They called him the Steel Horse. From 2 June 1925, when he became a permanent member of the New York Yankees baseball team, until 2 May 1939, when he had to say goodbye, he never spent a game in the dugout. Tall, fast, accurate and a power hitter, he played 2130 consecutive games, despite often having broken fingers and a sore body that was accidentally struck by bouncing balls. He was a model of fortitude, endurance and indestructibility, but when, on 4 July 1939, in his home stadium, he gave one of the most famous speeches in American history to bid farewell to his sporting career and embarked on the torturous journey of living with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which for the next two years rapidly eroded his physical strength until his body betrayed him before he turned 38, he became a model of real life strength and dignity.
“Fans, you have been reading about my bad luck for the last two weeks. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been on baseball fields for 17 years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you, the fans,” Lou Gehrig began his simple but famous address with an effort to overcome his painful emotions.
He stood in the middle of the pitch one last time, only this time in front of a microphone and surrounded by his teammates, those of 1939 and many of 1927, when they were united so fiercely that the media called them “a line of killers”.
Even though there was a lot of misinformation circulating in the public domain, everyone attending the game against the Washington Senators, which was combined with a celebration of Lou Gehrig’s remarkable sporting career, knew that he had been struck down by a serious illness.
“She was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This type of disease involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system. Simply put, it is known as chronic poliomyelitis (poliomyelitis). Due to the nature of this condition, Mr Gehrig will no longer be able to take an active part as a baseball player …,” reported the Mayo Clinic, to which the baseball star had turned in the second half of June 1939 for an explanation as to why he had been losing his strength so rapidly of late.
Now, standing in the middle of the Yankees’ home stadium in the Bronx, listening to the speeches in his honour and placing the gifts he had received on the ground, it seemed as if he wanted to leave as soon as possible. The atmosphere was so charged with emotion that he could hardly breathe. At the age of 36, he stared at the ground, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, as 61,000 shocked fans on their feet chanted: “We want Lou!”.
He couldn’t. It was too painful. Too moved to say goodbye, the event’s emcee informed the crowd. The technicians were about to put away the microphone when Yankees manager Joe McCarthy approached the shy and withdrawn Lou. No one knows what he said to him as he put his hand on his back, but Lou swallowed his emotions and did what he had to do: he stepped in front of the microphone.
After explaining to the fans that despite his accident, he was the happiest man in the world, he slowly and breathlessly, but firmly and uprightly, explained why:
“When you look around … Wouldn’t you think you were privileged to be in the company of such great men as are standing in uniform on this baseball field today?” No recording of the speech has been preserved, but it was later compiled from newspaper reports, although two newspapers did not carry the same words. But Lou seems to have made a strong announcement:
“Clearly, I’m lucky.
Who wouldn’t consider it an honour to know [New York Yankees owner] Jacob Ruppert? And the founder of baseball’s greatest empire, [club CEO] Ed Barrow? That he spent six years with this wonderful little guy, [baseball star] Miller Huggins? And that he spent nine years with a great manager, this bright psychology student, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy?
Clearly, I’m lucky.
When they send you a gift from the New York Giants, the team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa – that’s something. When everyone from the groundskeepers and those guys in white remember you with trophies – that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes your side in an argument with her own daughter – that is something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives to give you an education and build your body – that is a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a pillar of strength and who has shown more courage than you ever dreamed existed – that is the best thing I know.
So I conclude by saying that I have been unlucky, but I have an extraordinary amount of everything worth living for.”
Like many fans in the stands, he didn’t know how close the end really was. When doctors told him he had ALS on 19 June 1939, his 36th birthday, they did not tell him the truth, as his wife had asked.
They did not tell him that the disease of the motor nerve cells in his cerebral cortex, brainstem and spinal cord would slowly cause his muscles to deteriorate until he could no longer breathe. He will become completely helpless and dependent on others, yet he will always be acutely aware of what is happening to him and around him, but he will not be able to talk about it because he will no longer be able to speak. He will be racked by pain, insomnia, uncontrollable crying and laughing and much more, but no one will be able to help him because there is no cure.
