Luckiest man of all: 75 years ago, Lou Gehrig gave us a glimpse at courage in the face of death
Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day would turn out to be the most poignant and emotionally charged event in the history of New York sports, thanks largely to the 277 words the guest of honor spoke that day — deep and simple sentiments, straight from the heart of an immigrant’s son from Yorkville.
BY Wayne Coffey /
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS /
Saturday, June 28, 2014, 5:00 PM
His head bowed, Lou Gehrig prepares to step to the podium to deliver the speech that would best capture Yankee legend’s strength and courage as he declares himself ‘the luckiest man on the face of this earth’ despite knowing he didn’t have long to live, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), now best known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Morning broke hot for the holiday in the big city. The kid had his day all planned, a Fourth of July that featured no fireworks, just a farewell. He made his way across town from his apartment at 115th and Broadway, across the street from his school, Columbia University, and took the IRT line up to Yankee Stadium.
The Yankees were playing a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Ray Robinson spent 50 cents on a bleacher ticket and took a seat on a bench a few rows up from the 407 sign in rightcenter. For Robinson, a Columbia sophomore, the draw was not Joe McCarthy’s dominant Yankees (they were 51-16 going into the day), or the magnificent 24-year-old centerfielder, Joe DiMaggio, whose average would stand at .431 after a 4-for-8 day. Ray Robinson was there to honor his favorite Yankee of them all, Lou Gehrig, who wasn’t merely the greatest first baseman ever and a fellow Columbia Lion, or even the fabled, muscled Iron Horse with the just-ended consecutive-game streak of 2,130; he was Ray Robinson’s pen pal.
Years earlier, Robinson and a friend had written to Gehrig at his home in New Rochelle, asking if they might interview him for their school paper. Gehrig responded within days, in tidy penmanship, saying that would be fine.
“Just use this letter to come to the clubhouse,” Gehrig wrote.
Robinson and his friend showed up at the Stadium press gate, but the security guard wasn’t buying it, didn’t check with Gehrig and the boys waited there the entire game, until seeing Gehrig on the way out. Gehrig felt terrible — “Did you boys really wait all afternoon?” — and then pulled two crumpled tickets from his pocket and said they should come back and they would get the interview done.
The interview never came to fruition, but Robinson’s admiration for Henry Louis Gehrig only grew. He loved Gehrig’s lunchpail reliability, his understated excellence and his character, as sturdy as his thick-bodied physique. So how could he miss what was formally known as Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day? A day when Babe Ruth and Tony Lazzeri and Bob Meusel and even Wally Pipp, along with many other big-name Yankees, turned out to honor Gehrig, a day when for once Lou Gehrig had the spotlight all to himself, albeit for the worst possible reason?
Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day would turn out to be the most poignant and emotionally charged event in the history of New York sports, thanks largely to the 277 words the guest of honor spoke that day — deep and simple sentiments, straight from the heart of an immigrant’s son from Yorkville. The day was July 4, 1939, 75 years ago Friday, or 59 days before Germany invaded Poland to start World War II. Nobody in the crowd of almost 62,000 was more rapt in his attention then Robinson, who would go on to a long and prosperous career as a writer and editor, his books including “Iron Horse,” a biography of Lou Gehrig. Now 93 and living on the Upper East Side, Robinson stood in the Bronx mugginess that afternoon, taking note of the solemnity and dignity of the moment, the way almost all the men removed their hats, the way the Stadium almost felt as if it were an open-air church.
Ray Robinson bowed his head slightly when Lou Gehrig began to speak. The reverberation in the sound system made it a bit difficult to understand. Robinson listened hard. He compared the speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and said sometimes it requires the passage of years to fully appreciate the power of the moment, and of the words Gehrig spoke. It remains one of the most indelible moments of his life.
“I have no way of knowing if 60,000 people were crying, but I had tears in my eyes,” Ray Robinson said.
* * *
Independence Day in 1939 brought the usual complement of fireworks shows, choked roadways and overcrowded beaches — Coney Island reported a record 1 million visitors for the day — but it also brought an unmistakable sense of foreboding. Though 250,000 people celebrated the Fourth by visiting the World’s Fair in Queens, and were fascinated by its theme of “the world of tomorrow,” the world of the moment was considerably more worrisome. In Austria that day, word came that Nazi demonstrators had assaulted Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, the Archbishop of Vienna, cutting short his planned visits to rural regions. At his home in Hyde Park, N.Y., President Roosevelt urged the Senate to overcome the House embargo on weapons shipments so the U.S. could help nations who were at risk, even as Julius Streicher, one of the Third Reich’s most rabid anti-Semites, delivered a boilerplate rant of a speech about Jews hungering for war and being at the root of all evil. The palpable hatred was enough to compel Mahatma Gandhi to write a peace-seeking letter to Adolf Hitler not even three weeks later:
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?
In the corner of the world at 161st St. and River Avenue, however, the overarching concern that day was much more parochial. It was for the health of Lou Gehrig, the diffident, dimpled star who was the greatest supporting actor in baseball annals, Mr. Understatement who hit behind Mr. Overstatement, the monochromatic wingman to the technicolored Bambino. Ruth walloped the alleged Called Shot against Charlie Root in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series.
Gehrig followed with a home run of his own. Never have two home runs told so much about the men who hit them.
“I’m not a headline guy,” Gehrig once said. “… As long as I was following (Babe) Ruth to the plate I could have stood on my head and no one would have known the difference.”
