They had four kids together, two boys and twin girls, all successful professionals now, none of them broadcasters. "They all wanted to make an honest living," Harwell says. Three of the four live within a few minutes' drive of their parents in the Detroit suburbs.

And Miss Lulu is probably the only Michigander who's happy to see her husband calling it quits.

"Yeah, I like it," she says with a Southern accent far more pronounced than her husband's. "I've been alone for many, many years at night. When we lived in Grosse Pointe I always got kind of bored with people telling me what a wonderful summer they had up north, because I couldn't go unless I went by myself."

Harwell says he'll still be pretty busy even in retirement, writing, speaking, acting as a spokesman for Kroger supermarkets and Comerica Bank, and filming a series of "vignettes" for Fox Sports Detroit.

And he says he'll pick up a hobby he hasn't had a lot of time for lately: songwriting. He says he's had about 65 songs recorded by various artists, including B.J. Thomas and Merrilee Rush, of "Angel in the Morning" fame.

" I just got started as a hobby, and I got into it, met a lot of good people, and began to collaborate with real professionals," he says. He wrote a song with Mitch Ryder, a Detroit hero, and wrote a few with Academy Award-winning songwriter Sammy Fain, who co-wrote "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing." "That was one of my big thrills in music," he says.

Another was being approached by the estate of Johnny Mercer to finish a song that his family wasn't pleased with.

"Johnny Mercer's my songwriting hero, and after he died they had a lyric they didn't like, and they asked me to rewrite it, and I wrote it," he says. "We never got a record on it but it was a nice little tune. It was an old-fashioned song about sitting on a porch and writing a letter, which nobody ever does anymore, so we made a sort of a tavern song out of it."

Now he's sitting at a table in the Comerica Park press box cafeteria, singing: "'Sing, sing, sing every song/ Dance, dance all the night long/ Life is a party and doesn't last long/ So dance every dance and sing every song.' You know, like a tavern."

"I'm going to get back to it, I think, but it's a lot harder now," he says. "I just can't do a hip-hop song."

Harwell's musical career got him into the hottest water he's ever been in as the Tigers' announcer. In 1968, one year after Detroit had been racked by race riots, the Tigers won the American League pennant, an event that helped create some common bonds but didn't keep the city from being very much on edge, divided along racial and generational lines. Detroit hosted games 3, 4 and 5 of the World Series against the Cardinals. General manager Jim Campbell charged Harwell with finding singers for the national anthem. "Because I was a songwriter he designated me as the appointed singer picker," he says.

Harwell picked nightclub singer Margaret Whiting, Marvin Gaye and Jose Feliciano, who wasn't particularly well known yet, but came recommended by a music-industry friend. The Tigers were worried that Gaye, the Motown star, would sing an unorthodox anthem, and asked Harwell to speak to him. But Gaye planned to, and did, sing it straight. Feliciano, though, gave the song the Feliciano treatment, and set off a firestorm.

Veterans groups protested, sportswriters complained. Miss Lulu, on her way home from Detroit to Florida, where the family lived at the time, saw the newspaper headlines and was sure Ernie was about to lose his job.

"It was a Vietnam time," Harwell says, "and the people were very anti-hippie, and they thought he had long hair -- it really wasn't that long compared to what we saw later -- and he had the instrument of the time, you know, the hippie movement, he had the guitar, and he had his dog out there. He had on dark glasses, which was another symbol of hippie-ism. So they immediately sort of made a connection."

The Tigers, he says, were pretty good about the whole thing. "I got a little slap on the wrist, but that was all."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"Halter hits a fly ball to right. It'll be foul, back in the corner, in the seats, and a gentleman from Livonia, with a glove on, makes that catch."

Harwell takes the middle three innings off while Dickerson teams with Price. He usually stays in the booth to watch the game and listen to the broadcast, but if someone wants to talk to him, that's OK too. He's so generous with his time that a reporter in town for three days to research a story on him confesses on the third day that he's just about run out of questions to ask.

"I think throughout all the years a lot of people have experienced his kindness. He never refuses anybody or anything," says Lulu Harwell. "He's always very upbeat, and I think people recognize that. His mother and father were like that. They were wonderful people."

Harwell's father, Davis Gray Harwell, was left paralyzed in Ernie's teen years by brain surgery to remove a tumor. He says that while he doesn't really picture any particular listener when he's broadcasting a game, he used to use his father as an imaginary sounding board. "In the old days, when my dad was alive, he was an invalid," he says. "I sort of thought about him a lot. I couldn't say I actually talked to him, but probably in the back of my mind." Gray Harwell died in 1960, during Ernie's first spring training with the Tigers. His mother, Helen, died six days later.

Much has been made of the Southern upbringing of many great baseball announcers. Harwell says a lot of that has to do with the fact that Barber, from Columbus, Miss., was the first to do baseball in New York. The Giants, Dodgers and Yankees had an agreement not to broadcast games, which Dodgers executive Larry McPhail broke in 1939 by hiring Barber away from the Reds. "They broke the agreement, McPhail did, and the other guys had to follow," he says. "And I think that was pretty important for the Southern guys because nobody had ever heard big-league baseball in New York or the suburbs, and the first guy they heard was Red, and then Mel Allen. And they were both Southerners. So it wasn't anything strange for Russ Hodges, another Southerner, to come along. Or even Connie Desmond, who worked with us, was from Columbus, Ohio, which was pretty close to being Southern. These people were accepted, and that might have been a factor."

Harwell also credits the South's storytelling tradition. "We didn't have any entertainment in the Depression. You'd sit on the porch and you'd hear your mom and dad talk about Uncle Joe and Aunt Jane and Cousin So-and-So and what they were doing, tell stories about them, so it just sort of came natural, I guess."

But he's quick to point out that Vin Scully, among others, proves that being Southern is not required. "Vin's the best of all and he came from New Jersey."

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