Latest / Retro Sports Radio: Classic Games from History / 2006 • Baseball Clip • Ernie Harwell • Part 1 of 8 - Where Did It All Begin - Radio Interview

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2006 • Baseball Clip • Ernie Harwell • Part 1 of 8 - Where Did It All Begin - Radio Interview · Retro Sports Radio: Classic Games from History

• 0:00
  This is Retro Sports Radio. Visit RetroSeasons.com for more sports history.
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  Where did it all begin? Well, for William Ernest Harwell, it all began on January 25th, 1918,
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  in a spot that was not the crossroads of the South. It was not Atlanta, but it was not very far.
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  Washington, Georgia. Ernie, what was it like growing up in rural Georgia in the 20s?
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  Well, Washington, Georgia was a small town, probably had about 2,000 inhabitants.
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  Basically, it was agricultural. It was a cotton town.
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  In fact, my dad and his brother Tom had a furniture store and also had a funeral home,
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  because in those days the people that made the caskets made furniture also.
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  And they ran the store, the Harwell Furniture Company, and they depended a lot on the farmers
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  around Washington, Georgia for their purchases. And the farmers had a tough time,
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  because that was when the boll weevil came into the South and killed a lot of the cotton crops.
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  And my dad and uncle had extended credit to many of the farmers.
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  And when the farmers couldn't pay, my uncle and dad talked about going bankrupt.
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  My father refused to do it, but he had to give up the company and move to Atlanta.
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  Now, it didn't take you long to make friends and begin influencing people, did it?
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  Well, I don't know about that, Bob, but I began to sell magazines.
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  And I was about five or six years old when I sold the Saturday Evening Post, and we also sold Liberty.
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  My family had a tough time economically. We moved down to Westminster Drive.
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  My dad bought a house, paid about $2,000 for it at the time.
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  This was pretty much in the middle of the Depression, and he was working for Method Brothers Furniture Company.
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  He'd gotten this job as the manager and a salesman there, and he was stricken with the multiple sclerosis.
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  And he really didn't work from the time he was about 35 years old until he died at the age of 72.
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  And my mother had become the breadwinner. She made cakes and sandwiches and supported the family.
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  And the boys, yours truly and my brother Dick, my brother Davis, we did everything we could to help out.
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  We delivered the goods that my mother cooked. We'd go down to the city of Atlanta.
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  We'd go downtown on the streetcar for a nickel, take a cake that my mom had made.
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  We'd sell it to the drugstore there for 50 cents.
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  They'd cut it up and sell a slice for maybe a dime, and we'd pay another nickel and come on home on the streetcar.
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  And I also got a paper route, what we called CARED, the Atlanta Georgian, which was sort of the third paper in town.
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  They had the Constitution, the Journal, and the Georgian was a Hearst paper.
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  And I had a paper route, and I had to go over it three times because they had three different editions.
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  They had the final home, and then they had the market edition, which had the stock market results in it.
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  And then they had the peach, which was the baseball extra, telling you what the crackers had done.
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  And the other teams around baseball, what they'd done in the day game.
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  So I went over my paper route three different times each day, and I also had a Sunday paper to deliver.
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  And I made about two dollars a week.
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  And you had a very famous person on that route.
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  I'm sure you didn't realize at that time that she was going to do the things that she did,
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  but Margaret Mitchell sure made a name for herself, too, didn't she?
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  She certainly did. The author of The Great Gone with the Wind, and she was on my paper route for the Georgians.
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  She lived up on the Prado, had an apartment there, and I delivered the paper to her.
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  And as you always had to do, I had to collect for the paper, too.
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  I think the charge for the Georgian was 10 cents a week.
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  I bargained at any price.
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  Right. Daily and Sunday both.
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  Collecting for the paper and interacting with the people, you had a problem growing up being tongue-tied.
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  I think any time you couldn't speak clearly, it was embarrassing.
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  And it was especially embarrassing in Atlanta because at this time I was going to grammar school,
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  and the rule in Atlanta schools was that every student in the fifth and sixth grades in the public schools
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  had to either debate or make a speech at least once a month.