No, his wife Eleanor, a year younger than him, with whom he and Eleanor were a seemingly mismatched couple – she outgoing, talkative and spendthrift, he shy, withdrawn and downright miserly – refused to give up hope, so the doctors lied to him that he had a 50% chance of survival. As the press release also mentioned polio, the fans were also thinking more about the difficulties of their future life than about the end of it.
Mum’s son
He was adored, even though he was never a typical celebrity. “I’m not a headline guy”, he admitted, but the fact that he always lived in the shadow of someone, whether an older Baba Ruth or a younger Joe DiMaggio, never bothered him. He was simply too modest, hard-working, friendly and all the things that belong to a decent guy for that.
But he was not only a good boy, he was also his mother’s son. Christine Gehrig had an unhealthy attachment to him. Not only because he was the only one of her four children to survive his early childhood, but also because her husband Heinrich mostly walked around aimlessly.
So she more or less supported the family on her own, while her son played on the baseball fields of his native New York. As a passionate New York Giants fan, he also hit well, but rarely played because the sport was a waste of time for his mother. The only way to make a better life for himself than hers, she was convinced, was to be an entrepreneur, so he had to excel at school, although he also excelled in baseball and football in high school.
He was only 17 when he hit the ball so hard in front of 10,000 people that the Chicago Tribune’s sports pages wrote: “Gehrig’s hit would have made any major league proud, but it was the hit of a kid who hadn’t even started kicking yet.”
And a boy who was extremely poor. When Christine cooked and cleaned at the Columbia University fraternity house, he helped her serve and wash dishes. He earned a dollar at the butcher’s shop and another by working in the local grocery stores, but the family was always on the edge.
Mum’s dream of her son going to Columbia University only came true because he was a great athlete and was awarded a scholarship, but he almost didn’t get it.
Not yet out of college, the high school baseball star has already been approached by talent scout Arthur Irwin, saying that New York Giants manager John McGraw wants to meet him. It was a lie.
“I’ve got enough lousy players already, I don’t need another one,” McGraw dismissed the shy young man, but he didn’t break him. When Irwin offered to play for the Hartford Senators for a low fee, he accepted. He became a player called Lefty Gehrig or Lou Lewis.
But the Universe rules forbade playing for money. It was later accepted that Lou believed Arthur Irwin’s assurances that he was not breaking any rules, but Lou was too clever a boy not to question why he had to play under a false name, or to check what the rules really were.
He was probably tempted by a few dollars to help his mother, but his hope that everything would turn out well was soon over. He was caught and could have been suspended from the varsity league, and would have flown out of the school if his coach had not managed to negotiate a ban of only a year.
It wasn’t until 1923 that he stepped onto the pitch and immediately shone. Paul Krichell, the New York Yankees’ talent scout, spotted him immediately. He telephoned general manager Ed Barrow to tell him that he had found the new Babe Ruth, the Yankees’ biggest star at the time, and the not-yet-20-year-old Lou Gehrig was on his way to a meeting.
They immediately signed the contract. The salary was modest, $400 a month, and the $1500 bonus was not much, but for a boy who had lived in poverty all his life as a descendant of immigrants from Germany, it was a fortune.
The marginal fact that he has to quit his studies for a new “job” has not touched him in the slightest. He didn’t miss the books when it turned out that he wasn’t good enough for the Yankees after all and had to play for the Hartford Senators again in the minor leagues. But there he gained enough experience to become one of the Yankees in 1925.
But this was not exactly a cause for rejoicing. With a first baseman already in place and no room for a 22-year-old rookie on the field, he spent his time on the bench until coach Miller Huggins admitted to himself that his nine-man first line was a failure.
It was shaken so radically that only three of the old players were left, and Lou Gehrig finally got his chance: on 2 June 1925, he tried out for the first time as a first baseman for the New York Yankees.
“Don’t be scared. Nobody will shoot you if you miss a few,” the coach reassured him. “Scared” Lou finished the season as the 24th Most Valuable Player in Major League Baseball, the most popular league in the USA.
From there it was upwards, but at the cost of hard work and total dedication to baseball. In fact, not a day went by when I wasn’t hitting the ball. He trained constantly, kept fit, watched his food. Well, his mother made sure of that, and she was there for him at all the home games and often accompanied him on the road.
