WILL OF IRON : Gehrig’s Fight With ALS Honored 50 Years Later

No one could say exactly when Lou Gehrig began to die.

But after his death in 1941, former teammates realized that they had watched a seemingly indestructible man, the guy they had called the Iron Horse, die slowly--hour by hour, day by day.

Finally, they understood his poor 1938 season, when his batting average fell off 56 points. And also the countless little signs of physical deterioration.

His wife spoke of her husband beginning to drop things in the kitchen, tripping over curbs and uncharacteristically falling at ice skating rinks.

At first, Eleanor Gehrig laughed. Then she began to look away. Eventually, she went to the New York public library and looked up amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The Yankee trainer, Pete Sheehy, remembered an incident in the locker room. After a game, Gehrig, while struggling to put on his pants, fell down. He rose to his feet with some difficulty.

His teammates looked away.

The Yankee catcher, Bill Dickey, remembered sharing a diner car table on a train trip early in the 1939 season. Gehrig, who had once hit baseballs 500 feet, was unable to unscrew a ketchup bottle cap.

Neither man spoke.

The Yankees’ young star, Joe DiMaggio, recalled a batting practice session during spring training of 1939 when Gehrig swung at and missed 19 consecutive pitches.

No one spoke.

Fifty baseball seasons ago, on May 2, 1939, Gehrig took himself out of the Yankee lineup, ending his record playing streak at 2,130 games. It’s one of baseball’s treasured achievements.

The disease that killed Lou Gehrig, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also survives. In America, an average 13 people a day are diagnosed as having what is commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

This one is tougher than cancer. No one survives ALS. The average life expectancy after diagnosis is three to five years.

ALS is characterized by a degeneration of a select group of nerve cells and pathways in the brain and spinal cord, leading to progressive paralysis of the muscles.

According to the ALS Assn., the disease is not contagious nor is it rare. Statistically, it will kill one of every 1,000 Americans over the age of 20.

This summer, major league baseball and the ALS Assn. are conducting “Lou Gehrig Nights” at every major league city, commemorating the man and his 15-year career with the Yankees.

The Dodgers have set aside tonight’s game against the Houston Astros so that the club and the ALS Assn. can honor Gehrig’s memory in pregame ceremonies.

Before his amazing consecutive games streak reached four digits, they called him Columbia Lou, and Larrupin’ Lou. But after the mid- and late-1930s, he was the Iron Horse.

He was a hunk, 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, with massive hands and arms. Jim Murray once called him Gibraltar on spikes.

It has been half a century, and no one has come close to Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played. In fact, the man Gehrig passed in 1933 to break the record, Everett Scott, is still second with 1,307 games.

Only six players have ever played in 1,000 consecutive games, most recently Cal Ripken Jr.

Steve Garvey, whose 1,207 consecutive games played is third on the list, talked in 1978 about Gehrig, when his own streak had reached 510 games.

“I don’t think anyone is ever going to break that record,” he said.

“Forgetting for a moment the travel today, the chances of injury and all the other factors stacked against you, just imagine the media pressure of a guy who reaches, say, 1,800 or 1,900 games. I mean, a guy would be crawling by the time he got to 2,130.”

Even more amazing, Gehrig, from 1925 through 1936, also never missed a spring training game. Broken fingers, broken toes, colds, flu, sore back, headaches . . . he was the Iron Horse.

The streak began June 1, 1925, when Gehrig started at first base for Wally Pipp, who took the day off because of a headache. It ended May 2, 1939, when Gehrig, who was hitting .143, benched himself. Babe Dahlgren replaced him at first base.

But in that 15-season stretch, Gehrig did more than show up every day:

--He has another mark in the record book that also has never been approached--grand slams. He cleared loaded bases 23 times. Willie McCovey, with 18, is second. The only active player within shouting distance is Eddie Murray, with 14.

--Gehrig hit 493 home runs, 15th on the all-time list.

--His slugging percentage, .632, is still third on the list, behind Babe Ruth at .690 and Ted Williams at .634.

--Only 18 players have higher lifetime batting averages than his .340.

--With 1,990, he’s still third on the RBI list, behind Hank Aaron with 2,297 and Ruth with 2,204. And he’s still the American League single-season RBI leader, with 184 in 1931.

--He had multiple-home run games 43 times.

--He never hit 50 home runs in a season, but he hit 49 twice and had 40 or more five times.

His greatest game? Probably June 3, 1932, at Philadelphia. By the end of the seventh inning, Gehrig had four home runs--the first player in the 20th Century to hit four in a game. Only eight players have hit four in a nine-inning game.

