Memories come in all shapes and sizes

Yesterday was a very busy day. One filled with emotion, panic, worry, hope, relief and sadness. And each emotion was backed up by a memory from times past.

My oldest twin boy Jason suffered a head injury yesterday. An 11-year-old boy being an 11-year-old boy. Swinging by his arms between two tables, he slipped and fell hard - right on his head. He was in bad shape.

When my ex-wife called with the news, everything stopped. Emotions flooded over me. Then the memories hit. At first the recent time line recall of Natasha Richardson and her accident last week. Hit her head, everything seemed fine at first then…gone. You can imagine what that memory did to a dad who can freak out about his kids at the drop of a hat.

Then the “longer ago” recall began to take effect and I flashed back to my auto accident in 1999 where I was rear-ended at 70 MPH while stopped dead on I-94. By all rights, I should have died. Crushed the vehicle I was in into a sardine can. Then I began remembering the worried look in the eyes of my then 2-year-old twin boys as they saw me in ER – on a morphine drip with tubes and wires and my face badly damaged with teeth missing and facial parts rearranged – barely hanging on.

Thankfully, Jason is OK. The CT came back negative for hematoma. He now sports a huge bruised bump on his noggin the size of a golf ball. I will talk to the doctors today about having an EEG done just to play it safe.

However, one more event yesterday brought back the flood of emotions and memories. The event was not as traumatic, but still brought back the recall.

While I was waiting for the results of Jason’s CT scan, I went to an area of the hospital with WiFi internet to check email on my laptop. It was then I found out the news that former Tiger great George Kell had passed away at age 86 in Arkansas.

The flood of emotions hit me again. Sad to hear of the Hall Of Fame 3rd baseman and Tiger broadcaster’s passing. However, this time, the memories took me further back… back to a time of my childhood that filled my heart with much fondness.

Growing up as a kid in Metro Detroit in the 1960’s, you followed Detroit Tiger baseball two ways – on the radio and on the TV in black and white. Of course, going to Tiger Stadium as a kid, the vision of all the lush green interior was amplified in a kids mind, especially since the only other way I saw it was on our big old Airline black and white TV. Yeah. TV in black and white. With only channels 2 -13 until we got the UHF converter box. Yep, there was a converter box long ago…before the current DTV one.

And on the TV doing the Tiger games was George Kell. Kell was a former player with the Tigers in the late 1940s through the early 1950s. He had a laid-back drawl that just made you feel at ease, giving you everything you needed to know about the game’s progress. Much like his radio counterpart, the Hall Of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell. It figures, since Kell’s first stint at calling play-by-play was with Harwell doing a Baltimore Orioles game when Kell was injured .

Baseball was a big part of my childhood. Playing catch with my grandpa, Little League, pick-up games at Cherry Hill and Levagood Park, as well as Ford Field (the original one in Dearborn - long before the stadium Ford Field in Detroit was built).

My dad would tell me of George Kell’s glory days as a player with the Tigers. “Best 3rd baseman to ever play the game.” he would recall. Kell won the batting title in 1949 while with the Tigers, beating out the immortal Ted Williams by a fraction of a batting average percentage - .3429 to William’s .3247.

The following year was George Kell’s best. He walloped 56 doubles, led the league with 218 hits, and set personal highs with 101 runs batted in and 114 runs scored. He hit .340, second to Billy Goodman of the Red Sox in the race for the batting title. No one would hit as many doubles in any year until 2000, when Todd Helton slugged 59 for the Colorado Rockies.

George Kell joined the booth after Tigers broadcaster Mel Ott was killed in an automobile accident in 1958. On George’s recommendation, Ernie Harwell came to Detroit in 1960 as the radio voice of the Tigers, beginning a legendary 42-year career with the team.

"He had two outstanding careers, one as a baseball player, one as a baseball announcer," Harwell said yesterday. "He was certainly an icon in Detroit and Michigan."

I met George Kell in the latter years of his life when the Tigers were the ALCS in 2006 and Kell threw out the first pitch. It was quite a moment meeting such a great baseball man – both player and broadcaster. He was truly a class act – one of the nicest guys one could ever meet.

So, yesterday was a memory day for me. Memories of childhood and childhood play, the fun, scrapes and bruises that come with it as well. And memories of a great and gentle man who excited generations of baseball fans and Tiger fans as well.