Lou Gehrig Read online

  On July 4th, 1939, there took place the most tragic and touching scene ever enacted on a baseball diamond—the funeral services for Louis Henry Gehrig.

  Lou Gehrig attended them in person.

  Gehrig Day, as it was called, was a gesture of love and appreciation on the part of everyone concerned, a spontaneous reaching out to a man who had been good and kind and decent, to thank him for having been so.

  It was a day of sparkling sunshine and cheers, bunting and bands, a great and warm hearted crowd, fine gifts and fine speeches.

  But only much, much later, seen in complete and true perspective do we feel the full and bitter impact of its tragic implications.

  The suggestion that there be a Gehrig Appreciation Day began in the sports column of Bill Corum, who credits the idea to the telephone call of one Bill Hirsch.

  The Journal took up the idea. Other columnists concurred. It was suggested that the All Star game be the occasion. But the Yankee management—or rather, Ed Barrow, a burly bear of a man with the kindest of hearts, did not want to share Gehrig’s due with any other event. Gehrig Appreciation Day was set to take place between games of a Fourth of July double header.

  The most touching conception of the day was the coming from the ends of the country of Gehrig’s former team mates, the famous Murderer’s Row, the powerful Yankees of 1927.

  Bob Meusel, balding Benny Bengough, Gehrig’s first pal, gray-eyed Mark Koenig, and dead-panned Poosh-’em-op Tony Lazzeri, the clown of the team, tall skinny Joe Dugan, and even skinnier and taller Pipp the Pickler, the Yankee first baseman whose place Gehrig had taken so many years ago, all came.

  Little Everett Scott turned up, the man whose endurance record Gehrig had conquered so decisively, and the great pitching staff of yesterdays, Herb Pennock, from his Pennsylvania fox farm, Waite Hoyt from the broadcasting booths. George Pipgras was there too, but wearing the blue uniform of an umpire. Earl Combs and Art Fletcher still were in Yankee uniforms as coaches.

  And finally there was George Herman Ruth. The Babe and Lou hadn’t got along very well the last years they played together. Baseball writers knew that they weren’t speaking. And after Babe had retired he had criticized Lou’s long playing record in a newspaper interview. The original feud was a childish affair which began before Lou’s marriage, women instigated, and which gains nothing in dignity or sense in re-telling. Suffice it to say that the Babe was there on that Requiem Day, with an arm around Lou and a whispered pleasantry that came at a time when Gehrig was very near to collapse from the emotions that turmoiled within him. It needed Babe’s Rabelasian nonsense to make him smile.

  Present too were Lou’s more recent team mates, the Bronx Bombers under Joe McCarthy, and the Washington Senators who were the opponents of the Yankees for the Fourth of July double header.

  Sid Mercer, president of the Baseball Writers Association, was the master of ceremonies.

  The principal speakers were Jim Farley, Postmaster General, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Sixty-one thousand, eight hundred and eight were in the stands. It was what was known as a Great Day.

  To Lou Gehrig, it was goodbye to everything that he had known and loved.

  It was goodbye to baseball, to the big steel and concrete stadium where he had served so long, to the neat green diamond with the smooth dirt paths cut by the sharp steel baseball cleats, to the towering stands with the waving pennons, the crowds, their roar and their color.

  Goodbye too, to his colleagues, the friends and the men with whom he had played for fourteen years, the happy, friendly men who had been his shipmates through life.

  In the stands was all that he held dear, his family, mother and father seated in a box, unaware of his doom, his wife seated in another. Lifelong friends were in the boxes, cheering and applauding. And as Lou looked out over them gathered there in his honor, he knew he was seeing them thus for the last time.

  For he was the living dead, and this was his funeral.

  Gifts piled up for him, a silver service, smoking sets, writing sets, fishing tackle. They were from the Yankees, from his great rivals, the Giants, from the baseball writers and even from the ushers in the stadium and the peanut boys. The objects were a mockery, because he could no longer possess them. But the warmth of the feeling that prompted their purchase and presentation, melted the iron reserve in him and broke him down.

  It was so human, so great, so heroic that he should have wept there in public before the sixty-eight odd thousand, not for pity of his situation, or for the beauty and sweetness of the world he would soon depart, but because the boy who all his life had convinced himself that he had no worth, that he did not matter and never would, understood on this day, for the first time perhaps, how much people loved him.

  Not only his immediate family and his adored wife, his personal friends and acquaintances, but huge masses of plain, simple people, ordinary human beings with whom he felt a deep kinship, were broadcasting their warmth to him, sending it out through the air to the figure on the field below them. He was the lone receiving station. To tune in suddenly upon so much love was nearly too much for him.

  The speeches were ended at last, the gifts given, and the stadium rocked as wave after wave of cheers rolled down from the stands, huge combers of sound, and broke over him. For a little while as he stood at the microphones of the sound cameras and broadcasting companies, it seemed as though they might engulf him. He stood with his head bowed to the tumult—the tumult within and without, and pressed a handkerchief to his eyes to hold back the tears.

