2
Dad
MY FATHER HAD HAIRY EARS. Check that. He had really, really hairy ears. He had “Hey, what are you doin’ wearin’ earmuffs in the middle of summer?” hairy ears. When I would see an infomercial on late-night TV extolling the virtues of a state-of-the-art trimmer that could remove unsightly nose and ear hairs, I would dismiss its claims outright because the manufacturers had obviously never tried that thing out on Ernest Thorwald Johnson Sr. I would go so far as to say that the folks who make Weed Eaters would have been at least a bit intimidated by the sight. I wondered sometimes when he asked me to repeat something I’d said to him if my words hadn’t gotten tangled up in that underbrush and never reached his eardrums. So where’s this going? you ask. I’m getting there.
In the last month or so of my father’s days, before congestive heart failure brought the curtain down on what was a George Bailey–style wonderful life, he lived for a short time in an Atlanta rehabilitation center. Ernie Senior, or Big Guy, as we called him around the house, or Poppy, as the grandchildren called him, or the right-hander, as I called him when we worked Atlanta Braves telecasts in the mid-1990s, was six foot four, a great athlete whose talents had taken him to the major leagues as a pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves and the Baltimore Orioles in the 1950s. Now at the age of eighty-seven, he was struggling. Strength, energy, balance—they were all leaving him. And so was his memory. His mind was playing tricks on him. The early stages of Alzheimer’s had become more and more evident. I think that was the most difficult part of his illness for our family to witness. My dad’s loss of access to the vault of memories he’d accumulated was heartbreaking.
One afternoon in the rehab center’s living room/sunroom/visiting area for families, I finally did something with my dad I had never done before. I trimmed those hairy ears. The trimmer, with a fresh, right-outta-the-package battery, hummed as I turned it on. With the trimmer inches from my dad’s left ear, I began to wonder if there was any fine print in the instruction manual detailing what to do if the device became jammed or entangled in hair too dense for this model to handle. But I forged ahead, and with great success, I might add. In fact, the left ear was going so well that I thought I’d have to ask the janitorial staff if they had a broom and a dustpan I could borrow. Dad and I laughed about what had to be an interesting if not comedic scene for others in the room, and as I moved to the other side, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on between my dad’s ears. What if he had lost the ability to remember things the rest of us thought we’d never forget?
Did he remember growing up in Vermont? That’s where he was born to Swedish parents, Thorwald and Ingeborg. That’s where he spent time ski jumping and ice-skating and becoming a star baseball, basketball, and football player at Brattleboro High School. Did he remember the first time he laid eyes on that cheerleader, Lois Denhard, who would become his wife of sixty-three years? How about his World War II tour of duty with the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific? The unbreakable bonds he forged with his brothers in arms there, with whom he would remain in contact for years to come until slowly their numbers dwindled?
How well did he remember, I wondered, that glorious 1957 World Series in which he was a relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves, playing alongside legends such as Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn, and Lou Burdette? Did he remember being my seventh-grade basketball coach at St. Jude’s outside Atlanta—benching me for not playing tough enough in one game and later celebrating with me when my two free throws in the closing seconds gave us the championship? (In all honesty, the other team, Westminster, had fouled me intentionally, knowing there was no way the scrawny kid would hit two pressure free throws. Had I been coaching Westminster I would have done the same thing.)
Did he recall how my two older sisters, Dawn and Chris, and I would sneak up behind him while he sat in his easy chair in the den and play with his hair? He had a special way of spreading it around so that his head was pretty much covered. It wasn’t a comb-over as much as it was a “swirl” on top of his head, so if you caught him unaware, you could actually scoop up his hair and extend it straight up a good seven or eight inches. It was a wondrous sight. He would feign annoyance—“C’mon, you guys”—but it was always said with a laugh, so we never stopped doing it.
