Growing up with Ernie

Growing up with Ernie

It's great to see the outpouring of emotions following the announcement of Ernie's passing. The younger generation of baseball fans may never have experienced what it was like, growing up with Ernie, but I think you can get the picture from some of us "old timers".

It was a time when there were only three TV stations, four if you count channel 9 in Canada. Somewhere along the way during Ernie's tenure, we got color TV's, and we got Channel 50 on UHF, but there were still only one or two games a week on TV, so we got our baseball from the radio, on "the great voice of the great lakes", WJR 760. Of course, there was no internet, there were no i-pods, and we got our music by riding our bikes to the record store and playing 45's on a turntable.

For many of us, baseball was literally our pastime. That's what we did as kids. For me, it was church on Sundays, hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and a bunch of Irish stuff in between. We took our baseball gloves to school, hung on the handle bars of our bikes every day and played baseball in the school parking lot at recess and during lunch hour. We played it in the street with a rubber ball or hard ball in the park all day in the summer. We threw rubber coated hardballs at a box drawn on the school wall. We traded baseball cards, and put the duplicates in our bicycle spokes. Baseball was life, and Ernie brought baseball to us every night during the summer.

Each summer, we'd sit on the porch, or in the car, or in the back yard, or in a friend’s basement playing stratomatic baeball, or have a transistor radio snuck into school, or under the pillow, and we’d listen to Ernie Harwell. Ernie brought friends and families together, and he talked to us like he was our friend, a part of our family. Those who have met him say that he was exactly the same way in person.

You can close your eyes and almost literally hear his voice.
“There's a bounding ball up the middle for a base hit."
"Sweeeeng anna miss, he struck him out."
"No runs, no hits, no erras, and nobody left on base, we go to the bottom of the first, the Yankees nothing and the Tigers coming to bat",
"and the pitch, called strike three, he stood there like the house by the side of the road, and watched that one go by",
“The lanky left hander leans in for the sign, there’s the wind up, he deals, and there’s a ball outside, Mister Bremigan said so”
“there’s a bounding ball to shortstop, Trammel up with it, flips to Whitaker, on to first, two for the price o one”
“Tigers need some instant runs here in the eighth inning”
"fly ball to left field, it's deep and it's looooong gone, a home run for Cecil Fielder".

He was a class act, Ernie was. A Detroit icon, a role model, a good Christian, a Gentleman, a man for the ages. I was sure that I would cry when he finally passed after his bout with cancer, but I didn't. I shed some tears when I first heard the news last fall, and then he came out and put life in perspective for all of us. Yesterday, when I learned of his passing, I got choked up and posted the sad news on the Tiger Talk forum. I was watching the Red Wings and the start of the Tiger game, and it all seemed to matter much less, in perspective. Seasons come and seasons go, but the spirit of Ernie Harwell lives on.  I have a lot of baseball memorabilia, but just one custom made Tiger jersey.  On the back is the number of my favorite year, “68", and the name “Harwell”.    Ernie was my Tiger.  He’ll always be my Tiger.  I miss him already. May he rest in peace.