When his salary was raised from $8,000 to $25,000 in 1927, after an outstanding season, he bought a house for his parents in New Rochelle. It was “the proudest moment of my life”, he later said. Of course, he lived in it himself in his own room, because neither he nor his mother wanted to get divorced. Christina chased away every girl he showed an interest in, and the vivacious Eleanor Twitchell was a tough nut even for her.
Lou falls in love
The Chicago beauty was bright, eloquent and witty, and above all able to take care of herself, even though she grew up without a care in the world and was not affected by the fact that she lived with her parents, who were constantly on the front foot ever since her mother found out about her husband’s deception in the newspaper, but did not divorce him because he was too successful in business.
Eleanor skated, took lessons, played poker with the wives of famous Chicago mobsters, smoked when women didn’t smoke in public, drank “bathtubs of gin” and spent $100 every week, or $95 more than her pocket money.
She made up the difference by collecting bets that once brought her as much as 10,000 dollars to keep her locker full of banknotes. She was then in the habit of giving “copious tips”, but had to give it up when a period of debauchery was followed by a period of sobriety.
His father was exhausted by bad investments and new mistresses, but found solace in whisky. Years later, his daughter wittily wrote in her autobiography that “Twichells were ahead of their time. We were bankrupt before the Depression.”
The financial crash hit America at the end of 1929, and Eleanor’s heart problems meant that she had to adapt her lifestyle to the new situation months earlier. It turned out that her father’s blood was also running through her veins, and that he had made the family fortune, but in the end he had squandered it.
She quickly took a secretarial course and in March 1929, with a few charming lies, became secretary to the manager of the Chicago branch of the Saks Fifth Avenue chain. When she was promoted to personnel manager, she earned $30 every week for firing employees. When the economic crisis led to her own dismissal, she was immediately given a new secretarial job with a salary 50 percent higher than her previous one.
So she lived comfortably, not even thinking about Lou Gehrig, whom she met in July 1927, in her “wild days” and at a time when baseball fans were unanimously agreeing that the famous Babe Ruth had finally got an equal teammate.
In 1931, everyone already knew Lou Gehrig, so Eleanor didn’t hesitate when she was invited to a party where he was to come.
“I thought: tall, attractive, successful. All that, but, unluckily, terribly shy”, she later recalled her first impression of him that evening. “Then suddenly ‘shy’ became bold,” she continued, revealing how he had fallen for her among all the guests and “won her over”, as “shy” people do.
But no matter how he saw it, 28-year-old Lou Gehrig was not a man who forgot his duty: he had to be in bed at midnight, and he had to stick to it. He walked Eleanor home early, said goodnight and disappeared into the darkness.
Eleanor was a little shocked: on the one hand, he had been paying attention to her all evening, but on the other, he had shown no emotion. A week later, a present arrived in the post. There was no longer any doubt: Lou Gehrig had fallen in love.
So far, the love had only bubbled up in the letters that passed between them, but even that was enough to drive my mother crazy. Time passed and finally Lou had to make a decision: would he always be a mama’s boy or would he be a man with a wife of his own? He chose Eleanor, but of course it wasn’t without problems, although Eleanor also agreed to live with her future mother-in-law until they found their own place.
Christina sharpened her claws and provoked her unwanted future daughter-in-law to the point where she finally lost her nerve, “sent the whole thing to hell”, broke off the engagement and moved out just before she could get married at the end of the 1933 season.
Now Lou has finally straightened up and taken the reins of his life into his own hands: he has called the mayor of New Rochelle and invited him to the apartment Eleanor had previously arranged for them. “The floor-layers, the plumbers, the doorman, the policemen, the coatless bridegroom, the armoured bride and the servants in aprons, all stood motionless … as Mayor Otto recited the words that had turned this unexpected couple into husband and wife,” she later wrote.
On Saturday, when they were supposed to get married as planned, they had only a modest party. A furious Christina forced herself to go only at the last minute, even though her son had taken good care of her: he had put all his savings in her trust fund and was starting from scratch financially with his new wife.
