Ernie Harwell turns 90
Tom Gage / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- Ninety years young.
Rest assured, if Ernie Harwell felt compelled to blow out all his birthday candles today, he could -- and after that, he'd probably skip rope for 10 minutes and run up a flight of stairs 30 times.
"That's not going to happen, though. I don't think they make a big-enough cake," Harwell, the annually viable candidate for most popular person in town, said with a laugh.
He's retired now, of course. But not.
His Hall of Fame broadcasting career is over, but his era as a corporate spokesman is in full swing. Ernie's the man who informs us about Blue Cross, and about Fox Run, the 62-plus community in which he lives.
He's almost everywhere. On the radio, on television, in the newspapers. At 90, he's impressively active.
"His best years might even be ahead of him," said Gary Spicer, Harwell's longtime friend and attorney.
It's a milestone birthday, 90 -- but only because all birthdays ending in zero are. There are some we celebrate, some we choose not to notice.
There are others we simply forget. Not Harwell, though. He believes it's part of the secret of longevity to live in the present, yet he recalls the past so vividly, it's as if all his milestone birthdays were yesterday.
In that case, don't leave us here like the house by the side of the road, Ernie. Beam us with you -- back to when you were 50, back to when you were 20 -- all the way to Jan. 25, 1918, Washington, Ga., where as we peer through the window of time, the joy of a winter day for the Harwell family is the birth of a baby boy.
William Earnest.
The first 10 years
"Washington, at that time, had a cotton economy and most of the people around town were farmers," Harwell said. "My dad, though, was in the furniture business. He and his brother had a furniture store, but also a funeral home.
"In those days, the furniture store and funeral homes often combined because of the commonality of building caskets. What happened to Washington, though, is that the boll weevil came in around 1920 and wiped out all the farmers, people to whom my dad had extended credit -- and suddenly they couldn't pay.
"So his business went kerplunk.
"My dad didn't want to go bankrupt. He tried to pay off all his debts, but he didn't have a job so we moved to Atlanta, where he got a job managing a furniture store.
"I remember there was a drugstore in Washington where they'd put me up on the counter and let me imitate the baseball announcers of the day, recreating ballgames.
"I was tongue-tied at that time, though. I had a speech impediment. Words like 'sister' came out 'thith-ter,' but I was interested in baseball broadcasts even then, so they'd put me up on the counter and I'd try to imitate the announcers. It wasn't a very good imitation, but I'd try."
1928 -- Turning 10
"We're in Atlanta and my elementary school, the 10th Street School, is right around the corner from our house on Piedmont Avenue. Our family didn't have much money, but enough was scraped up to send me to a speech teacher to try to overcome my impediment.
"All the kids in Atlanta at the time were required to debate or declaim at least once a month in a contest. It would have been very embarrassing to speak the way I did, but I was able to overcome it.
"I'd gone to my first baseball game by then. My interest in baseball was very intense already. I went to a July 4 doubleheader in 1926, the Atlanta Crackers against the New Orleans Pelicans. But after that, in those days, I'd go by myself, sometimes walking 2-3 miles to the ballpark or taking the streetcar.
"I later became the bat boy for the visiting teams. But my first broadcasting experience of any kind came when I was in a puppet show in junior high at a hobby fair. The teacher asked me to do a boxing match. There I was behind a curtain with a script, and that was my first sports broadcast."
1938 -- Turning 20
"I'm at Emory University in Atlanta on my birthday, but living at home. I didn't live on campus until my final year when I was president of my fraternity.
"I was now working at the (Atlanta) Constitution as basically a copy editor and headline writer. They paid me $1 a day. I was also working for The Sporting News as their Atlanta correspondent. At the time, my career was headed for print journalism. I wanted to be a newspaper writer, but I'm a failed newspaper writer.
"When I got out of college in 1940, none of the papers in Atlanta had an opening, so I auditioned for a radio station, got lucky and won the audition, and that's how I got into radio.
I didn't know anything about radio, though, I just took a shot at it -- but the manager of the station had been in speech class with me and knew that I had a little bit of a background in sportswriting."
