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