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Storyteller Harwell to be honored in hometown

WASHINGTON, Ga. — On the northwest corner of this town's exquisite square, in a building now occupied by a gift shop, once stood Doc Green's Drug Store, where it all began for Ernie Harwell. Sort of.

Possessed of a baseball mind even as a child, along with a fixed and dramatic stutter, Harwell would be called upon to re-create games and various announcers for the sports-minded customers who frequented the place. He was not yet 10.

"They'd put me up on the counter and the guys would prod me into doing a little imitation," Harwell said. "I think they liked to hear my tongue-tied-ness. I think being tongue-tied about baseball maybe has gone on throughout my career."

Today, nearly three-quarters of a century later, Washington gives itself to its stammering prodigy, who mastered his impediment to become one of baseball's most storied radio announcers. Now 90, and sharp as people half his age, he comes home for Ernie Harwell Day.

This will necessitate a bunch of introductions. The Harwells moved to Atlanta in 1923. He hasn't been back to Washington since his brother Rick's funeral 20 years ago.

"I was always aware that he was a radio personality and that he was very respected, very well known announcer," said Lamont Lannae, 60, life-long Washington resident and a distant relative. "And you have some family pride but it was from a distance. . . . Ernie was kind of a ghost you heard about."

That is about to change. When it was announced last fall that Harwell was to be inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame — that ceremony comes Saturday night at the Cobb Galleria — a group spearheaded by sports author/announcer Loren Smith schemed to bring Harwell back to Washington.

At the luncheon feting him today at the Pope Center on Lexington Avenue, proceeds of a silent auction will go to fund a scholarship in the Harwell name for prospective broadcast media students. Future baseball MVPs at Washington-Wilkes County High School shall be presented with the Harwell Award. The team itself, wearing game jerseys, will serve the luncheon.

Braves announcer Pete Van Wieren will give the keynote address to the anticipated crowd of 150, an odd blend of true believers and the merely curious. A group of Michigan retirees over the river in Savannah Lakes, S.C., who lived through Harwell and his 42 seasons as the voice of the Detroit Tigers, are coming. A son of Denny McLain, the game's last 30-game winner for the Tigers (1968), is trying to make it from his home in Augusta.

"Since his brothers and his parents died, the Harwell name had faded away around here," said Sparky Newsome, editor and publisher of the Washington News-Reporter. "I feel like I know him now."

Without the boll weevil, this story could never be told. As with communities across the South, the cotton crop in Wilkes County was decimated in the early 1920s by the weevil invasion. In time, the county's population of 20,000 was cut in half.

"My dad had a furniture store there," Harwell said. "He went broke in the '20s, when the boll weevil came in. All the farmers that he'd given credit to on their furniture couldn't pay him, and he didn't want to go bankrupt. So he had to pay off everybody he owed and then we moved to Atlanta about 1923.

"He got a job as assistant manager at Mathis Brothers Furniture. They had two stores in Atlanta. They had a great slogan: Good and Bad Furniture."

Young Ernie continued to spend his summers with family in Washington, at least until his teen years, when he became a young Zelig to Atlanta. Batboy for the Atlanta Crackers. Paperboy for the old Atlanta Georgian, where Margaret Mitchell was on his route.

But the gang back at Doc Green's knew where his heart lay. The interior of the old place has changed but the drug store's white-and-black tile floor remains.

"That was the sports-gathering place," said Skeet Willingham, a Washington writer and historian. "In fact, Green's had a tickertape machine in there, so they could keep track of the World Series games. There may have been a little gambling going on too."

The Harwell household produced no baseball stars but the game framed their existence. Father and the three sons frequented Washington's semi-pro games. Ernie's father, Davis, was a close friend to Stafford Smith, who as Brooklyn's pitcher in Game 2 of the 1916 World Series dueled with 21-year-old Boston pitcher Babe Ruth for 14 innings before losing the game 2-1. Ernie was bitten hard.

"Dad loved the game and inculcated love in all three of the boys, especially me, very, very early," Harwell said.

In time, it was baseball that would take Harwell far away. Catching on with WSB after earning a degree in journalism at Emory, Harwell announced Crackers until 1948, when in one of the game's rarest trades, Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey traded catcher Cliff Dapper for a radio voice, which is how Harwell got to Brooklyn. Willingham keeps a Dapper-autographed ball, in the event's honor.

From there, after brief stints with the New York Giants and Baltimore Orioles, Harwell, in 1960, went to Detroit, where he would do his life's work. Only following the 2002 season would he retire. He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame a remarkable 26 years ago.

Finally today, his old hometown gets its chance to honor that kid up on the counter at Green's.

"We grew up in a culture that we didn't have a lot to play with," Harwell said, as he described his life's arc from Washington. "We didn't have video games. We didn't have TV. We really didn't have radio in those days. One of the pastimes was sitting out on the porch and listening to mom and dad and the aunts and uncles talk about kinfolk and tell stories. Maybe we ultimately became the storytellers."

Thomas Stinson writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.