Did he remember all the piano recitals Dawn and Chris had participated in and those early morning or late afternoon horseback rides with Chris? How about those Christmas Day games of H-O-R-S-E on the driveway basketball “court” when we spent as much time retrieving the ball from the woods as we did shooting it? Everybody in the family played, which led to some marathon games, but there were so many laughs that nobody cared. How about that one round of golf we played at Augusta National? If you’re not into golf, Augusta National is the site of the Masters Tournament every year and is basically the Sistine Chapel of the sport. Did he remember how lucky we were to be playing golf on December 10, 1998, on a seventy-degree day, putting on the same greens that the greats of the game had putted on and walking the same fairways? (Okay, for those of you who are wondering, he beat me by a couple strokes, and we both broke a hundred.) So many blackberry moments in a life that spanned nearly ninety years.
As I finished with his right ear and the trimmer’s smooth hum was replaced by a labored groan, I stepped back not only to admire my handiwork but also to gaze at the man I had always wanted to be.
Back in the day (that’s athletespeak for “a long time ago”), it wasn’t always enough for a Major League Baseball player just to be a Major League Baseball player. Salaries weren’t that great “back in the day,” so Dad had a job during the off-season selling insurance for Northwestern Mutual. I had always wanted to be a baseball player like him, but in the winter, I had wanted to wear a long-sleeved white business shirt just like he would wear to work. My exact wish, my mom says, went like this: “I want to wear a white shirt where the sleeves go down like an insurance man.” When his playing days were through, Dad did not make a career of the insurance business. Baseball was in Big Guy’s blood. The Milwaukee Braves made him their public relations director and later a member of the broadcast team after the franchise moved to Atlanta in the mid-1960s. And that is when my education truly began. It was then my father became the greatest influence in my life.
Growing up as the son of a broadcaster certainly had its perks, no doubt about it. Not many kids can tag along with their dad to the ballpark, hang out around the batting cage, and listen to Hank Aaron ask you how your Little League team is doing. I also got the chance simply to watch Dad work. I don’t think he realized it at the time, but he was teaching me without ever actually trying. I watched his meticulous game preparation. He was always among the first to arrive at the park and never rushed through the pregame work that needed to be done. I listened to him interview players and managers and then sat in the radio booth during the game, watching and listening as he called the game. To this day, baseball fans who used to listen to him tell me, “I got to talk to your dad once, and he sounded just the same in person as he did on the radio.” No surprise there. Dad’s mantra was “Be yourself.” He never put on airs, never tried to create some persona. He was simply “good old Ernie” to viewers and listeners.
But his greatest teaching didn’t come on the field or in the booth. It came on the walk from the field to the press box. Fans who came early to watch batting practice would without fail beckon to my dad from fifty yards away. “Hey, Ernie!” would come the call from an unknown voice. After my father turned and made his way through the blue wooden seats of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium to come face-to-face with the owner of that unfamiliar voice, he would hear a familiar tale. “Man, we listen to you all the time. We came up here from Macon and just wanted to say hi.” And my dad would spend time with these strangers as if they were lifelong friends.
I have volumes of mental notes from meetings like that. My dad wasn’t lecturing me about respect; he was demonstrating it. He wasn’t preaching to me about humility; he was modeling it. During one particular broadcast, shortly after Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren were hired to be Dad’s partners, Skip came out of a commercial break and said, “We head to the top of the fourth, and to call it for you, here again is the voice of the Braves, Ernie Johnson.” Dad did the play-by-play for that half inning and then during the next set of commercials turned to Skip and said, “Hey, if it’s all right with you, Skip, you don’t need to introduce me that way. You and me and Pete—we’re all the voice of the Braves.” That’s just the way he was. Just being himself—Big Guy.
Those lessons learned at the ballpark during my teenage years would be a guiding light as my professional career began. The baseball player thing never quite panned out for me. I walked on as a freshman at the University of Georgia and was told to walk off as a sophomore. There aren’t many roster spots available for guys who are good with the glove but can’t hit their weight. That was me. So having spent so much time watching my dad work in broadcasting, I decided to try it too. From a radio station in Athens, Georgia, to TV jobs in Macon and Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Atlanta, and then eventually to Turner Broadcasting, I have heard my father’s voice.
• “Be yourself.”
• “Don’t think you’re special because of the job you have.”
• “Never think you’re bigger than the game.”
• “Treat everyone with respect.”
• “Be loyal.”
• “Once you’ve done your best, to heck with it.”
• “Take the high road.”
