By Cody Stavenhagen 7h ago 14
In January, I drove home from the Detroit Public Library, snow flurries flicking against the windshield, steam rising from the old streets along Woodward Avenue.
I had just visited the Detroit Public Library’s main branch for the first time. I came to see the Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, and that led to a journey through the grand old building, dedicated in 1921 and designed by Cass Gilbert, also the architect of the U.S. Supreme Court Building.
Upon the library’s construction, it was hailed as the most beautiful structure in Detroit. Gilbert’s Beaux-Arts style is grandiose, with a way of transporting you to a different time and place. The Renaissance design is heavy on Greek and Roman influences, reverent to the power of knowledge. The famed loggia panel outside the Fine Arts Room depicts the “Seven Ages of Man,” representing a scene from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
It was on that drive back, for one of the first times in my one year as a Metro Detroit resident, when I felt connected to the city, its past and its future. The connection was a testament to the life’s work of a baseball broadcaster, a man whose slight Georgia twang rang out over the state of Michigan, a man whose 60 years in baseball transcended the role of announcer and morphed into a sort of poet laureate for Detroit and beyond.
For as much as Ernie Harwell conveyed the enthusiasm of a man who deeply loved baseball, his broadcasts also contained allusions to the Bible, Homer and contemporary poetry. Mark Bowden, now the Detroit Public Library’s director of special collections, grew up in Michigan and remembers listening to Harwell call games on the radio in the 1970s. These broadcasts shaped the roots of Bowden’s Tigers fandom and served as a link to the bigger world. Today, Bowden oversees the Harwell Collection, a man’s life preserved in papers, folders and boxes.
Ernie Harwell began donating his personal collections in 1966, starting with 7,000 photographs. Subsequent donations throughout Harwell’s life included World Series programs, letters, media guides and much more.
Harwell’s brother was a librarian and Civil War historian, so Harwell’s appreciation for the broader role of a library was ingrained. Although we often think of libraries as solemn places where people read books, the best ones are so much more. They reach into their communities. Their walls are temples to history and the defiant belief in the power of stories. A passage from Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book,” explains why things like libraries, books and memorabilia matter:
“If something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved,” Orlean writes, “and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know you are part of something that has shape and purpose.”
Count Ernie Harwell as someone who understood the mystical powers of observation and memory. Although he is best known for his many years calling the Tigers, Harwell also announced games for the Atlanta Crackers, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and Baltimore Orioles earlier in his career. His collection of baseball materials includes artifacts from those days and actually dates to his childhood, where some of the money he saved working a paper route went to buying baseball cards and sports pamphlets.
Harwell used his expansive collection in his work. He kept 3-by-5 index cards featuring stories, anecdotes and trivia. Each time he used something from the card on a broadcast, he marked the date, so as to not repeat himself too frequently. These types of insights are what brought Harwell’s broadcasts to life, and they live on as part of the collection.
“I think like anyone else, he got tired of lugging (materials) all around when you move,” Bowden said. “And on a deeper level I think he began to feel uncomfortable with the idea of collecting just to collect.”
(Courtesy of the Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library)
Today, the Harwell Collection is split into two sects. There is the Lulu and Ernie Harwell Room, tucked away on the library’s second floor. It is a hidden gem in a city filled with reverence to the past. The small room has a mock broadcast booth, complete with a microphone, and is loaded with artifacts from Harwell’s career and Detroit Tigers history: seats from Tiger Stadium, Harwell’s 1968 World Series ring, shelves filled with books, even a glove signed by Ichiro, a player who fascinated Harwell late in his career. The room has other artifacts and knickknacks inside glass cases, including rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Al Kaline, Ernie Banks and Roberto Clemente.
The Harwell Room is one of the library’s main attractions, drawing visitors from all over. It is accessible via appointment only. Bowden says the appointments start filling up during baseball season, especially if the Tigers are good, especially if they are headed for the postseason.