Baba Ruth, formerly Lou’s best friend, was not at the wedding party. They had been feuding for some time and this was the only scandal in Lou Gehrig’s life that filled the pages of the newspapers.
Mum, the apple of contention
Although they were so different that they couldn’t have been more different, Babe and Lou hit it off as soon as Lou joined the Yankees. Babe was a debauched star and Lou was his “little brother” who could never threaten him because he was simply too shy to do so.
They trained together, spent their free time together. Gehrig tried to get Ruth excited about fishing, Ruth about sitting in bars. The former was responsible to the extreme and grateful for all that life had given him, the latter was cheerful and demanding, but they had something in common: they both loved Christina Gehrig.
Babe Ruth had not had a real family since he was a child, so the Gehrig home meant that much more to him. They spoke German among themselves, but he didn’t mind because he had German roots himself and he loved Christina’s German cooking so much.
“It was one of the few times I got a taste of home,” he later admitted. He gave Christina a dog as a thank-you gift and she named him Judge, as she also called Ruth, because his real name was George, which she spelled Jidge and made into the word judge or magistrate.
But all this family connection fell into disarray in 1932, or perhaps a year later, after Ruth married Claire in 1929. She was the mother of the teenage Julie, and he brought his then six-year-old adopted daughter Dorothy, who was probably his biological daughter, except that her mother was not his first wife.
In 1932 or 1933, Dorothy visited the Gehrig family and Christina thought out loud how badly she was dressed, then wondered why Claire dressed her daughter better than her husband. Dorothy complained at home, of course, and her stepmother complained to her husband, who decided to settle the matter.
According to one version, he sent an intermediary to tell Lou: “Don’t ever talk to me off the field again.” According to another, he approached him himself and said, “Your mother should mind her own devilish business.” But since Lou was his mother’s son, he didn’t want to hear anything against her, and the two former friends had a falling out and only “spoke” when they were in the media.
In 1937, or two years after his retirement, Babe Ruth, for example, publicly taunted Lou in an interview to give up “the illusion of the man of steel” and “learn to sit on the bench and rest” for once, because he would not be “paid for how many games he plays in a row”.
He announced that the next two years would decide Lou’s career. “When his legs give out, they will give out fast. The average baseball fan does not understand the power of a single spasm caused by a hard hit to the leg. If Lou continues to be on the field every day and never rests his legs, one severe cramp could send him straight to the bottom.”
Lou replied publicly, but without naming him. “I’m not stupid enough to play if I’m not good for the team. I have to be honest and say that I was never tired on the pitch. If it happened that I was hurting the team by trying to keep playing, I would go and at that moment it would all be over.” Two years later, that’s exactly what happened. At the time, some people thought Baba Ruth was a visionary, but unfortunately he was not.
But it wasn’t just Lou’s mum who made the arrows fly between the Yankees’ two biggest stars. Tensions also arose because of their differences. Ruth was gregarious and outspoken, Gehrig withdrawn and quiet. The former was a spendthrift, the latter was notoriously stingy. Ruth disliked the new manager, Joe McCarthy, but Lou liked him because he demanded hard work, strict discipline and strict adherence to the rules. Lou even wrote on the photo he gave him: “May I always be worthy of your friendship.”
Despite their differences, Lou and Babe were an extremely profitable duo. After the 1927 season ended, they went to Japan together for the first time to take part in exhibition matches.
They have each formed their own team. Ruth’s was called Bustin’ Babes and Gehrig’s Larrupin’ Lous, because Larrupin’ Lou was one of Lou’s many nicknames. The writers gave it to him, and it was quite obvious, because the adjective larruping, describing an extremely powerful punch, was so unusual even then that nobody used it except them.
So Lou and Babe cruised around Japan, playing and earning. More than 250,000 people watched their games, which put $30,000 in Ruth’s pocket and $10,000 in Gehrig’s – $2,000 more than his annual salary in 1927.
Good player, bad negotiator
It was also low because he always gratefully signed whatever they gave him to sign. In Japan, Babe brainwashed him that he had to negotiate with his employers for his salary. Before they parted ways at the end of the tour, he told him, “Don’t accept the first contract Ruppert offers you in the winter. Whatever he offers you, insist on $10,000 more. When the negotiations are over, see that you don’t settle for less than $30,000.”
