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Ode to Ernie Harwell Over five thousand Detroit Tiger ball games ago, Grandpa took me trout fishing on the old Butterfield Creek. On the way home half asleep I listened to Ernie Harwell recite the late innings of a Tiger ball game while Grandpa's cigarette glowed like a campfire in the dark. Outside the car windows Michigan flowed along. I felt content as a young trout snuggled under a log in the current. Since that night only thing on the radio that's rivaled rock-'and'-roll (or county and western music) is Ernie Harwell going on and on like an epic poem full of Ty Cobb trivia and Detroit Tiger history, like a human baseball encyclopedia always sounding the same, but always different through three decades and most of the incarnations of my life. I even proposed to my wife with Ernie crooning in the background, or was it the Rolling Stones' song "Time Waits For No One"? That was over two thousand Tiger games ago. Grandpa's been gone since 1979. Late that last September he whispered, "Psst, I've got a secret, I'm dying." Then he sat there like an old house beside the road and watched life go by like a Denny McLain fastball. There isn't any real security, but Ernie Harwell on the airwaves came close. |
Elegy for the Carl D. Bradley Six-hundred and forty feet of riveted steel judged unsinkable, the big freighter Carl D. Bradley steered northeast away from the shelter of Wisconsin's shore, working through hurricane force winds, twisting and thumping in a wild arc across northern Lake Michigan headed home to Rogers City after the last haul of the year. Ugly green 30 foot high waves thundered against the starboard hull. November 18, 1958 the gray light dissappeared into howling black snow clouds. The thirty year old longboat could carry enough crushed stone to fill three freight trains a hundred cars long, but she'd rubbed bottom near Cedarville two weeks before. The cargo holds were full of rust and she'd been popping rivets all day from the strain of the storm, but this was normal. The 35 man crew rode on below out of the screaming winds. At 5:30 the big ship radioed Rogers City telling the wives not to worry that the waves were rough but routine. Minutes later Carl D. Bradley was lifted out of the lake by a dark mountain of water full of unbelievable power. The old inland seas freighter groaned, bowed in the middle, rocked up and down, radioed for help, buckled and broke into eternity. Electric cables snapped and hissed, men screamed and prayed for their wives and kids and friends. |
The hot boiler exploded in a death shudder as the cold lake swallowed the ship's heart, and through the icy night hours all but two of the men. Cars full of families from Rogers City, Posen, Onaway, St. Ignace and Cheboygan drove to Charlevoix. They shinned their headlights like prayers out into the storm. But morning rolled in full of fatherless children. Fourteen years later a faded life ring from the Carl D. Bradley washed ashore on Pelee Island in western Lake Erie. |