The room can draw people like me through the doors. Perhaps those people will also look around and experience the greater wonder of the library. Maybe they’ll want to come back, get a library card and experience the magic of a book or dig through the library’s four other special collections: The Burton Historical Collection, the National Automotive History Collection, the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in Performing Arts and the Rare Book Collection.
“My job, because of the five different special collections, it’s never boring,” Bowden said. “In a single day or week, I could be dealing with a question about baseball, someone’s genealogy, someone restoring their 1950 Oldsmobile, to something about Detroit’s historical past, the history of a building, a piece of property, or with the Hackley Collection, something to do with Stevie Wonder. … It’s just an incredible range of topics that my staff and I deal with weekly, all the time.”
The second component of the Harwell Collection rests behind closed doors, in the stacks. Readers and researchers can view a catalog of the Harwell Collection and request materials to view in the library’s grand reading room. The collection is varied and enlightening. It spans football, cricket, horse racing, the Olympics and more. There are files on sports figures from Ty Cobb to Barry Switzer. There are photographs, 12 volumes of Tigers team correspondence from 1903-1912 and even a beautiful collection of old baseball cards, including tobacco cards from the early 1900s, which the library staff has to watch over with diligent security. The Harwell Collection as a whole was once estimated to be worth at least $4 million.
(Courtesy of the Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library)
Like any good Detroit story, the Harwell Collection is also not without controversy. A few years ago, there was critical news coverage regarding the Harwell Room, how it’s not easily accessible, how it is so hidden, how there were security concerns.
“He really wanted it to be open and accessible to people,” Gary Spicer, Harwell’s friend and attorney, said in 2011.
Although not directly related to the Harwell Collection, Ernie and Lulu Harwell’s four children have also been locked in legal infighting over the Harwell estate and the handling of finances late in Lulu’s life. Ernie Harwell died in 2010 at age 92; Lulu died last year at age 99.
But the fact the Harwell Room is somewhat hidden, and the fact the materials Harwell collected through his career exist in the library, are also part of what makes the collection so fascinating. Like any good piece of history, it requires a search. And once you find it, once you tour the room, scour through old photos and programs via the library’s online catalog, you get a sense of Harwell and all the things that made him so respected.
Bowden says he’s encountered numerous visitors with stories of writing letters to Harwell, still cherishing the letters of encouragement he wrote in return.
“I think that’s probably why he’s so beloved in Detroit and in Michigan, because of that genuineness and that authenticity,” Bowden said.
Harwell’s shadow is still felt over the Tigers organization. There’s a statue of him inside the gates at Comerica Park. The press box is named after him. His name is still spoken with a tone of reverence, from his successors in the broadcast world to the players and managers he chronicled throughout his career.
“Ernie has been the voice of the Tigers for so long (since 1960, every year except 1992) that it’s not an exaggeration to say that in some ways, he is the Detroit Tigers,” Al Kaline wrote in a foreward to one of Harwell’s books.
In recent years, Bowden says he has tried to curate the Harwell Room and the broader collection to reflect the history of the Tigers. The library occasionally purchases books or other materials to add to the collection. Visiting the Harwell Collection, you get a sense of the man, and the team, and the city.
“The Seven Ages of Man” at the Detroit Public Library. (Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library)
New Detroit, for all the spectacle of urban resurgence, does not always bring the city’s vibrant past to life. A walk between Comerica Park and Little Caesars Arena does not conjure memories of the days when Woodward roared. A walk down Michigan and Trumbull, past the new Police Athletic League site, makes it hard to believe Tiger Stadium ever occupied the block.
But a stroll through the library — into the reading room, up and into the Harwell Room, into the old wing and under stunning ceilings and painted windows, brings things that are gone back into mind.
It has been almost 20 years since Ernie Harwell last called a baseball game. Many of the visitors to the Harwell Room, Bowden says, are families stopping by on afternoons before a Tigers game. The children have often never heard Harwell’s voice. They will tour the room, learn about Harwell’s life and work, hear stories from their parents or grandparents and walk away learning something new.
That is the legacy of Ernie Harwell, that is the beauty of a library and that is the wonder of Detroit.