Babe was a great negotiator, Lou didn’t even reach his ankles. When he got the contract, he didn’t sign it right away, as he had done before, but a few weeks later he got together with the owner of the club, Jacob Ruppert, and signed a three-year contract for $25,000 a year, or $5,000 less than Ruth had commanded.
But he did not know how much Lou was burdened by his former deprivation and how much he feared the future. Immediately after the wedding, when he handed over his bank book to her and left her in charge of his financially secure future, his wife went to Abercrombie & Fitch to buy him new clothes, because the ones he had been wearing were completely worn out.
In 1937, when baseball had already survived the economic crisis and his salary had been increased again, he and Eleanor moved into a new apartment. Lou nearly had a stroke when he came home and saw how she had gone to the trouble of decorating.
“Oh my God. You know very well that I can be sold at any time,” he reproached her, in his eternal fear of the future, when he was still invincible. But he wasn’t really angry or hurt, she knew that well.
When he was, he was silent. If he was unwell during a match, he was silent in the car on the way home. If they lost the game, he didn’t speak during dinner either. He also punished her with a so-called silent mass when he thought she had crossed the border, such as when they sailed back to Japan with Baba Ruth, Claire and her 18-year-old daughter Julia.
The women met on deck, and Claire invited Eleanor to their cabin, even though the families were formally at odds. Eleanor later recalled, “I stepped into their little world: a radiant Baba, sitting cross-legged like Buddha, surrounded by the luxury of caviar and champagne.” The scene seemed to her like an extravagant picnic she had to attend.
“I could never get enough caviar, but now I was suddenly staring at mountains of caviar. So I was ‘missing’ for two hours … One of the places Lou would never look for me was Baba Ruth’s cabin.”
When Lou realised that she hadn’t fallen overboard, but was enjoying herself with Ruth, he fell silent. Babe wanted to help her, but he came rushing into their cabin: “Ruth rushed in, all happy, with his arms outstretched in a ‘let’s be friends’ style, but my husband, who didn’t know how to forgive, turned his back on him.”
Some later suggested that Ruth had tried to seduce Eleanor that day, but it was too much even for him, in whose shadow Lou always felt comfortable. When Lou was once asked if it bothered him that he lived in it, he replied that it was so big and there was so much space underneath that he could easily spread his wings.
Eleanor was much less happy with her husband’s position. She wanted him to think like a celebrity and behave like a celebrity, instead of running away from his fame and fans. “I’m trying to raise him to a level where he knows he’s good,” she explained why she was almost pushing him to become rivals with Ruth.
During the same period, Maye, the wife of star Tony Lazzeri, found Eleanor a little too “excited about being Mrs Lou Gehrig”. She reportedly once said to her, “Listen, Eleanor. I’m only married to Tony Lazzeri. I have nothing to do with all these runs to home base and all the honors. I was just lucky to get him. The sooner you realise you’re not Lou Gehrig, the easier it will be.”
Eleanor was reportedly a little put off to see her husband being almost worshipped, but Maye admitted that she was “wonderful to Lou”. Among other things, she introduced him to the world of art and culture, so that by the end he was a true admirer of Wagner’s operas.
He was attracted to them because he understood German and his mother’s language was completely foreign to Eleanor, which was another reason why she never liked to visit her mother-in-law, who always spoke to her son in German. But she hired a German housekeeper to cook German food for her husband, because she did not know how to cook American food herself, let alone the kind of food his mother had spoiled him with.
What’s happening to me
So in 1938, Lou managed to come to spring training a few pounds overweight for the first time in his career. He immediately started working out like crazy and the scales soon showed the same amount as before, so that on the last day of May 1938, when he was due to play his 2,000th game, he was in perfect shape.
But Eleanor wanted him to let her go. A newspaper headline would have been a big hit if it had announced that Lou Gehrig’s career was over with 1999 consecutive games played, she teased him, but her husband was not ready to say goodbye to baseball.
