In this series, The Detroit News looks back at events and people from past sports moments, enlarging on experiences that might have been forgotten with time, or revisiting behind-the-scenes drama that never made it into print or on airwaves.
They had become acquainted, in Baltimore, during the 1956-57 big-league seasons. George Kell was wrapping up his years as a Hall of Fame-destined third baseman. Ernie Harwell was a baseball broadcaster also headed, years later, for Cooperstown.
They together had done Orioles games when Kell, while on the disabled list, was invited into the booth to offer insight Harwell had extracted from him, comfortably.
By the spring of 1960, they were together. In Detroit.
History can hinge on random events. For generations of Tigers viewers and listeners, the confluence of Kell’s and Harwell’s voices became a blend so indelible, so exhilarating, that literally no other on-air talent has, for so many, meant so much.
Kell’s crackling, melodic, Arkansas twang fans still hear:
“Thanks, Larry, and good evening everyone.”
“You gotta like this youngster.”
“They’re gonna wave him in!”
“He lays down a bunt, and it’s a dandy.”
“I was talking to Mickey Lolich this morning in the HO-tel lobby …”
“Could be the ballgame — and it is.”
Harwell, likewise, was a man from the South, from Georgia. He was a storyteller, a professional announcer who understood precisely inflection and economy; when to be spare, when to stay under tight control, and when to have his voice rise in a carefully controlled exultation that would mesh with his audience’s passions, never flirting with the term “homer.”
He knew also when to color a moment with pet expressions that 10 years after Harwell’s death fans can yet hear: “He stood there like the house by the side of the road,” or “two for the price of one,” or what became his signature home-run call: “Longgggg gone …”
In a baseball town as rich and as ancient as Detroit, broadcasters can take on status disproportionate to their jobs. It’s stardom akin to Vin Scully with the Dodgers, or Harry Caray during his long reign mesmerizing Cubs fans at Wrigley Field and beyond. Baseball has a way of making its play-by-play kings immortal.
It seemed that few in the Tigers audience for nearly 50 years believed Kell and Harwell were, or could be, overly worshiped.
And yet only those close to the Tigers’ daily rhythms appreciated how different the two men were as individuals.
“They weren’t close, Harwell and Kell,” said Ray Lane, the longtime Detroit sports anchor who was each man’s baseball-booth partner, working with Kell on TV in 1965 and ’66, before shifting to radio as Harwell’s sidekick from 1967-72.
“They got along pretty good on the air. But personally and socially, not at all.”
Larry Osterman agrees. Osterman was Kell’s co-pilot on Tigers telecasts from 1967-77, then left to work Minnesota Twins games before returning to Detroit as prime play-by-play man on the PASS network from 1984-92.
“They were friendly — no shooting matches,” said Osterman, who is 85 and who for the past 22 years has lived in Largo, Florida, where he still works full time as an educational video producer for the Pinellas County School District. “But George, I think, had the feeling Ernie was getting more publicity.”
Or, more specifically, Osterman and Lane agree, that Harwell needed attention and acceptance the Tigers audience gave him in increasingly lavish streams even after he retired following the 2002 season. Ever gracious, ever mindful that fans were thrilled to meet him, Harwell was a perpetual ambassador for baseball, for the Tigers — and because he was a man who treasured being liked, probably an ambassador for himself.
There are and were few grievances from his partners during those years. And in their testimony now and in past years, Harwell’s goodness is viewed as it was by most fans: as the work of a man who craved people and approbation, who insisted on introducing players and broadcasters and fans to one another, who at home or on a road trip was as inclined to invite a fan to lunch as some dignitary, baseball or otherwise.
“First day I got the job,” Lane said, recalling the night in 1966 when he learned he would be moving the next season to full-time radio work alongside Harwell, “I get a call from him: ‘Congratulations, partner!’
“Ernie was always so gracious. That first year together, it was always: ‘Hey, come on down (onto the field during batting practice). I want you to meet the players.’
“It was amazing,” Lane said. “The other teams’ players all knew him. First guy I’m introduced to: ‘Jake Gibbs (old Yankees catcher), I’d like you to meet my new partner.’ He was always so considerate.”
Kell matched Harwell’s gentlemanliness and decency, all who worked with him agree. But the boy whose father had been an Arkansas barber and semi-pro pitcher had an understated persona quite opposite from Harwell’s gregariousness and people-pleasing ways. The styles reflected two men’s makeups and preferences. And perhaps, as well, Ernie’s innate need in the extreme to love and be loved.