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  So my family, not having much money, they scraped up some money and sent me to what we called in those days
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  an elocution teacher or an expression teacher.
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  And now I think she'd be called a speech therapist, but this lady was named Margaret Lacklin,
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  and she worked in her home, and we'd go there and learn these speeches like Horatius at the Bridge
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  or Gettysburg Address by Lincoln or In Flanders Field or House by the Side of the Road
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  and all the poems, and we'd recite those, and also she'd coach us on how to debate.
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  It was sort of funny that later on in my career when I came to Detroit,
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  the Guideposts magazine had a piece about me, and they mentioned Mrs. Lacklin,
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  and some of her pupils down in Albany, Georgia, saw it and showed it to her,
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  and she wrote me a beautiful letter and sent me the program that they used for her recitals,
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  and those pupils of hers were still reciting the same poems that we had done back in the early 1930s.
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  And little did she realize that the House by the Side of the Road would be made even more famous by you.
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  Yeah, one of my so-called signature phrases, I guess.
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  When a guy takes a third strike, he stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched it go by.
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  That, of course, brought on a whole new set of friends, and the games that everybody played in those days,
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  stickball if you didn't have a good bat or things like that, and of course you became involved in so much of that, I'm sure.
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  Oh, I certainly did. I loved baseball. My dad was a great baseball fan, and he inculcated in me the love of baseball.
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  And baseball was certainly the premier sport around there at that time.
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  We did have good football with Georgia Tech and University of Georgia, but my interest was devoted to mostly the baseball,
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  and of course the summertime was a long time, and we could have our sound lot games,
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  we could choose up sides and play on the vacant lots around the neighborhood, and we had a great time.
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  How cognizant were you of the major leagues and of the players of that day?
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  I knew a little bit about the major leagues. I think my focus was on the Atlanta Crackers,
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  the local team, which was in a minor league, the Southern League, but they played pretty good ball,
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  and my heroes were really the Cracker players, and then on the side I rooted maybe for teams in the major leagues.
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  I was pretty much a National League fan at that time. The St. Louis Cardinals were my team,
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  and if I had a team in the America League it probably would have been the Detroit Tigers,
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  or it would have been anybody but the Yankees, because remember General Sherman came to Atlanta previously
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  and got a little careless with matches down there.
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  Talk a little bit about the Atlanta Crackers and something about their history,
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  because before Atlanta ever had Major League Baseball, they had a reputation as being a baseball town.
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  The Crackers had started back in the 1880s in the early days of professional baseball,
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  and had lasted for a long, long time. We're talking about the 30s now,
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  and I really got interested in the Atlanta Crackers, and these guys were heroes of mine.
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  They were bigger than life, and I can remember I'd be thinking about if they were in Chattanooga,
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  what would the guys in the hotel be doing, and what time would they get to the ballpark,
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  and how would they get there, and I was the bat boy at one time for the visiting teams that came to old Ponce de Leon Park.
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  I was also the bat boy for the Crackers once in a while if the regular bat boy couldn't make it,
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  and I never got paid anything. They'd give me all rough up baseball, and that was about all I expected,
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  but it was sort of like living out a dream for a kid 10, 11, 12 years old at that time
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  to be out at Ponce de Leon Park and playing catch with his heroes or shagging in the outfield.
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  Did you have any aspirations of playing at a higher level?
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  I didn't play in high school because I was working all the time, but I did play American Legion ball,
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  which was sort of a forerunner of the little leagues, and up to 17 years old was the age limit there,
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  and our team went to the city finals, which was pretty good because Atlanta was very hot for American Legion,
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  and we had a lot of teams competing, but we lost out to the Grant Park team in the finals.
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  Your baseball love put you in contact with one of the greats of all time, Babe Ruth.
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  Well, that was one of the highlights of my younger days, I think.
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  The Yankees came north from training in Florida, and they were playing the Atlanta Crackers
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  and afternoon game at old Ponce de Leon Park.
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  About the eighth inning, I sneaked down toward the box seats right by the Yankee dugout.
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  Babe Ruth was playing right field when the inning was over.