So before the game, she somewhat angrily told him that they were going to hang “just a horseshoe of flowers around his neck” to celebrate the anniversary. He returned home with a horseshoe of flowers around his neck.
“I jumped on him, embraced him, wrestled with him and with the horseshoe of flowers, so that we fell to the ground together, hitting him and receiving blows, attacking wildly, both him and the horseshoe, screaming …. We tore the flowers off the frame, one after the other, and threw them at each other,” Eleanor described one of the moments when Lou was completely different from the controlled man fans knew him to be.
They then decided to finally hang up the baseball cap no later than his 36th birthday, or 19 June 1939, although Eleanor had already noticed something was wrong with her husband in the spring of 1938. His strength was failing, his thumb was injured by a ball, he refused to have his picture taken, and he was suffering from lumbago.
But these were not the first health problems for the Steel Horse. Four years earlier, on 29 June 1934, he had been the target of Ray White in an exhibition match, who had settled a score with an opponent by bouncing the ball straight into his head. Since helmets were not yet worn, he hit Lou with such force that he staggered to the ground like a dummy and lay unconscious for about five minutes. When he regained consciousness, he had to be helped off the field.
His skull did not burst, but he suffered a concussion. Nevertheless, he played again the next day, albeit on the other side of America and with such a lump on his head that he had to borrow a bigger cap and cut a hole in it to tie it on his head. Despite the pain, he hit three very difficult triples that day.
He was just as effective in the next seven matches, but a week later he could not move again due to lower back pain. The club reported that he was suffering from lumbago, and the same problem reportedly plagued him a year later and again in 1938.
No one has ever been able to explain what happened in 1935. Ellsworth Babe Dahlgren, just starting his career with the Boston Red Sox, later recounted how his youthful idol suddenly fell to the ground while running towards home base. The ground was slippery because of the rain and boys kept falling on it, but Lou was different.
He couldn’t pick himself up. He tried, but it was no use. He managed to get on all fours, but he was shaking so badly that he stumbled again. Dahlgren first wanted to help him, but then he remembered that he was green and this would not be appropriate.
“Something is very wrong with Lou Gehrig”, he must have thought, watching him struggle to his feet, although it is quite possible that he did not think of this until three years later, when everyone had noticed it in the spring of 1938.
Lou’s punch no longer had its old power. He tried a lighter bat and started hitting differently, but the result was always the same. He became slower and clumsier.
Some thought that the years were catching up with him, others put it down to health problems, and everyone found it immensely difficult to watch him struggle and fail and fail. By August, he had had enough. He stopped trying, but even a return to routine did not bear fruit.
At the end of the season, he agreed without protest to have his salary reduced from $39,000 to $36,000 a year, even though “Gehrig has not given up on Gehrig yet”. He had worked like mad all winter to get stronger, but Eleanor could not help noticing that things were slipping out of his hands, that his stride was different and that he was much more awkward in his skating than he had been. She sent him to the doctor, but he only found that he had gall bladder problems and prescribed a diet.
To the end
In the spring of 1939, everything was back to the way it was in the autumn of 1938. “He couldn’t catch the ball at first base. Sometimes he didn’t move his hands fast enough to protect himself,” reported Joe DiMaggio, the team’s outstanding rookie.
One afternoon, he got distracted in the changing room when he wanted to change his clothes. When he came to, he refused to let anyone help him up. The next day, while talking to his teammate Wes Ferrell, he suddenly fell on his back. “He was lying there all frowny. He couldn’t understand what was happening.”
Nobody understood what was happening, but nobody could lie to themselves that this was still the old Lou. Joe McCarthy didn’t send him to the dock, though. He couldn’t do that to him. He was the captain of his team and he was a Steel Horse who had played 2122 consecutive games.
A new season has begun. Lou played eight games and realised it was over. On the first of May 1939, he and Eleanor decided it was time to say goodbye. The next day, before a game against Detroit, he told the coach he wanted to stay on the bench. He had played 2130 consecutive games.
