Lulu Harwell, the beloved widow of legendary Detroit Tigers play-by-play voice Ernie Harwell, died on Friday at the Fox Run Village senior development in Novi. She was 99.

Lulu Harwell's death was confirmed to the Free Press by Gary Spicer, a lawyer and longtime friend of the family.

Mrs. Harwell's death comes nearly nine years after Ernie's death in 2010, when Ernie died at 92 eight months to the day after learning he had cancer of the bile duct.

Born Lula Tankersley and named after her mother's sister, she grew up in Kentucky when the songs "Don't Bring Lulu" and "Lulu's Back in Town" were popular. "People in my school started calling me Lulu," she once said, "and it just stuck."

Affectionately known as "Miss Lulu" — out of Southern habit — Mrs. Harwell was the matriarch of the Tigers broadcast family for decades.

[ Mitch Albom: Ernie Harwell still inspires man who plays him ]

She met Ernie while he was attending Emory University in Atlanta and she was at Brenau College, which at the time was an all-female school in Gainesville, Ga.

"Emory, though, has changed since to include both sexes, and I'm glad it wasn't that way then," Lulu said in 1991. "I had a better chance. I had met one of Ernie's fraternity brothers and we went to a dance, where this fraternity brother introduced me to Ernie.

"And when our school had a dance a few weeks later, I invited Ernie instead of the other guy. After that, we just mostly corresponded, and when we were in school we saw each other quite a bit on weekends. Ernie waited for me to graduate the next year, and we got married the next summer."

Over the next seven decades, they stitched a family together through love and baseball.

Mrs. Harwell tended to their four children — and often her garden — while Ernie traveled the road. He started broadcasting with the Atlanta Crackers (1943; 1946-48), then the Brooklyn Dodgers (1948-49), N.Y. Giants (1950-53), Baltimore Orioles (1954-59) and, eventually, the Tigers (1960-91; 1993-2002).

“I know some announcers’ wives have a difficult time with this life,” Lulu Harwell said in 1993, sitting in a chair in the Harwells’ tidy Farmington Hills home.

“But I knew Ernie would be doing this from the day I married him. We used to walk in the parks in Atlanta — we didn’t own a car then — and he would say, ‘What do you want to hear? Baseball? Tennis? Golf?’ And I would pick and he would start announcing, right there, a make-believe game.”

Ernie spent 55 years broadcasting major league baseball, retiring in 2002 at 84. During 42 seasons with the Tigers, fans learned his signature calls by heart, including his calls to "Miss Lulu."

[ Audio: Ernie Harwell recites 'Voices of the Turtle' ]

While not a great fan of the game, Mrs. Harwell was a devoted follower of her husband's work: "I listen to Ernie every time I can get to a radio," she once said.

The Harwells began living at Fox Run in Novi in September 2003. They often went on long walks, and during spring baseball season and in Michigan summers, they walked at dusk to avoid the heat.

Mrs. Harwell was a great cook, according to Ernie, who was a fan of her cornmeal and almond-crusted tilapia. Her fried apples, burned in sugar and olive oil, were his weakness.

"She's the best thing that ever happened to me," Ernie once said.

Mitch Albom and Free Press archives contributed to this report.

Chris Thomas is the sports editor at the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at cdthomas@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @bychristhomas.