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  He came in, and as he approached the dugout, I got up at the railing, and I shouted to him,
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  and I said, Mr. Ruth, Mr. Ruth, can I have your autograph?
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  And I was so stupid, I didn't have anything for him to sign.
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  He said, well, kid, you ain't got anything for me to sign on.
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  I said, well, I've got a pen, and then I stuck my tennis shoe over the railing,
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  and I said, well, will you please sign my shoe?
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  So, Babe Ruth signed my shoe.
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  In those days, autographs and autograph memorabilia did not command the high respect that they do today.
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  If it had, you would have not worn that pair of shoes again, and they would not have been worn out.
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  Well, I wore the shoes because I had to, you know.
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  I didn't want to go barefooted all the time, and probably the only pair of shoes I had.
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  So, eventually, they were tossed aside, and Babe Ruth's signature went with them.
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  Now, we've talked about the entrepreneurship of you with sports.
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  That got you into your first job not as a broadcaster, but as a writer,
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  with one of the most prestigious publications in the country, and that's the Sporting News.
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  Take us back to those days, and how you got this job.
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  The Sporting News was really the paper that I looked forward to every week,
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  because in those days, the Sporting News covered every league in baseball.
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  Baseball had subsidized the printing of the box scores,
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  and if you had a friend who was playing in the Cotton State League,
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  you could look in there and look for his name in the box score, and it would be there.
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  And each city had a correspondent, and the major leagues, of course, were featured.
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  H.G. Sal Singer in Detroit, Dan Daniel in New York, Irvin Vaughn in Chicago, and I was a great fan.
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  I loved the Sporting News, so I decided, well, I'm a big cracker fan.
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  I'm going to sit down and volunteer to be the Atlanta correspondent.
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  So I sent a letter off to the editor, and he sent a letter back saying,
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  well, you sent some stuff in, and if it's okay, you've got the job.
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  He didn't know I was only 16 years old and that I was in high school,
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  so I sent some stuff in, and they printed it, and he gave me the job,
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  and my first article in the Sporting News came out in August of 1934,
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  and from then on, I had an association with that publication that lasted even into the 60s.
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  Do you remember that first column that you wrote for Sporting News?
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  I remember a little bit about the first item I sent in.
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  I remember that Wilbert Robinson, who had been the president of the Atlanta Crackers,
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  the old Brooklyn manager and the old Baltimore Oreo back in the 1890s,
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  who was a great friend of John McGraw, and he had just died before I wrote the first article,
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  and I made a reference to that, and then the rest of the article was more or less about
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  how the team was faring there in mid-August.
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  Now, this was 1934, but eight years earlier, you got your first taste, I guess, of radio.
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  Now, this was not on a transistor radio, as we've alluded to earlier,
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  because they didn't come along until the late 50s.
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  It was not on the computer or not on the stereo system,
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  but it was on an old crystal radio set with the cat's whiskers.
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  Crystal radio set was pretty primitive, I tell you.
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  My brother Davis had one down in the basement of our home on Westminster Drive in Atlanta,
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  and the World Series had never really been broadcast in the true sense of the word very much,
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  and in 1926, Graham McNamee came on NBC, which was a brand new network at that time,
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  and broadcast the World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals,
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  and it went into the seventh game, and I was a great Cardinal fan
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  because I rooted against the Yankees, and they came to the seventh and final game,
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  and Tony Lozare comes to bat in the seventh inning,
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  and they bring in Grover Cleveland Alexander, the old pitcher,
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  and he strikes out Tony Lozare, which was a key event of that World Series in 1926,
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  and that's probably the first baseball broadcast that I ever heard.
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  We might have had local broadcasts in Atlanta,
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  but I don't remember listening at that stage of my boyhood,
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  but that was a big thrill for me, and it really cemented my interest in baseball and enhanced it,
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  and I still remember Graham McNamee broadcasting that series.
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  Who was your first interview with?
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  You know, I don't remember. I started in May of 1940.
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  I remember I did Jack Dempsey early in my career.
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  Jack had come into town because he was going to referee a wrestling match,
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  and I remember waiting for him, and that was another problem we had.