For most of his career, he played in the considerable shadow of Ruth. And even in the late 1930s, DiMaggio began to eclipse Gehrig.

Curiously, Gehrig’s life and achievements were frequently in someone else’s shadow.

On the day he hit four home runs, for example, John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants for 30 years, announced his retirement.

In 1927, when Ruth hit 60 home runs and was paid $70,000, Gehrig hit 47 and made $7,500.

His highest Yankee salary was $39,000, in 1938. In 1930 and ‘31, when he drove in 174 and 184 runs, the Yankees paid him $25,000.

Gehrig was born June 19, 1903, in an apartment above Second Avenue and 102nd Street in New York, to poor, German-speaking immigrant parents. The Gehrigs had two other children but both died in infancy.

Heinrich Gehrig, was an ornamental metal worker, when he worked. Much of the time, though, he enjoyed drinking beer and playing pinochle with German-American men at the neighborhood saloon.

Christina Gehrig was a domestic and a cook who took in washing. Somehow, she put food on the Gehrig family table. One of her sturdy son’s boyhood duties was to catch eels in the Hudson River so she could pickle them.

Gehrig, always big for his size growing up, became a soccer, football and baseball star at New York’s High School of Commerce. At his mother’s insistence, he prepared to study engineering at Columbia University.

While her son was in high school, Gehrig’s mother became a cook-housekeeper at Columbia’s Sigma Nu fraternity house. Her son, with patches on his pants, waited on tables and washed dishes after school.

Little Dutch boy, the brothers of Sigma Nu called him.

In 1921, Gehrig became a sports page name in New York. First, his Commerce baseball team won the city championship and was awarded a train trip to Chicago to play that city’s high school champion, Lane Tech, at Wrigley Field.

Gehrig enjoyed talking about that Chicago trip for the rest of his life.

Commerce won the game, 12-8, when Gehrig hit a long, bases-loaded home run in the ninth inning. “The Babe Ruth of the High Schools,” New York papers called him the next day.

Gehrig went to Columbia, joined Sigma Nu, and continued to help his mother in the kitchen. He also began hitting tape-measure home runs at South Field. Some of his homers cleared 116th Street and landed on the library steps.

A Yankee scout, Paul Krichell, saw Gehrig hit two homers at Rutgers one afternoon. Of one of them, Krichell said: “Ruth never hit one farther.”

The Yankees signed him, in the spring of 1923, for $1,500, but didn’t announce it until after his Columbia season.

Christina Gehrig was furious, crushed that her son had turned his back on engineering for a “silly game” she knew nothing about.

But according to Gehrig’s widow, Eleanor, in her 1976 book, “My Luke and I,” written with Joe Durso, Momma Gehrig became increasingly pacified as her son’s paychecks began arriving.

Near the end, there were only a few clues from Gehrig himself that he knew he had a fatal illness. A New York writer who was close to Gehrig, Rud Rennie of the New York Herald Tribune, recalled an incident at Union Station in Washington, shortly after Gehrig’s problem had been diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic.

A group of Boy Scouts recognized Gehrig, and set up a clamor around him. He smiled, and they wished him good luck. As he waved goodby, according to Rennie, Gehrig said: “They’re wishing me luck, and I’m dying.”

After Gehrig left the Yankees, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed him to the city’s parole board. His salary was $5,700 a year. Gehrig enjoyed the job, according to his widow, and left it only when he discovered one day that he could no longer lift his hands off the desk.

He had a memorable final day at Yankee Stadium. July 4, 1939, was “Lou Gehrig Day,” and 60,948 were there.

Members of the Yankees’ 1927 “Murderers’ Row” team were assembled. Babe Ruth embraced him. Gehrig cried. Then he gave a short speech, during which he described himself as “The luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

His teammates gave him a trophy with a bronze plate, upon which was a poem, written by John Kieran:

“We’ve been to the wars together , We took our foes as they came , And always you were the leader, And ever you played the game. Idol of cheering millions; Records are yours by sheaves; Iron of frame they hailed you, Decked you with laurel leaves. But higher than that we hold you, We who have known you best; Knowing the way you came through Every human test. Let this be a silent token Of lasting friendship’s gleam And all that we’ve left unspoken. --Your pals on the Yankee team. Lou Gehrig died at 10:10 the night of June 2, 1941. He was 37.

Eleanor Gehrig, who never remarried, died in 1984, at 79.

In her final years, she said of her husband: “I had the best of it. I would not have traded two minutes of my life with that man for 40 years with another.”