{"id":589,"date":"2010-05-14T09:21:45","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T14:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/blog\/?p=589"},"modified":"2010-05-14T09:21:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-14T14:21:45","slug":"thank-you-ernie-harwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"Thank You, Ernie Harwell…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press<\/em>, May 8, 2010<\/p>\n

When I was nine years-old we moved to Michigan from South Carolina. In South Carolina, folks followed football and stock car racing. Baseball was played, but it wasn\u2019t followed. The Atlanta Braves were the nearest major league team, but I don\u2019t recall ever hearing about them. We arrived in Michigan in April. Our next door neighbors were the Kidles, a husband and wife in their late 80s. Their house was one of the only styles in our subdivision that had a front porch designed for occupying. (Unlike our two-story colonial that had a small cement block designed only for barely avoiding impact when the screen door was opened.)
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\nWhen the warm summer evenings arrived, the Kidles would set up a transistor radio on the porch and listen to the Tiger game. Eventually I started to drift over there, and I\u2019d listen, too. Sometimes we\u2019d talk, and sometimes they would tell stories, but mostly we\u2019d sit quietly and enjoy the game. It\u2019s funny how there was such a rhythm to it. You could be mid-sentence and instinctively know Ernie Harwell or Paul Carey was going to say something important — you\u2019d pause, listen to the action, maybe whoop up a Willie Horton homer or Micky Lolich strikeout — then continue without missing a beat. The Tiger broadcast was an integral part of a summer evening.<\/p>\n

But you know what? To celebrate Ernie Harwell is not to look to the past — it\u2019s to look to the future. Of the many incredible things I read or heard about Ernie Harwell over the past couple weeks, none was greater than the short article Michael Rosenberg, from the Detroit Free Press, wrote in Sport Illustrated this week. It pointed out that, for the most part, Ernie disliked nostalgia. For him it was all about learning and embracing the new. This is beyond impressive for a person born in the Deep South in the early 1900s. And it explains a lot about why he was so universally loved by generations of Tiger fans. I\u2019m already celebrating Ernie by nearly jumping out of my skin looking forward for this summer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, May 8, 2010 When I was nine years-old we moved to Michigan from South Carolina. In South Carolina, folks followed football and stock car racing. Baseball was played, but it wasn\u2019t followed. The Atlanta Braves were the nearest major league team, but I don\u2019t recall ever hearing about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grand-rapids-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}