He was, after all, a retired baseball announcer whose death last night at the age of ninety-two, had long been anticipated.
He had announced last fall that he had terminal bile duct cancer.
The doctors said then that he was unlikely to make it past Christmas; in fact, he lived to see the start of a new season.
But nobody who grew up in Michigan ever thought of Ernie Harwell as merely an announcer. His was the voice of spring, and summer; he was the chords of memory, and childhood.
The constant in a too-rapidly-changing world. His rich and distinctive Georgia accent was always in the background on summer days; at picnics, floating across the water on Michigan lakes. He was furtively listened to by little boys, who put transistor radios under their pillows when they were supposed to be sleeping.
Adult men did the same thing at the office, in those years when the Tigers were winning and the games meant something.
Harwell told me once that he knew people could sometimes listed for just a minute or two, and so he tried to slip in the score whenever he could. His was a comforting voice, a voice of continuity which held Michigan together throughout an era of change.
He had arrived in Detroit at the beginning of 1960, when the city had more than twice as many people as it does now.
General Motors was the largest corporation in the world. Nobody had a Japanese car, and baseball was still America’s favorite sport. Tiger Stadium was a vast, dark-green fortress at Michigan and Trumbull. Between innings, Ernie did commercials for Stroh’s, Detroit’s distinctive brand of beer. Life was easier to figure out.
Detroiters went to school; then got a job in an auto plant, or went to college and became an engineer.
Then things started to change, slowly at first, then ever-faster. There was a game in July 1967 when Ernie was told not to mention that a major riot had broken out, though those watching on television could see smoke in the distance.
There came Vietnam and the counter-culture; wars between parents and children. The city lost population; the auto industry began to slip, and life became uncertain.
Stroh’s was sold and left the city; Vernors and Hudson’s vanished too. Yet there was always Ernie, whose voice every April symbolized renewal, a new chance, and hope.
Through the year, he gave us reasons to listen even when the team was dreadful.
Nobody realized how much of an icon he had become until Bo Schembechler became president of the Tigers and decided not to renew his contract after the 1991 season.
The outpouring of shock and anger was unprecedented. Soon, the Tigers had a new owner, who understood tradition and baseball. Mike Ilitch brought Ernie back and placed a statue of the announcer at the entrance to his new stadium, Comerica Park.
Ernie’s body will lie in state there tomorrow. For years, whenever a player hit a home run, he would shout, “That ball is long gone.” Ernie Harwell is dead now, true. But his memory is anything but gone. As long as many of us live, we’ll just think of him as somewhere in the middle innings.
Comments