Shuffling seats
How the two had gotten to Detroit is tied to some thick baseball and biographical lore.
Kell had been a Tigers star during the late ’40s and early ’50s. He had a Motor City baseball pedigree, gilded by a gift for clear, baseball-steeped diction. Those who knew broadcasting talent could be heightened by baseball experience, and vice versa, had seen in Kell the makings of a man made for the mic.
It was Kell who was summoned to work alongside another play-by-play giant, Van Patrick, after Patrick’s broadcast partner, Mel Ott — another Hall of Famer — was killed in a car accident in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, in November 1958, at age 49.
A year later, Patrick left the baseball chair, moving to regular sports-anchor duty at Channel 2 in Detroit and to eternal fame as the booming Lions play-by-play voice until his death in September 1974.
Kell was now, in 1960, the primary Tigers’ play-by-play chief. He needed a sidekick. He endorsed Harwell.
Those early years of partnership were, by today’s standards, primitive and unorthodox.
From the 1960 through 1963 seasons, Kell and Harwell sat in the same radio booth, teaming up for all Tigers radio broadcasts. But for 40 or so televised Tigers games that then were rationed each year to Detroit’s audience before cable TV became a baseball fan’s bounty, Kell and Harwell had a routine.
George would do the first 4½ innings on radio. Ernie would handle the first 4½ on TV. They then would pass each other on the 25 feet of catwalk that stretched between TV and radio booths at Tiger Stadium. The same flip-flop would occur on the road. They would work alone in each booth during their occasional joint radio-TV shifts.
It was a routine that continued through 1963. Afterward, they split for a year — although not because of any friction.
Kell went home to Swifton, Arkansas, to tend to a young son he feared was growing up without his dad, and to bolt down his new car dealership, George Kell Motors, 18 miles away in Newport, and a dealership that yet flourishes.
While they would come to be stars and institutions during the next three decades — Kell on TV, Harwell mostly on radio — there was a separate broadcast chronology brewing.
It had to do with partners. Kell’s brief exit in 1964 set in motion a shuffling of broadcast-booth personnel and matchups:
► Bob Scheffing: He had been fired as Tigers manager during the ’63 season, then finished his Tigers contract as Kell’s broadcast replacement in 1964. That he wasn’t invited back said everything about Scheffing’s single-season move from dugout to TV/radio duties.
► Lane: A Detroiter who played baseball at Mackenzie High and Michigan State before diving into a long broadcast career statewide and in Detroit, he was splitting sports-anchor shifts with Patrick at Channel 2 and doing a Tigers pregame show. When Kell decided after his one-year sabbatical that he would return in a TV-only role for those 40 games Tigers fans then were allowed, Lane signed on as Kell’s partner, while Gene Osborne replaced Scheffing on radio.
►Two years later, in ’67, Osborne was gone and Lane was asked to move full time to the radio booth alongside Harwell. Kell’s new partner would be a young sports anchor and Nebraska native from WKZO-TV in Kalamazoo: Osterman, who happened to work for a TV station owned by John Fetzer — the very man who also owned the Tigers from 1961-83.
It was Osterman who begot, for a decade, Kell’s epic first-inning opener on each telecast: “Thanks, Larry,” and Kell, with his crystalline timbre, somehow would turn “thanks” into a nearly two-syllable word.
While Osterman was to hang with Kell for a decade, Lane gave way to Paul Carey in ’73 after Patrick died and Lane took on dual sports-anchor shifts at Channel 2.
And then came Al Kaline, who had played alongside Kell during Kaline’s early years with the Tigers, gradually began moving into the booth as Kell’s partner. He would remain at Kell’s side until Kell retired following the 1996 season. Carey, likewise, would stick with Harwell through 1991, a year the Tigers would prefer to forget because of one incendiary decision in late, 1990.
Unpopular decision
The Tigers had a new president who had replaced the man now easing in as Tigers chairman, Jim Campbell. It was Bo Schembechler, fresh from a year as University of Michigan athletic director and 20 preceding years as Wolverines football coach.
Schembechler thought he knew baseball. He had been a left-handed pitcher in college. Even during his coaching years in Ann Arbor, he studied the Tigers, something the man who now was Tigers owner, Tom Monaghan, knew when Monaghan picked Schembechler as Campbell’s replacement.
What Bo didn’t comprehend fully was Harwell’s relationship with Tigers fans. That failing led to the most disastrous move in Detroit broadcast history.