For all his vaunted strength, the 6-0, 200-pound Gehrig knew something was wrong during the 1938 season, when he found himself sapped of energy and explosiveness. Still, he had no solid diagnosis until mid-June, 1939, when he underwent a series of tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The tests came just five weeks after the Yankees visited Detroit. Lou Gehrig had gone into the Yankee lineup on June 1, 1925, pinch-hitting for Pee Wee Wanninger, then starting the next day at first base for the slumping, headache-ridden Wally Pipp. He would play every game for the next 15 seasons, until May 2, 1939.
I’m benching myself, Joe — for the good of the team,” Gehrig told Joe McCarthy, his manager. McCarthy, who loved Gehrig like a son, grudgingly went along and put Babe Dahlgren in the lineup against the Tigers. Lou Gehrig never played baseball again.
* * *
As Gehrig’s special day approached at the Stadium, the particulars of his condition were a mystery to all but those closest to him. At the time, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — a disease not yet named after him — was all but unheard of to the general public. Most press accounts of the day said that Gehrig was suffering from a form of “infantile paralysis.” There was virtually no awareness that Gehrig had a fatal neurological disease, one that attacks the motor nerves along the spinal cord, as author Jonathan Eig writes in “Luckiest Man,” his splendid biography of Gehrig, “shutting down the body’s functions one by one, like a night watchman switching off the factory-floor lights.”
Still, fans knew Gehrig was seriously ill, and that made his day of appreciation that much more meaningful. The ceremony took a little more than 40 minutes, after the Yankees lost the opener to the Senators, 3-2. The current Yankees lined up along the third-base side of the pathway between the mound and the plate, the Senators on the first-base side. The 1927 Yankees and other guests were clustered around home plate, among them Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and Postmaster General James Farley, both of whom spoke before Babe Ruth took a turn at the knot of microphones at home plate. Soon the gifts for Gehrig began to pile up like Sunday newspapers: a fishing pole from his teammates; a framed piece of parchment from the Senators with the words “Don’t Quit,” a fruit bowl and silver candlesticks from the archrival New York Giants, and an assortment of other silver items from the press, Yankee management, the concessionaires.
Gehrig stood and shifted from side to side, his head down, twisting his Yankee cap in his hands, fighting tears and looking as if he wished he were invisible.
“I’d give a month’s pay to get out of this,” he told McCarthy beforehand, according to Eig.
The tributes continued. Gehrig pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes and nose, his pinstriped flannels hitched up high, his uniform top blousing over his shrinking upper body. McCarthy handed Gehrig a trophy with an eagle on top, and a poem that Yankee players asked John Kieran of the New York Times to pen for Gehrig. Now things were winding down. The master of ceremonies, Sid Mercer, stood before the microphones, waiting to see if Gehrig wanted to step forward.
“We want Lou! We want Lou!” the crowd chanted.
Gehrig did not move. He had apparently prepared some remarks but was too overcome to speak. The festivities were all but over, the workers ready to dismantle the microphones and roll up the cables. Gehrig was still not budging, his head still fixed on the ground, before McCarthy walked over to him. The manager whispered something in his ear. Gehrig seemed to nod.
Finally, Lou Gehrig edged towards the microphones.
Lou Gehrig biographer Ray Robinson, sitting in his Upper East Side home, was in the stands at Yankee Stadium 75 years ago when The Iron Horse — dying of a neuroloigcal disease that now bares his name — said goodbye to Yankee fans.
“The Stadium was so quiet,” Ray Robinson said.
Now Lou Gehrig, the Yankee star whose greatness seemed forever to be taken for granted, was alone at the microphone. He looked hesitant, as if he wondered if he could really get through this. The fans were chanting for him. He owed them this, didn’t he?
Lou Gehrig began to speak, in his thoroughly New York accent.
“Fans,” he began, “for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
He went on. He spoke about all the things he had to to be grateful for, beginning with baseball and ending with his parents and his wife, Eleanor.
“So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for,” he said.
The fans, standing, roared in appreciation. The marching band on the field played a German folk song, “Du Du Liegst Mir im Herzen” (You are Always In My Heart). Babe Ruth stepped forward and hugged Gehrig, sending the photographers into a frenzy.
Father Thomas Pipp, a Jesuit prieset in St. Paul., Minn. and grandson of Wally Pipp, the first baseman Gehrig replaced in the Yankee lineup, was not even born when Gehrig spoke, but was moved by it nonetheless.
“Perhaps that is because he showed those present what is best in the human being,” Pipp said. “Though suffering from a fatal disease, he was not bitter, depressed, or turned in on himself, but grateful for his life. And gratitude is fundamental in any kind of spiritual life: to see the goodness in spite of all the difficulties we confront, to say that ‘this life is good.’”
Lou Gehrig returned to the dugout for Game 2. The Yankees won, 11-1. Afterward, Lou Gehrig walked out of the Stadium with his best friend and roommate, Bill Dickey.
On Wednesday the Yankees launch MLB’s recognition of the 75th anniversary of Lou Gehrig’s Luckiest Man speech and the first 18,000 fans will receive a Lou Gehrig bobblehead.
“I am going to remember this day for a long time,” Lou Gehrig said.
* * *
The Speech - July 4, 1939
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?
Sure I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy?
Sure I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift — that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies — that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter — that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body — it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed — that’s the finest I know.
So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.
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