FEATURED JOBS
He was an announcer for a short time here.
I doubt few people without Detroit connections will feel any impact.
Learning of Ernie Harwell’s death last night brought tears to my eyes.
At age 92, he had succumbed to cancer.
When Lisa and I moved our family to Detroit in 1990, we were ostensibly alone.
I remember on the day we moved, driving sadly through Pennsylvania and into Ohio. By mid-afternoon outside of Toledo, I searched the radio dial, and I found what I was looking for.
It was a friendly, welcoming voice calling a baseball game.
I knew then it was the great Ernie Harwell. Like a tracking beam, his soft, genteel voice brought us to our new home in Southfield, Mi.
Ernie Harwell was Detroit Tigers baseball.
We arrived in Detroit in mid-summer of 1990.
After living through our first Michigan winter, I received a phone call from Joanne Levine, a woman, who along with her husband Steve, found kindred baseball spirits in their new friends from Baltimore.
Joanne told me to turn on the radio, that the Tigers first spring training game would start soon, and that I had to hear Ernie Harwell’s traditional first words of the baseball season.
The words were a poem:
“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.”
In our remaining years in Detroit, I heard him say that before each season. I knew that cold would give way to the spring and warm days at the old Tiger Stadium.
At a time when we can easily so much to find wrong, when I need to hide from oil spills, terrorism, and the disaster of the days, I find that hiding place watching or listening to a baseball game. I feel privileged to have listened to a man call the play by play of a sport I love.
He brought peace to the lives of many, and made us all feel good about the game on the field and its place in our American tradition.
Thank you Ernie.
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