Lucky Lou

(New York Daily News)

It was July 4, 1939. It was a hot, muggy day in New York City.

At Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, the Washington Senators (today, the Minnesota Twins) were in for a holiday doubleheader, as was baseball tradition at the time.

The Senators, limping through another bad season in which they'd finish 65-87, beat the Yankees in the first game, 3-2. Dutch Leonard, on his way to his best season, pitched a six-hitter.

Officially, 61,808 fans rattled the girders of the grand old ballpark.

The games were an afterthought. The crowd was there for the ceremony between games.

It was Lou Gehrig Day.

Lou -- the Iron Horse -- was dying, but not everyone knew that. He had been to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota after a dreadful start to the '39 season. He knew he didn't feel right. His power was gone.

He soon found out that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Soon to be known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease."

Lou took himself out of the lineup in Detroit on May 2. For the first time since 1925, Gehrig's name would not play. His consecutive game playing streak was over at 2,130 games. The record would stand until 1995.

The thinking was that Gehrig was done playing ball, but then what? Nobody seemed to understand that ALS was -- and still is -- fatal.

Few knew the cause or that it wasn't contagious. Some said Lou was so dedicated to his streak that he brought the disease upon himself. One writer called him "soft and washed up."

Larrapin' Lou was as popular as anyone in sports due to there not being a bad word to say about him. Humble, though a penny-pincher, he doted on his wife and his mother, who detested each other.

In Richard Sandomir's book The Pride of the Yankees, he writes that Lou and his wife, Eleanor,  worked on a speech, however, no proof has ever come of that. Eleanor was known to keep scrapbooks of his exploits. No copy of a speech exists.

Between games at Yankee Stadium, the Senators and Yankees were joined by members of the 1927 Yankees and other guests. The famed Murderer's Row had reassembled with Babe Ruth front and center. Ruth was one of several to speak that day, with sportswriter Sid Mercer serving as the emcee.

Gifts were distributed to Gehrig: a fishing rod, a framed parchment that said "DON'T QUIT" on it, a ring, bowls, and other trinkets.

Gehrig, head bowed and nearly mute for the entire ceremony, motioned to Mercer that he would not be speaking. The crowd chanted, "We want Lou."

It took Yankees manager Joe McCarthy to get Lou to approach the microphone. Guiding him in a fatherly way, whispering a word into Lou's ear, the manager was able to convince him to address the crowd.

Eventually, Yankee Stadium went dead silent.

Sadly, there is no complete transcript of the speech. There are only bits of movie reels with just four lines intact (marked in bold). What I've placed below is the work of Jonathan Eig, in his book Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig. To this day, it's still the finest biography I've ever read.

Gehrig began to speak the Gettysburg Address of sports.


For the past two weeks, you have been reading about a bad break. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

When you look around, would you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such fine-looking men as are standing uniform in the ballpark today?

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 such a wonderful little fellow as Miller Huggins? To have spent the next nine years with that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Who wouldn't feel honored to room with such a grand guy as Bill Dickey?

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 office staff and writers and old-timers and players and concessionaires all remember you with trophies -- that's something.

When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles against her own daughter -- that's something.

When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body -- it's a blessing. When you have a wife who 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 might have been given a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.

Thank you.

Ruth hugged his former teammate and broke the tension. Lou's famous dimples finally appeared as he smiled.

"I saw strong men weep this afternoon," Shirley Povich wrote in The Washington Post.

Lou would stay with the Yankees through the end of 1939, as the Bombers steamrolled through the American League and quickly dispatched the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series.

He would work for Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia as a parole officer until he was too weak. He died on June 2, 1941, seventeen days shy of his 38th birthday.

The Yankees carried on in the second game and beat the Senators 11-1.

Eighty years ago today.