Marketing moguls at WJR, the 50,000-watt radio colossus that had carried Tigers games for decades, concluded that Harwell, then 72, had hit his expiration date. Schembechler supposedly balked, but neither he nor Campbell — each had the power to oppose WJR’s move — overly resisted. Schembechler worked to get Harwell a farewell season in 1991. It was formally announced at a press conference the week before Christmas.
Fans were staggered. And enraged. Harwell was spinning play-by-play silk every bit as deftly as he had been doing for decades. His energy level, already legendary, hadn’t dipped an inch.
The only person as angry as Harwell’s listeners was his old boss, Campbell, who was a year from retirement after working 43 years as a Tigers business head, general manager, president, chairman — and unquestioned franchise chief. What incensed Campbell were two shakeouts from the December press session at Tiger Stadium.
Harwell had made it clear he did not wish to leave, an honest response Campbell ostensibly had no right to oppose. But what most grated an old-school exec was that Harwell had shown up at the press conference with attorney Gary Spicer.
The man who as Tigers GM chafed at agents negotiating players’ contracts was white-hot that Harwell, who had brought along Spicer for a reason, was hinting at an age-discrimination suit. That, anyway, was Campbell’s read.
Breach of loyalty there, Campbell concluded. Never mind that in Harwell’s accurate view it had been the Tigers, Campbell and Schembechler who were agreeing to Ernie’s ouster. Campbell saw Harwell’s brandishing of his attorney as a betrayal.
The two men had a bad follow-up phone conversation. Harwell, the essence of a Southern evangelical Christian, was contrite — offering prayers of peace and healing. Campbell told him to bag it. They were finished.
Campbell’s ire never waned. At a gala Farewell to Ernie celebration at Tiger Stadium late in the 1991 season, Campbell — pretending to be all smiles as he stood by the man whom he had employed for 30 years — awarded Harwell his going-away present: a painting of Tiger Stadium.
Some would have seen it as the notoriously penny-pinching Campbell being typically cheap. But the “gift” was meant to be a message to Ernie: You made us look bad. You’ve spent a year on a sympathy tour raking in the Farewell to Ernie fests. Goodbye, sir.
That it was Harwell — and Tigers fans — who felt violated wasn’t foremost in Campbell’s mind. Lane and Osterman agree that Campbell had been quietly resentful of Harwell in much the same fashion as Kell, believing, fairly or unfairly, that Ernie’s fame and soaring fan-worship was more about Harwell’s ego needs than about duty to the Tigers.
“Campbell wasn’t a big fan of Ernie,” said Lane, who is 89, and who splits time each year between Farmington Hills and winters in Florida. “Ernie had gained in popularity, and then when the Harwell and Gary Spicer thing happened, that really incensed him.”
Campbell might have axed Harwell sooner had the Tigers’ not won the 1968 World Series. It was Harwell, who loved music and those who wrote and played it, who arranged for a young friend, Jose Feliciano, to sing the national anthem at Game 5 between the Cardinals and Tigers at Tiger Stadium.
Feliciano played on his guitar a custom-conceived melody that was alien to every tradition of an anthem viewed by America as sacred. Fans in Detroit and nationally were either bewildered, offended, or enraged. No one was more irked than the crusty traditionalist, Campbell. But Feliciano, Harwell — and the Tigers — were hours from catching a break. The Tigers late in Game 5 had a Hollywood comeback that detonated a three-game Series turnaround. Their seven-game ’68 championship muted most of the Feliciano ruckus.
Meanwhile, Kell’s broadcast years were as steady with the Tigers audience as his relationship was with Campbell.
The bond between Campbell and Kell was simply explained: Both were baseball men, as was Rick Ferrell, who had been GM ahead of Campbell and who for three more decades stayed as a front-office guru and Campbell confidant. The three men dined together, often.
‘Like brothers’
In the fall of 1966, Kell had been back at the mic for two seasons. The Tigers had just wrapped up a year of personal calamity.
Charlie Dressen, who had moved in as Tigers manager after Scheffing’s axing in 1963, that May had been socked with a second heart attack after having had his first during spring training, 1964. Bob Swift, a Tigers coach, each time stepped in as acting manager — until Swift was hit during the 1966 All-Star break with what initially was thought to be food poisoning.
It was worse: lung cancer. Inoperable. Swift died on Oct. 17, nine weeks after Dressen, and now Campbell was looking for a new manager to replace Dressen, Swift, and the team’s second interim skipper, Frank Skaff.
Campbell spoke with Kell.
“You’re going to be the new manager,” Campbell said.