I need to spend a moment or two on that last one because to this day it remains very much a guidepost, especially in my professional career. No matter what line of work you’re in, there will be times when you’re criticized or when you feel a co-worker has done you wrong—maybe done something behind your back to elevate his or her value and at the same time diminish yours. Back in the 1970s, long before anybody thought of Twitter and its ability to deliver up-to-the-second opinions on everything from breaking news to celebrity gossip, there was fan mail. Grasp the concept. Actually write a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and then wonder if the intended recipient in fact received it and would have the inclination to respond. My dad got a ton of fan mail as an Atlanta Braves announcer and did his best to respond to all of it.
Sometimes I would sit in his office at the stadium hours before a game and read those letters from fans praising the quality of the Braves’ broadcasts, telling my dad how much they enjoyed listening to him. His fan mail was predominantly positive, but some letters were, how should I put it, not so nice, or downright rude, and Dad would make it a point to bring those home and let us read them. As a teenager in those days, I was outraged when a fan attacked my father in writing.
“Dad, you’ve gotta write this guy back and let him have it. You can’t let him get away with this stuff.”
Dad would just laugh it off.
“You’re never going to make everybody happy in this business, Ernst.” He rarely called me Ernie when I was growing up. It was usually Tiger or Ernst, an abbreviated form of my given name, Ernest. “Just take the high road, Ernst. Never get into a pissin’ fight with a skunk.”
Dad would respond to the bad fan mail as well as the good, and often when he answered one of those mean-spirited letters, it would be with a postcard that featured a photo of the Braves’ broadcast team. His handwritten reply would read, “Thanks for taking the time to write, and thanks for listening. Glad you’re a Braves fan.” I always wished I could be there to watch somebody who had unloaded on my father open that letter and realize that instead of having his fire returned in kind, he was dealing with a guy who lived on the high road. It was good teaching. Like every other on-air personality, I’ve taken more than my share of shots from viewers, especially in this social media age, and it always serves me well to remember my dad’s words.
Now, while baseball was something to which my father devoted his professional life, I learned even more from him away from the ballpark. I watched my dad being a dad—making the time, when there wasn’t much time to be had, to be with us. Even when baseball season had ended, as the Braves’ director of broadcasting, he still had to go to work, setting up the Braves’ network of radio stations around the Southeast that would carry the team’s broadcasts in the upcoming season. I think of the times he worked all day, drove a half hour or forty-five minutes home from downtown, and then turned right around and drove back downtown with me in the passenger seat so we could watch the Atlanta Hawks play basketball or the Atlanta Flames play hockey.
Now don’t get me wrong—it wasn’t all fun and games, and if you’re a parent, you know what I mean. The man could lay down the law. Sure, I got some spankings, but what I remember more are things like the lecture he gave me when he found out that his son, altar boy in the making, had not bothered to try to learn the Latin liturgy required at the time. It ranks as one of the great dressing-downs ever administered by a parent to his child. I woke up the next morning reciting, Kyrie Eleison and Et cum spiritu tuo as if I’d been born and raised in Vatican City!
My father knew how to nurture a friendship with me while at the same time leaving absolutely no doubt about our assigned roles. I could be his golfing buddy one day, and then later that week he could be judge and jury. I remember how excited a friend and I were about the prospect of driving from Atlanta to North Carolina one weekend for an outdoor concert that featured one of my favorite bands—Emerson, Lake and Palmer. We had it all worked out, and my friend’s parents had given their okay. Now all I needed was for mine to sign off on it. My mother wasn’t thrilled with the idea. She conjured up visions of Woodstock, drugs, and motorcycle gangs. She said my father would have the final say. He came home from the ballpark on Friday night as my friend and I waited, hoping we were just a matter of hours from hitting the road. Mom told him we were in the living room awaiting his verdict. As he started up the stairs to the bedroom, he poked his head into the living room and delivered a judgment that was controlled, remarkably swift, and left no room for rebuttal.
“I’m gonna be the horse’s ass here, fellas. You’re not going. Good night.”
While there was no masking my disappointment, deep down I did have an appreciation, even in that moment, for the kind of father I had. I always knew where I stood. And I knew he loved me. But, man, that would have been a great concert.
