Lou Gehrig

Henry Louis Gehrig was born on June 19, 1903, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, the son of German immigrants Heinrich and Christina Gehrig ^[1]. He was the only one of four children in the family to survive past infancy. His father worked irregularly as a sheet metal worker and struggled with poor health, so the household depended heavily on his mother, who cooked and cleaned for other families to keep the family afloat ^[2].

Gehrig grew up speaking German at home and learned English at school. He was a strong, heavyset boy who helped his mother with her work and took odd jobs while attending public schools in Manhattan. At the High School of Commerce he played football and baseball, and in 1920 he attracted citywide attention when his school traveled to Chicago for an intercity championship game at Cubs Park, where the seventeen year old hit a grand slam that cleared the right field wall ^[1].

His athletic ability earned him a place at Columbia University, where his mother hoped he would study engineering. Gehrig enrolled in 1921 and played football as well as baseball for the Lions. Facts about this period of the Lou Gehrig biography often surprise readers: he pitched as well as hit for Columbia, and in one 1923 game he struck out seventeen batters ^[3].

Yankees scout Paul Krichell watched Gehrig hit for Columbia in the spring of 1923 and urged the club to sign him at once. Gehrig accepted a contract that included a signing bonus his family badly needed, left Columbia after his sophomore year, and joined the New York Yankees organization ^[2]. He made his major league debut on June 15, 1923, the same year the original Yankee Stadium opened, and spent parts of two seasons refining his game with Hartford of the Eastern League ^[1].

The turning point came on June 1, 1925, when he appeared as a pinch hitter. The next day manager Miller Huggins started him at first base in place of the veteran Wally Pipp, and Gehrig never surrendered the position. That June afternoon began his streak of 2,130 consecutive games, a run of durability that earned him the nickname the Iron Horse ^[4].

By 1926 he was an established regular, and in 1927 he emerged as a superstar on what many historians rate the greatest team ever assembled. Batting behind Babe Ruth in the famed Murderers' Row lineup, Gehrig hit .373 with 47 home runs and 175 runs batted in, and he was named the American League's most valuable player while Ruth was hitting his 60 home runs ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Lou Gehrig usually starts with the numbers, because few careers can match them. Over seventeen seasons, all with the Yankees, he batted .340 with 493 home runs and 1,995 runs batted in ^[3]. He drove in more than 150 runs in a season seven times, and his 185 runs batted in during 1931 remain the American League single season record ^[1]. He won the Triple Crown in 1934, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in, and he earned a second Most Valuable Player award in 1936 ^[3].

On June 3, 1932, against the Philadelphia Athletics, Gehrig became the first player in the twentieth century to hit four home runs in a single game ^[1]. He also hit 23 career grand slams, a major league record that stood until 2013, when Alex Rodriguez surpassed it ^[5].

Lou Gehrig achievements extended to the postseason. The Yankees won six World Series championships during his career, in 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937, and 1938, and Gehrig batted .361 across his 34 World Series games with 10 home runs ^[3]. In the 1928 sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals he hit four home runs in four games. He was selected for the All-Star Game in each of its first seven seasons, from 1933 through 1939 ^[4].

Away from the ballpark Gehrig was reserved, frugal, and devoted to his mother, with whom he lived well into adulthood. Teammates and writers described him as modest to a fault, a quiet counterpart to the flamboyant Ruth, with whom his relationship cooled into a long estrangement during the early 1930s ^[2].

In September 1933 he married Eleanor Twitchell, a Chicago woman he had met through mutual friends. Eleanor encouraged him to negotiate better contracts, broadened his social life, and managed much of his business affairs. The couple settled in New Rochelle, New York, and had no children ^[2]. After his death Eleanor spent decades protecting his memory and supporting research into the disease that killed him, and she collaborated on the 1976 memoir My Luke and I ^[6].

Gehrig also dabbled briefly in Hollywood, appearing as himself in promotional films and starring in the 1938 western Rawhide, a curiosity among Lou Gehrig facts that his admirers still enjoy ^[2].

Gehrig's decline arrived with alarming speed. His 1938 season, though respectable by ordinary standards, fell far below his own, and by the spring of 1939 his coordination and power had visibly deteriorated. After eight games of the 1939 season, batting just .143, he took himself out of the lineup on May 2 in Detroit, ending the consecutive games streak at 2,130 ^[4].

In June 1939 he traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where doctors diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive and incurable disease of the motor neurons. The diagnosis was announced on June 19, his thirty sixth birthday ^[7]. The illness became so closely associated with him that Americans still commonly call ALS Lou Gehrig's disease.

On July 4, 1939, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day between games of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium. Before more than 61,000 fans, with former Murderers' Row teammates gathered on the field, Gehrig delivered a short farewell in which he declared that despite his bad break he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth ^[1]. That December the Baseball Hall of Fame waived its waiting period and elected him immediately, and the Yankees retired his uniform number 4, the first number retired in major league history ^[4].

Gehrig refused to retreat from public life after the diagnosis. In October 1939 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed him to the New York City Parole Commission, and Gehrig took the work seriously, studying case files and interviewing parolees even as his condition worsened ^[2]. He moved with Eleanor to a house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and continued commuting to his office until walking and writing became impossible.

By the spring of 1941 he was largely confined to home, cared for by Eleanor and his mother. He died at his Riverdale home on June 2, 1941, seventeen days short of his thirty eighth birthday and sixteen years to the day after he had replaced Wally Pipp at first base ^[1]. Flags flew at half staff at ballparks around the country, and thousands of mourners filed past his casket. He was cremated and interred at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York ^[7].

Gehrig's consecutive games record endured until September 6, 1995, when Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles played his 2,131st straight game in a nationally televised celebration that renewed interest in the Iron Horse's career ^[5]. His statistical legacy has proved nearly as durable: he still ranks among the all time leaders in runs batted in, slugging percentage, and on base percentage, and his 23 grand slams stood atop the list for eight decades.

Hollywood cemented his place in American memory with The Pride of the Yankees, the 1942 film starring Gary Cooper that dramatized his life and farewell speech and received eleven Academy Award nominations ^[6]. A monument to Gehrig stands in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium, and his plaque in Cooperstown draws steady crowds at the National Baseball Hall of Fame ^[4].

His name now carries meaning far beyond sport. Advocacy groups invoke Lou Gehrig's disease in campaigns for ALS research funding, and in 2021 Major League Baseball established June 2, the anniversary of both the start of his streak and his death, as annual Lou Gehrig Day across the league ^[7]. For a quiet man who let his bat and his attendance record speak for him, that continuing usefulness to others may be the most fitting monument of all.