Save The Date!
Nov. 5, 2010 – Nov. 7, 2010
"Gateway To The Wind" Weekend,
St. Louis, MO
Celebrating Author Margaret Mitchell's Birthday and the 70th Anniversary of the Premiere of GWTW in St. Louis. Special guest actors from the movie, Roundtable discussions and speakers covering GWTW and St. Louis Civil War connection Saturday night Gala Charity Ball to benefit Rainbows For Kids, a 501 (c)(3) charity for children with cancer. You won't want to miss this fun weekend.
For more information: info@GWTWbook.com
Gateway to the Wind -
Schedule of Events
Registration Form
Foreword—Mixing Gone With The Wind and Baseball
About Ernie Harwell and the Foreword
Ernie Harwell was born January 25th, 1918 and after a long career in broadcasting he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981. Harwell is from Washington, Georgia and worked in the newspaper business in Atlanta. He started as a paperboy for the Georgian, and then as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal. He was a copy editor and a sports writer. While working at the Journal (now the Journal-Constitution)one of his assignments in December of 1939 was to help with the coverage of the premiere of Gone With The Wind.
While in Atlanta, Harwell also worked as a correspondent for The Sporting News. It was during his time in Atlanta that his family began their association with the Mitchell Family of Peachtree Street in Atlanta. They had a popular teenaged daughter who would one day become famous worldwide for writing Gone With the Wind, but back then she was just Peggy Mitchell.
When asked to write the foreword for The Making Of A Masterpiece, Harwell did not hesitate. He was excited to participate because it brought back many happy memories of his younger days in Atlanta and as a tribute to his brother’s close friendship with Mitchell.
As he wrote in the Foreword for The Making Of A Masterpiece:
“My mother was a great cook and her work quickly became known to the well-to-do ladies around Atlanta. Whenever one of the debutantes had a party, they would contact my mother to bake the cakes and make the sandwiches for the lunch or dinner or other special occasion. One of these ladies was Margaret Mitchell.”
Helen Barksdale Harwell was Mitchell’s caterer on numerous occasions. In the foreword and elsewhere in the book, Harwell tells of his various connections to Mitchell. He was her paperboy and his brother Richard’s life brought them together with Mitchell on other levels. Richard wrote several books dealing with Mitchell and the Civil War, and it was because of his love of history that Mitchell formed a long-time friendship with Richard. Harwell was around her with Richard and also when he did work at a local prison, which is detailed in the book.
Harwell knew my husband Rob Rains, who is a baseball writer, so he wanted Rob to help with the foreword. Rob and Harwell collaborated via the phone several times and Rob helped organize Harwell’s thoughts. The foreword was very much Harwell’s words, just captured on paper by Rob. He was so pleased to be involved in this book. Here is the letter he wrote to me after looking over my manuscript—before I sent it to the publisher.
Harwell has been one of the most respected baseball announcers in history. Besides the broadcasts he did for the various teams he worked for—the Detroit Tigers was of course, the longest—he broadcast two All Star Games and two World Series Games for NBC Radio. He also did other broadcasts for CBS and ESPN Radio including the CBS Radio Game of the Week in the 1990’s.
According to Voices Of The Game (Diamond Communications, 1987) by Curt Smith, Harwell loved broadcasting and especially the medium of Radio.
“Radio is the best medium for baseball---sitting at home, you can imagine it all. The game is linear. The bags, the positions, the batter, the pitcher—they’re all definite designations,” he told Smith for the book.
“You start with the bare bones, and your creativity fills in the rest,” he said.
But radio was not the only thing Harwell has done besides the newspaper writing. In the 1950’s he wrote an essay titled “The Game For All America” which was originally published in The Sporting News, but has since been reprinted many times. He wrote several books and since his retirement he has done some television. During his long sports career he even wrote songs and reportedly 66 of his songs have been recorded by various artists.
Besides being only the fifth broadcaster to win the Ford C. Frick Award in the Baseball Hall of Fame, he has won many other awards including induction to both the Michigan and Georgia Sports Halls of Fame as well as the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, and the Radio Hall of Fame.
"For more than half-a-century Ernie Harwell has been baseball's beach bud, camp counselor, and pillow pal: mythy and sweetly rural, his voice falling lightly on the ear,” said Smith. “He has been a husband of 69 years; Hall of Fame announcer; best-selling author; lyricist; and creator of baseball's greatest essay, A Game For All America. Living one of those lives would be exceptional. Extraordinarily, Ernie has lived them all.”
When I first started writing The Making Of A Masterpiece, I told Smith, who is a friend of ours, about it. He was the one who told me of the connection Harwell had with Margaret Mitchell. Working with Harwell was a pure joy. His booming broadcasting voice and friendly demeanor were always welcome when he called the house.
One day in the fall of 2009 Harwell called me to tell me he had read my book.
“Congratulations on the book!” he said, and he told me how much he liked it. “It was fun working on it. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed working with you and to wish you luck.”
I enjoyed our chat and thanked him for calling. The next day I saw the news on ESPN that he announced he was suffering from terminal cancer. He had said nothing about that to me on the telephone and he sounded perfectly fine—fantastic in fact. What a man, I thought. Here he was going through all of this and trying to decide if he would go public with his health struggles, and he took the time out of his day to call me and tell me how much writing the foreword to my book meant to him.
From the first time I spoke to the baseball broadcasting legend on the phone --and he said he’d do the foreword --I was thrilled. In fact when I hung up from that call I ran out to find Rob yelling with happiness, “Ernie Harwell is going to do my foreword! He said yes!”
It was a big thrill to be able to talk to him and receive handwritten letters from him. When Harwell said “thank you” to me I said, “No, no Ernie thank you.”
 |
| Photo by Bill Greenblatt |
Thank you for doing the foreword, and thank you for being the kind of person the great broadcasting legend Jack Buck was. Living in St. Louis afforded me the opportunity to hear Jack Buck do the Cardinal games on a regular basis. Rob was lucky enough to get to work with Jack on his autobiography. We were fortunate enough to become friends with these two great men. They are the types of men that are great because of what they have done, but beyond that, they are just great men.
“Oscar Wilde penned The Importance of Being Earnest,” said author Curt Smith. “Harwell's life shows the Wonder of Being Ernie. God bless him, and He will."
Phone: 314.842.9724
Email: info@GWTWbook.com
Copyright ©2010 Sally Rains. All Rights Reserved.
Website Developed by