“Since the start of the season, I have only helped the team a little. It wouldn’t be fair to the guys, to Joe and to the baseball fans if I kept going,” he explained to the public. He wrote a letter to his wife the day after, on 3 May 1939:
“It was inevitable, even though I dreaded the day. All my thoughts were constantly on you. The question of how this would affect you and me was the most important for me, stronger than anything else. Just before the match I broke down because I was thinking about you so much. Not because I didn’t know that you were the stupidest partner, but because my feelings of inferiority overwhelmed me and made me wonder and debate whether I could ever be worthy of you.”
Eleanor never doubted it. She arranged for him to fly secretly to Rochester to the Mayo Clinic, then asked her stubborn husband if he would “do her a favour” and go for a check-up. He did her a favour. He was diagnosed on his 36th birthday.
Two weeks later, he publicly said goodbye to baseball and the fans, but for the rest of the 1939 season, he travelled with his team as a non-playing captain. When the season was over, he could have easily cashed in his name, as he was offered as much as $30,000 to have a restaurant named after him, for example, but he accepted New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s offer to become a parole officer for $5,700 a year. “I’m as proud as I can be. I’m up to my throat in criminal law books,” he explained to reporters.
But now that he was a city employee, he had to live within the city limits of New York, so he and Eleanor bought a house in the Bronx. From there, he drove to his office in lower Manhattan six times a week, going through files and talking to inmates about their parole. But soon he was no longer working alone. His new job also became Eleanor’s.
She drove him to the office when he could no longer drive himself. She typed letters on his instructions and signed on his behalf when he could no longer hold a pen. She turned pages in books when it became impossible for him to do so. She lit his cigarettes when he could no longer light a match.
Nevertheless, she asked the doctors not to tell him the truth. “It seems to me that we are all lying like crazy. I want him to keep a shred of hope. It is pointless to add psychological torture to the horror he is experiencing now,” she wrote in her letter, explaining why she was lying to her husband.
She later added that if Lou had known what was in store for them, she thought he might have “taken an extra pill” to make sure he was not a burden to her. But she made sure that there were no medical books in the house and that it was always full of friends, fun and laughter.
She hired a maid and an assistant, but neither was allowed in Lou’s room. When he was confined to bed, his mother-in-law, who had now moved in with them, brought him food. Her husband had died in 1934, but he had hardly had any contact with the family much earlier.
Lou slowly faded away and quietly passed away in his sleep on 2 June 1941, just two weeks before his 38th birthday. When they heard the news, Babe Ruth and his wife Claire were among the first to arrive at Eleanor’s house. Lou and Babe reconciled on 4 July 1939 after Lou’s famous speech, but reportedly did not reconnect.
Professional widow
In any case, Ruth came to the funeral in a family circle of about 100 mourners. Eleanor was “cool and eerily calm”, the Associated Press reported.
Outwardly, she remained so when she quarrelled with his parents over his inheritance and when she dutifully played the “professional widow”. She attended all Yankees home games, raised money for charities, opened events, went everywhere she was invited and spoke on behalf of her late husband, but “behind closed doors, in the long nights, I sometimes thought I would never find peace”.
In reality, it doesn’t. As the eternal Mrs Gehrig, she could not find a new love, and her friends were slowly leaving her, or perhaps she was leaving them. As long as her mother lived, they were companions, but when she died, she was left alone.
The older she got, the more she closed in on herself. Sometimes she didn’t leave her flat for weeks. She got drunk. Her only friend, George Pollack, a lawyer, once took her to hospital in a panic because she was unconscious due to her drunkenness. Another time, she nearly burnt to death because she set fire to a mattress with a cigarette butt.
She tortured herself until 6 March 1984, when she died 43 years after her husband on her 80th birthday. Only two pallbearers, her lawyer and his wife, went to her coffin.
She gave her entire inheritance to research into ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, although today some people question whether her husband really had it or whether it was his only diagnosis. Since he had some health problems before 1938, it is wondered whether he might (also) have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), although this is more common in boxers and American football players, who suffer many blows to the head during their sporting careers, which can cause brain damage.
So far, no one has proved that Lou Gehrig did indeed have CTE, but in any case, the man once known as the Steel Horse for his remarkable physical endurance bore the burden of being trapped in his failing body with the same steely dignity until the premature end.