Kell wasn’t having it.
“Naw, Jim,” Kell said, recalling the precise conversation during an interview July 27, 1974, at Cleveland. “Let’s not do that. You’ll just have to fire me. That won’t be good for any of us.”
Kell feared his relationship with the Tigers and with Campbell would end, or at the least be marred, by one of big-league baseball’s inevitabilities. But there was even more at stake. He loved broadcasting — 40 games a year. He didn’t need eight months in a dugout and manager’s office.
Campbell instead picked Mayo Smith as the Tigers’ new skipper. Two years later, Smith was riding in the Tigers championship parade after having pulled one of the great hocus-pocus acts in World Series history: moving Mickey Stanley, the Tigers’ regular center-fielder, to shortstop as a replacement for Ray Oyler, who that season had batted .135.
“Kell and Campbell were like brothers,” said Osterman, who himself had such natural ease and friendship with Kell that the two men and their wives, on the rare occasions both wives traveled, unfailingly had dinner together, often heading for a merry evening across the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito, or at some haunt in Manhattan. It was Kell, says Osterman, who made possible the kinship that grew between Kell, Osterman, and their producer, Doc Fenkell, a TV pro and fun-lover of deep renown.
Other friendships, far from baseball, also were at work for Kell. They extended into Arkansas politics and to a 10-year run on the Arkansas State Highway Commission.
Kell was a centrist Democrat from an era when the South had been solidly Democrat, owing heavily to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the New Deal. Neither liberal nor rigidly conservative, Kell found his political soulmate in a man who in 1970 became Arkansas governor: Dale Bumpers, and who four years later took on, in the Democratic primary, a powerful Senatorial giant: J.W. Fulbright, who had represented Arkansas since 1945.
There was a joint campaign appearance early in 1974. Something, though, had derailed Bumpers and he drafted Kell as a last-minute fill-in. The showdown — not a debate but an appeal by each camp to Dem voters — proceeded. Fulbright was, in Kell’s view, imperious and condescending. Kell was hot. He stepped to the mic and offered a testimonial to Bumpers as crisp and as compelling as any of his best play-by-play work.
Bumpers destroyed Fulbright in the primary and won easily in November.
Kell wasn’t finished.
He had come to like a bright newcomer in Arkansas, a candidate for governor named Bill Clinton. Kell’s endorsement, Clinton later said, was what enabled Clinton to win the governor’s chair in 1982, 10 years before Clinton won the White House.
But it was a friendship that forever made Kell uneasy. Even before Clinton became President and before his 1998 impeachment, Kell knew that Clinton was not every Tigers fan’s favorite. As years passed, Kell kept his support as well as his critiques of a governor-turned-President mostly to himself.
More comfortable was his cozy TV routine and his commutes to Detroit and to American League towns. Swifton was 104 miles northeast of Little Rock, but it was easier for Kell to cross the Tennessee border and fly from Memphis International Airport, which was 107 miles away and offered more direct routes to Detroit and elsewhere.
Harwell’s timeline was relatively smooth, spanning thousands of Tigers games, until the December 1990 bombshell that was about to birth two years of baseball-booth melodrama.
Harwell’s replacements, Rick Rizzs and Bob Rathbun, had a miserable two-year run with an audience so hostile that Mike Ilitch, who had bought the Tigers from Monaghan in 1992, returned Harwell as part of a three-way radio team in 1993. A year later, Harwell shifted to TV-only on the PASS network and then came home to his more natural niche, radio, in 1999 as Tigers play-by-play chief.
There he flourished until he retired — this time by his own call — at the end of 2002.
Kell died at his home, in his sleep, on March 24, 2009. He was 86. Harwell passed 14 months later at age 92.
It might have been expected that the two would have final farewells that mirrored their broadcast personas. Kell was buried in Swifton, after a funeral at the Methodist church where he taught Sunday school even into his senior years.
Harwell lay in state at Comerica Park, where a full-size statue yet commemorates him, and where thousands shuffled past his open casket as he lay in repose, wearing his trademark beret.
Ernie’s funeral was private. Some irony there, perhaps, for a man whose professional life, like Kell’s, had been the essence of baseball celebrity one man happily accepted and the other might, more accurately, have needed. But in the extraordinary manner they were appreciated at the time, and even years after their deaths, it can seem as if Kell and Harwell are yet at work as their voices and expressions are recalled.
They’re treating the Tigers audience to extra innings.
Former Detroit News sports reporter Lynn Henning is a freelance writer.