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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?

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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?

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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,

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a choke up an inch is probably the best advice, and don't try to pull the ball.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I hit.333 in the road, I hit.360-something in Boston.

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Thanks for being here.