  But when at last, encouraged by his friend Ed Barrow, he faced the instruments and the people behind them, the noise stopped abruptly. The echo barked once and was silent too. Everyone waited for what he would say. With a curled finger he dashed the tears that would not stay back from his eyes, lifted his head and brought his obsequies to the heart-breaking, never-to-be-forgotten finish, when he spoke his epitaph.…

  “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.…”

  The clangy, iron echo of the Yankee stadium, picked up the sentence that poured from the loud speakers and hurled it forth into the world.… “The luckiest man on the face of the earth … luckiest man on the face of the earth … luckiest man …”

  16

  PASS TO VALHALLA

  There is an epilogue, because although the tale of Lou Gehrig—American Hero, really ended above, he lived for quite a while longer, and perhaps the simple story of how he lived what time was left to him and what he did, is the most heroic deed of all, the bravest, most gallant and most self-sacrificing.

  For life is not the work of a master dramatist. The hero does not vanish in a cloud of fire at the supreme moment. No, life must be lived on until the curtain falls of its own accord, and that calls for the greatest heroism of all … the little things, the breaking smile, the cheery word, the laugh that covers pain, the light phrase that denies hopelessness and a sinking heart.

  Almost two more years had to pass before the end came to Henry Louis Gehrig, and Eleanor says that during that time he was always gay and always laughing, cheerful, interested in everything, impatient only of unasked-for sympathy … in short he lived his daily life.

  But he did more. And here we come to the final bit of heroism. With his doom sealed and his parting from the woman who had given him the only real happiness he had ever known, inevitable, he chose to spend his last days, not in one final feverish attempt to suck from life in two years all that he might have had in forty, but in work and service.

  Mayor LaGuardia appointed him a City Parole Commissioner. The appointment was for a term of ten years, and one wonders whether the kindly Mayor did not know too of Gehrig’s short remaining shrift on earth, and made the long term to encourage him.

  And so for the next months, as long as he was able to walk even with the assistance of others, Gehrig went daily to his office and did his work. He listened to
cases, he studied them, he brought to it his thoroughness and his innate kindness and understanding.

  He sat at his desk, even when no longer able to move his arms. When he wanted a cigarette, his wife or his secretary lit it for him and put it between his lips, removed it to shake the ash, replaced it again.

  He listened to thief, vagabond, narcotic addict, pimp and prostitute. When there was help to be given, he gave it unstintingly of what strength there was left to him. He would not give in. He would not give up. He did not give up.

  On June 2, 1941, Lou Gehrig died in the arms of his wife in their home in Larchmont.

  But the final beauty of his story is that in a way, the tenacious man who had overcome every obstacle that ever faced him, overcame that last one too.

  As close as one may come to attaining immortality in the hearts and minds of men, Gehrig achieved the life everlasting in that he left behind a vital part of himself. Men have tried to express it in the perpetuating of his playing number “4” and his locker in the Yankee Stadium, in the renaming of Concourse Plaza—“Gehrig Plaza,” in the dedication of the late World Series to him, in the screening by Samuel Goldwyn of a picture, patterned after his life.

  But the light that really shines like a friendly, beckoning beacon, is that of the spirit of a clean, honest, decent, kindly fellow gleaming through the gloom and darkness of a dispirited, disillusioned world.

  It is less the man our weary souls have canonized, so much as the things for which he stood for and by which he lived and died. And for the seeing of those, we must all of us, great and small, be very grateful.

  About the Author

  Paul Gallico (1897–1976) began his writing career at the New York Daily News, where he became one of the best-known sports journalists in America. Over the course of his fourteen years as a daily columnist and editor, he took a knockout punch from Jack Dempsey, caught Dizzy Dean’s fastball, teed off against Bobby Jones, and founded the Golden Gloves boxing tournament. In 1937, at the height of his fame, Gallico quit his column to devote himself to writing fiction. He went on to publish more than forty books for adults and children, including The Snow Goose (1941) and The Poseidon Adventure (1969), the basis for the blockbuster movie of the same name. Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees (1942), a biography of the baseball icon, inspired the Academy Award–nominated film starring Gary Cooper.

  Born in New York City to an Italian father and an Austrian mother, Gallico left the United States in 1950 and lived the rest of his life abroad, with stops in England, Monaco, and Antibes, France, among numerous other locales.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1942 by Paul Gallico

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0949-2

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Contents

  1. The Time, the Place—and the Man

  2. Youth of a Hero

  3. The Making of an Athlete

  4. “There Was a Man Named Ruth”

  5. A Career Ended and Begun

  6. Those Fabulous Yankees

  7. The Bitter Impatient Days of Trial

  8. Lou and Babe and the Yanks—Onwards and Upwards

  9. “Strike Out You Big Goof”—It Was Love!

  10. The Course and the Obstacle

  11. Happily Ever After

  12. The Full Measure of Success

  13. “What’s the Matter with Gehrig?”

  14. Portrait of Courage

  15. “The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth”

  16. Pass to Valhalla

  About the Author

  Copyright Page