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  We never knew whether a guy was going to show up because it was a live show,
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  and Jack was a little bit late. We went on at 6.15 and went off at 6.30,
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  and now it got to be about 6.21 or 6.22, and Mr. Dempsey hadn't showed up,
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  but he finally comes in and we do the interview, and I remember asking him.
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  He had a book out, an autobiography, you know, My Life by Jack Dempsey,
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  and I said, how's the book going? He said, I don't know. I haven't read it yet.
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  Jack Dempsey, just one of the great names that paraded through WSB before your sports microphones,
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  the likes of Bobby Jones and the Georgia Peach,
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  a man that many people have called the meanest of them all,
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  but you had a different perspective of him, didn't you?
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  I sure did with Ty Cobb. I heard that Ty was coming down to his hometown Royston,
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  and I decided it might be good if I went down there and interviewed him,
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  and the people at WSB, the executives, didn't like the idea too much.
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  They said, well, he's a mean old man, and he's not going to talk to a kid announcer like you,
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  and if you want to go, go ahead. So we took this engineer on the truck,
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  took the big console down there to record, and I went up to Cobb's residence,
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  and he came to the door. He was very pleasant. He said, come on in.
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  We sat down there on the sofa, and the 15-minute show was completely filled with Ty Cobb.
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  I had no problem at all with him. He was very hospitable.
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  He was very cordial and very warm to me, and I made a good friend there.
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  I used to see him from time to time then on, and I must have been with him
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  seven or eight or ten times after that first interview,
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  and he was always a very cordial gentleman.
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  What a baseball player.
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  He was the greatest, I think, for a long, long time.
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  Babe Ruth might have exceeded him because of his pitching prowess,
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  but Cobb was a Mr. Baseball, certainly from around 1906
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  up until the Babe came to the Yankees.
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  Cobb was one of those that maybe is the embodiment of desire, of competitiveness.
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  He wouldn't lose.
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  Well, you're right about that, Bob. He had competition to the ultimate,
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  no question about that. He would do anything to win.
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  Some people accused him of dirty tricks, and I imagine from time to time
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  he did pull a few, but he was a real genius in spikes.
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  And I remember we had a batboy at Tiger Stadium named Eddie Forster,
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  who had been a batboy when Ty was in his heyday,
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  and Eddie was also the delivery boy for the butcher near the ballpark,
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  and Mrs. Cobb ordered some meat one time.
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  They were going to have company on a Sunday evening, and Eddie delivered the meat,
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  but the Cobbs weren't home, so he put it inside the screen door,
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  and when the Cobbs came home, the meat was there, but it had spoiled.
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  So old tyress Raymond Cobb, he didn't get on the phone or anything else.
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  He went right down to the butcher shop and beat the so-called whatever out of the butcher.
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  They called him the greatest hitter ever, had the best batting eye ever,
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  the Splendid Splinter. Ted Williams was your guest.
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  Many times you knew him in a great many avenues.
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  Tell me about Ted Williams and what made him the great hitter that he was.
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  I really love Ted Williams. He's one of my all-time favorites,
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  and I think what made him a great hitter was the fact that he focused on hitting all the time.
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  He would come to the ballpark, and he'd talk to the other players about certain pitches.
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  He'd even talk to radio announcers, you know, who didn't know much about it.
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  And he had a feud going on with the media, especially the print guys,
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  because they were sort of mean and nasty to him in Boston when he first reported,
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  and I think it turned him off. But we always got along great.
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  I loved Ted Williams, and he was good to me.
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  I remember in Baltimore one time when I was working for the Orioles,
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  the Orioles were paying tribute to Ted in one of his last go-rounds with the Boston Red Sox,
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  and he knew he was going to have to make a speech, so he wrote something out,
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  and he came to me during batting practice. He said,
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  when we get through here, come on in the clubhouse. I want you to look over my speech
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  and see what you think about it. I looked it over, and it was just right.
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  He had a great intelligence about things, and he knew exactly what he was after,
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  and whatever he went into, he was very thorough.
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  For instance, he took up fishing and became a great fisherman.