When I got married in 1982, there was no question who my best man would be. It would be the guy who had encouraged, corrected, and inspired me for twenty-six years. My gift to him on that August morning was a pewter beer mug engraved with six words: “My Best Man. My Best Friend.” And on another August morning twenty-nine years later, I stood at the lectern at St. Jude’s Catholic Church and tried to get through the toughest thing I’ll ever do with a microphone in front of me: eulogize my best friend. It was unscripted. I had jotted down a few notes as a road map of sorts for where I wanted to go. The blackberry story I’ve already described was the starting point, and the rest went as follows:
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 5, verses 22 through 23, it says the fruits of the Spirit are love and joy, peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And my dad lived that. Paul was writing the letter to believers in Jesus Christ, and these are the trademarks, the earmarks, of the Holy Spirit–led life. I can honestly say that my sisters, Chris and Dawn, and I thoroughly tested the outer reaches of the self-control and the gentleness. We tested the goodness and kindness and patience and peace. But never the faithfulness and never the love—never tested it.
Paul goes on in his second letter to Timothy, and at this point he knows his death is near. He says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing” [4:7–8].
I have no doubts where the right-hander is today. As my son Michael told me the other day . . . Michael has been zippin’ around in a wheelchair, sitting there in the second row . . . He said, “Poppy is in heaven with God and Jesus and the angels.” And he’s right. And I’m sure he’s heard the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And I’m sure he’s hearing some stories that are even better than the ones you’ve heard today. And I’d like to add just a couple to them.
God has given us so many moments that blessed us and blessed those who seek them. I call those blackberries. And those blackberry moments, if we get too tied up in what we’re doing in our jobs, in the game, in whatever it is, we miss them, and when we do, we’re missing out on so much.
My life has been filled with them. Our family’s been filled with them. There were some blackberries for my sister Chris. She said, “My dad was the perfect dad for a tomboy. He realized a fishing pole was just as good a fit as a Barbie doll for girls like me and taught me to fish when I was five years old. It was a hobby we shared for over fifty years. He let me take horseback riding lessons when I was twelve. We used to go riding in the fall when baseball season was over.” That was spreading blackberries with a fishing pole and horseback riding. And my sister Dawn was all about the wintertime. My dad, having grown up in Vermont, knew every trick that came with the two feet of snow we’d get in Milwaukee. Building these great snow caves, making snow angels, teaching us to ice-skate, putting these ridiculous-looking skis on the girls and letting them jump over the ridiculous little hump that he built back there. That was a blackberry.
I have remembered for the last few days so many great moments, but one in particular is when we were on vacation up in Vermont where Dad was from. We were at a farm up there. And there were a bunch of cousins and friends, maybe six or seven of us. And Dad would just throw us pop-ups out in this open field next to this barn near the house. You could just do that forever. But the other kids would start to lose interest, so six dwindled down to five, four, three, and then it was just me and one other guy. We said, “Maybe about ten steps this time. Throw one I can dive for.” Then it was just me and him.
I said, “Just one more.” He knew it wasn’t the last one. “Hey, just one more, Dad.”
Asking for just one more throw is what I’ve been feeling for the past few days. Just one more. One more day. One more hour. One more minute.
He had these habits and sayings around the house that became blackberries for us, things we’ve laughed about through the years. Anytime you were at dinner, it was, “Chew it up small.” “Dad, we’re having soup, c’mon.” “No horseplay,” he’d say. No horseplay at the table, no horseplay in the car, no horseplay that’s any fun. “Drive slow.” That was a big one, especially when we all became drivers. “Drive slow.” He got on my mom once back when the speed limit was 55 because she was going 56. “Hey, lead foot.”
He passed on his rare abilities in household repair to all of us. Mom likes to say he’s the only man in America who’s never been in a Home Depot. My dad’s answer to everything when it came to household repair was a can of three-in-one oil. And it didn’t matter what the problem was. Three-in-one oil did the trick. Squeaky hinges? Three-in-one. Storm damage? Three-in-one. He used it on my baseball glove. It was, “Here’s some three-in-one. Throw it in there.” Out of salad dressing? Three-in-one oil.
