A Beloved Part of Michigan

May 7, 2010

When his voice first drifted across Michigan’s summer parks and sandlots, Detroit was the nation’s industrial powerhouse, with more than twice as many people as it has now.

The Detroit Tigers played baseball in an enormous dark green concrete structure known as Briggs Stadium. You could buy a bleacher seat for less than a dollar, and drink Stroh’s Beer.

General Motors was the mightiest, richest, and most powerful corporation in the world. Nobody had a Japanese car. Nobody had even seen a Japanese car. Hudson’s downtown department store was the place to shop. Sometimes, on special occasions, Gov. G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams might come by the press box.

Michigan was still growing faster than most other places in the country. Baseball was still the national pastime. Michigan Central Depot was still a train station, not a ghastly ruin.

That was half a century ago, the year the Detroit Tigers hired a new radio and television play-by-play announcer, Ernie Harwell.

Within a few years, he became far more than an announcer; he was a cultural touchstone. His distinctive, deep, Georgia-accented voice became part of the fabric of growing up in Michigan. It was in the background at picnics and volleyball games; drifted across summer lakes; was on in the gas station.

Long ago, he stopped being merely a play-by-play announcer and became a beloved part of life, a wonderful constant in a world of terrifying change. Our state changed; the city changed; baseball changed.

The Vietnam War ripped America apart. TV viewers watching on July 24, 1967, saw smoke rising above Tiger Stadium; Ernie had been told not to mention a riot was underway.

Baseball added games; nearly doubled the number of teams; added playoffs and designated hitters and inter-league play.

Fathers warred with sons; Democrats with Republicans; but all listened to Ernie Harwell. When the team was good, kids put transistor radios under their pillows when they should have been sleeping. Big kids took radios with earplugs to corporate suites, to listen when they should have been working. When the team was lousy, they listened anyway, because he was reason enough to listen.

Ernie Harwell did not change. Batters who struck out looking still “stood there like a house beside the road.” Home runs were loooooooooog gone!” Foul balls were caught “by a man from Amherstburg” or Paw Paw, or whatever town popped into his head.

By the time he broadcast his last season eight years ago, much of Detroit was a ruin. Stroh’s was gone; Hudson’s was gone.

Tiger Stadium, the house where Al Kaline and Ty Cobb played, was on the way to becoming the sadly pathetic vacant lot it is today.

But Ernie was still there, a reassuring presence somehow, a reminder that we were still us.

Some people didn’t get this. The worst of these was Bo Schembechler, the legendary University of Michigan football coach who became Tigers president and fired Ernie Harwell in 1991.

“He’s just an announcer,” the football coach said. The outpouring of shock and anger made New Coke look like a good public relations move. Soon, the Tigers had a new owner — Mike Ilitch — who speedily restored Ernie. Later, for good measure, he had a statue of the announcer placed at the entrance to Comerica Park. (“That’s me,” Ernie chuckled. “Hollow inside.”)

Mike Ilitch understood tradition.

So did the thousands who stood in line at Comerica Park to file past Ernie Harwell’s casket on Thursday

Yes, he was enormously good. He enlivened and enriched the game with a seemingly endless supply of historical anecdotes.

He was also a master of understatement, knowing not just what to say, but when to say nothing at all.

Possibly nobody has ever been as beloved in the history of Michigan. In part, that’s because the press knew he was that rarest of all celebrities; someone really as good or better than his public image. I knew that personally.

Ernie Harwell and I were friends for more than a quarter century. He called me “the old professor.” When we got together, we sometimes talked about baseball, but more often about books.

He was a voracious reader and quizzed me about politics and world events. We had different political opinions. He was a devout Christian; I am not. But that didn’t matter to him; he was one of the most genuinely tolerant people I’ve ever met.

He was also the only man I’ll ever know who spanned three centuries of baseball, who knew Connie Mack, born during the Civil War, and Ty Cobb, who never stopped fighting it.

Ernie was also surely the only man to have ever met Babe Ruth — and Geoffrey Fieger. I took them both to dinner once, at the height of the assisted suicide wars. Jack Kevorkian was supposed to be there too, but was…otherwise occupied.

Later, Kevorkian told me, “You know, I thought about being a baseball announcer. Harwell’s okay, but I think I could do better.”

And I thought: you don’t know, Jack.

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.