1948 -- Turning 30
"Out of the service and now married I'm between seasons as the announcer for the Atlanta Crackers on my birthday. But that was also the year I went to Brooklyn, the year I was traded for catcher Cliff Dapper.
"It didn't matter to me how I got there; going to the big league was the height of everyone's ambitions in our business.
"My first game was rained out. I was nervous anyway, so to wait another 24 hours was excruciating. But I worked my first game in Brooklyn on Aug. 4, and Jackie Robinson stole home in the first.
"There was an argument after the play, some of the words on the field were obscene, and went out over the broadcast. I'm thinking, 'What did I get into?' But Jackie's steal was a great example of how he played the game."
1958 -- Turning 40
Now in Baltimore for his birthday, and looking like he'd stay there, Harwell had long since gotten over a rather strange welcome to his new city.
"My first week and I'm working for National Bohemian Beer. A guy named Norman Almony was the sales manager, and he put together a party downtown with a lot of the sales reps. I went to a place called The Oasis, which was nothing but an upholstered sewer with girls dancing up to the table without anything on.
"I was trying to make a good impression because I was brand new, so I went. The emcee at the club started this big spiel about how great Ernie Harwell is, really laying it on about me. Like my dad used to say, he threw his hair in the butter.
"I was asked to stand up and got some obligatory applause, but when I sat back down, the emcee started up again about how great I was and asked me to stand a second time. When I did, the guy said 'Sit down, you little , nobody wants to see you.'
"It was a setup all the way. But by 1958 on my birthday, I'm thinking I was going to be in Baltimore the rest of my life. I loved it there."
Two years later, the Tigers made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
1968 -- Turning 50
"I'm living in Dunedin (Fla). The Tigers had been good the year before, so I thought they'd be good again in 1968, but I didn't really think pennant precisely. Most everyone around the team thought that they'd gotten very close, but that they could get closer and win it.
"I'd been in Detroit since 1960 now, liked the people, liked the ballclub so I was feeling comfortable about things."
Fans got comfortable with him as well -- including his assigning a hometown to whomever caught a foul ball -- as in, "A woman from Kalamazoo caught that ball."
1978 -- Turning 60
"I was still in Dunedin, maybe playing golf on my birthday, with some family gathering that night. At that stage of my career, though, I was just ready to keep going. I still enjoyed the games and I had a philosophy that, like golf, where you want to hit every shot the best you can, I just wanted to describe a baseball game the best I could no matter what happened on the field.
"That sort of kept you away from whether the Tigers were in last place. Plus, each game is an entity, and when you approach it that way, you can have a game (broadcasting for a bad club) as good as any game in a World Series. Those two philosophies influenced my approach to broadcasting."
1988 -- Turning 70
Now a Hall of Fame (1981) broadcaster and back in Michigan for the offseason. "I was probably out making a speech somewhere on my birthday that year," Harwell said. "We never left for Florida until the first week of February, but I was thinking even then about my job that I'd just keep working.
"I was getting little advanced in age, but I figured that I wasn't any better or worse than 10 years ago. Maybe people felt I was slipping a little bit, but I didn't think so."
Before he turned 80, however, the Tigers fired him. Harwell sat out a year (1992), but Mike Ilitch rehired him after buying the club.
1998 -- Turning 80
"I'd been fired once and brought back, so I was having a good time again. I thought people would say about me that 'he worked here a while, but that's it,' but the outpouring was amazing to me and sort of unbelievable. I didn't think there'd be much reaction, so I was baffled by it, but of course gratified.
"Probably the best thing that ever happened to me, though, was getting fired, because the public reaction really helped me. But I didn't want to just hang on, so I started thinking about retiring in 2001, the year before I did retire.
"Besides, my new ventures were becoming apparent at the time and that eased my way into retirement."
2008 -- Turning 90
"I tell people not to worry too much about the good, old days. Think about today and what's happening."
As for the candles on his cake? "Ninety would be too expensive," he said. "I'll probably have one."
Fair enough when you're 90 years old and young at the same time.
Many more, Ernie.
You can reach Tom Gage at tom.gage@detnews.com