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  He was on a veterans committee, and when we discussed different players,
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  he had more facts and more statistics about them and knew more about these guys.
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  Plus, he had played for and against a lot of them,
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  so he was a very valued member of the veterans committee.
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  And also, he was a real man's man. He was a great marine flier.
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  He was a hero. He gave up a lot of his baseball time to be in the service,
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  and he was a great patriot.
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  I did a lot of interviews with Ted Williams and how he loved to talk about hitting.
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  Here's Hall of Fame with Ted Williams. Ted Babe Ruth had his nemesis, Hub Pruitt.
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  Do you ever have one? Anybody ever get you out in the big leagues with any irregularity?
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  Well, that's the difference between he and I. He only had one.
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  I had an awful lot of them. It would take me a long time to tell you.
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  There's probably 20 pitches that I could name that were really tough.
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  It wasn't a matter of striking out, but I never could get a hold of their ball
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  consistently as well as some of the others.
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  Any special type pitcher? Any guy that was more effective than any other?
• 19:25
  No. No. It was a funny thing. In my book that I wrote on hitting,
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  I mentioned five pitchers in the book. One was a cute little left-hander,
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  kept it outside and good breaking stuff. Another one was a knuckleball pitcher.
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  And another one had a sinking fastball that I could never quite get a hold of.
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  That type of pitcher. I would think that a hard sinking ball pitcher,
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  day in and day out, was toughest.
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  Now what was the hardest pitch for you to hit?
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  And a knuckleball.
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  Hardest ball for me to hit?
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  Yeah. I think the hardest ball for me to hit was what's the hardest ball for any hitter.
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  A good, hard, quick breaking ball is the tougher pitch to hit than the fastest fastball.
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  For me it was.
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  Now what's the biggest mistake that most young hitters make when they come to the Major League?
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  Well, funny thing. I saw a shot of the three outstanding pitchers last year.
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  One was a rookie pitcher, one was a Cy Young winner, and one was something else.
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  Special year he had. And they showed the picture of them pitching.
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  Just a little insert of pitching. All of them threw the ball in the dirt,
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  and the hitters swung it every damn one of them.
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  So getting a good ball to hit is all, all important,
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  because I couldn't have hit some of the pitchers they were swinging at.
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  Of all the guys you've talked to about hitting, was there any one particular guy that helped you the most?
• 20:55
  Well, I asked so many hitters in my life, great hitters ahead of me,
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  that I thought that could say something that just might trigger something.
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  I thought Hornby would give me probably the greatest thing of advice.
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  You've got to get a good ball to hit.
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  I can't hit that one up here, high and high, and I can't hit that one blowing away off the plate.
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  Or I can't hit a ball that fools me.
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  So getting a good ball to hit means all of that. A ball in a good spot, a ball that's not fooling you.
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  Then, that's when you've got to concede to the pitcher.
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  And you say, I've got two strikes, I've got to do something just a little quicker, a little tightening up,
• 21:32
  a choke up an inch is probably the best advice, and don't try to pull the ball.
• 21:36
  How about ballparks? You liked Detroit, didn't you?
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  I loved Detroit, but you know, it's a funny thing. They had a challenging type of pitching staff there.
• 21:44
  They had guys that always thought they could get you out,
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  and they were more challenging than they should have been with me at times, I thought.
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  And still, I went to other parks, like Yankee Stadium, and boy, they didn't ever give in to me.
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  They were always out there, out there.
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  If he gets a, he's going to swing, you're going to hit at that, or we're going to swing.
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  And I walked more times in Yankee Stadium than any other ballpark.
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  I had an inviting park in Detroit, and I got enough pitches that I hit well there.
• 22:15
  What about Fenway?
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  Fenway had one great advantage for me, is that we had a right-hand hitting club, and still a long right field fence.
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  And they said, well, it's a matter of pitching to him with a long right field,
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  and these other guys had short left fields, so I got a lot more chances to hit there at times.
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  And I felt I hit better than Fenway in any other park.
• 22:41
  I hit.333 in the road, I hit.360-something in Boston.
• 22:45
  Thanks for being here.