I like to call him a sportscaster with a speech impediment. He couldn’t say no. Charity golf tournaments, speaking engagements, you name it, he was there. Mom lost track of all the nights he was away from the house, away from the kids, speaking. “Dad’s not here tonight. He’s out speaking to a group of dads about spending time with their kids.”
Dad read about a kid named Ricky Haygood who got paralyzed a long time ago because of a football injury, and they became lifelong friends. Ricky lived in south Georgia. Nobody brought Dad’s attention to it. He just read it and fell in love with it. He had such a heart. And it didn’t matter—we would be on vacation or he’d be speaking in south Georgia, and it was always, “Hey, hold on, we’re going to stop by and see Ricky.” We’d be on our way back from Florida and we’d stop by to see Ricky. The Haygoods made Dad an honorary member of their family. It was that way with Kelly Hayes too in her wheelchair. I remember something Dad used to say on the radio: “I’m going to say hello to all the shut-ins. I know you can’t get to the ballpark, but we’re thinking about you.”
He was a constant source of encouragement, so proud of Chris and Dawn as they pursued the teaching profession. I went the less cerebral route, into television. But you know, when he and my mom were coming back from Florida once and I had just started my career in Macon, anchoring the news, they looked at their watches as they were driving up 75 and said, “Hey, you know what? It’s almost six o’clock. If we stop around here somewhere, we can watch the six o’clock news on channel 13 in Macon.” This is a true story. They pulled into a hotel down there around Warner Robins or Unadilla or somewhere that got WMAZ. It’s two minutes to six. They get out of their car, go inside, and tell the guy behind the desk they need a room for a half hour. I can just picture that clerk saying, “All right, Ernie.” He said, “No, I want to watch the news, really.”
The greatest thing I’ve ever done or will ever do in my career is work with my dad. They made that happen on SportSouth in the midnineties. To sit in that booth with a man who is respected by so many, loved by so many fans, it was the greatest thing anybody has ever done for my career. I want to thank Garland Simon—she’s here with Ned—and it was her idea to have us work together. For me, it was a chance to sit shoulder to shoulder with that legend and try not to embarrass him.
There are so many folks who don’t have that relationship with their dad, and I feel for you. I talk to guys who say, “I haven’t talked to my dad in years. He and I just don’t see eye to eye.” I never took for granted the blessing it was to have that kind of relationship with my dad. He was the best man in my wedding, my best friend. He simply taught me everything I needed to know about how to work, how to be a dad, how to be a husband. If you gave me eighty-seven years and sixty-three years married to the same woman, I’d take it.
There are certain blackberries in my dad’s life.
Those Marine Corps reunions. He was so proud. I remember him telling us all, “I won the war. We were losing when I went in. And when I came out, we had won.”
High school reunions he and Mom would go to in Brattleboro, Vermont. They’d have these parades, and Mom and Dad would be the grand marshals. I’m surprised you haven’t seen it; it was on cable. Those were huge blackberry moments.
Those vacations on Anna Maria Island, which we took as kids, which Mom and Dad continued to do. I’d see them out there in their beach chairs watching the sunset. Dad’s got one hand on a gin and tonic and the other in my mom’s hand.
The Wednesday night dinner club. I must have met five hundred people yesterday who were in that Wednesday night dinner club. That was a blackberry.
The workouts at the rehab center. I tried to hammer home to Dad, “Don’t tell me you’re going to rehab. It sounds very old. Tell me you’re going to go work out.” So he’d say, “Mom and I are going to go work out.” One of his buddies actually said, “Your dad and I used to pump iron.”
The chance he had to work at Enable of Georgia. Helping special-needs adults lead productive lives was huge for my dad, a huge blackberry for him.
For all of us the last few days, there was no greater blackberry than Embracing Hospice—the facility where he spent his last days, a place that is staffed 24/7 by absolute angels who know exactly what to say and when to say it. Their care and concern just floor you.
On behalf of our family—Mom Lois, Dawn and Rebecca, Chris and Jackie, Cheryl and Eric, Maggie, Michael and Ashley and Carmen and Allison, thank you for being here. I don’t know when we’ll see him again, but I know we will.
And while I don’t know exactly what heaven is going to be like, I hope there’s baseball. And I hope there are blackberries.