On a warm March day in Lakeland, Fla., 22 years ago, Ernie Harwell signed a Detroit Tigers baseball.
He didn’t want to sign it, but I insisted and so he did. I had traveled to Lakeland, trying to find a way to write about spring training for a female audience. I found a restaurant called Hooters and Ernie Harwell.
Over the radio, Ernie Harwell’s magical voice conveyed expertise and Georgian sunshine and the sound of bat meeting ball.
In person, his magic took the form of extraordinary kindness.
I was nobody — a journalistic tourist he would likely not see again — and he was who he was: a gentlemanly host, extending himself when he didn’t have to. Remembering my name. Introducing me to ballplayers and reporters.
This will surprise no one. He is a man long celebrated for his humility and courtliness, for his lifelong display of virtues rarely seen in public.
The surprising part is how much we have appreciated him.
His appearance at Comerica Park last Wednesday, with its bittersweet aspect of finality after he revealed he has inoperable cancer, added a coda to all the week’s fuss over public incivility. He’ll also be saluted at today’s Detroit Lions game, serving as honorary captain and participating in the coin toss.
Harwell is the living counterpoint to rude outbursts, with his carefully written thank-you notes, his returned phone calls, his welcome to just about everyone. But it is also true that his style — vintage Americana preserved — has been fully honored. In Ernie we trust.
Ernie Harwell’s outsized gift for appreciation has always been returned. In this brutal era of corporate shrinking, plenty of people are forcibly “retired.” How many, though, can elicit enough support and outrage to force management to change course?
He is that rare treasure, embraced and beloved in maturity and old age, recognized with a statue in Comerica Park, a bust in the Hall of Fame, with special days and business contracts into his 90s, revered and saluted.
Last week, at 91, he received the adulation and tears of a stadium full of fans who came to say goodbye.
When I first met him, he was already past 70, a slight man with white hair, who gave no hint that his brilliant career would survive two more decades, that his appetite for work would never wane.
For most of us, Ernie Harwell has eclipsed the boys of summer with a signal feat: proving that even in an uncivil age, virtue can be — is — justly rewarded.
Detroit News
Laura Berman’s column runs Tuesday and Thursday in Metro and Sunday online. Reach her at (313) 222-2032
