1

A Brilliant Career, a Tragic Death

On a late March day in 1939, Tommy Henrich played first base for the Yankees in a spring training game against their Kansas City farm club. Ordinarily, Henrich’s position in a meaningless exhibition would not make news. On that day in Haines City, Florida, though, Henrich’s unexpected shift from outfield to first base caused a stir: He was replacing Lou Gehrig, whose lackluster, even embarrassing, spring training was worrying teammates and the Yankee brass. He had cooled off considerably in 1938. At thirty-five, he might simply have been shedding his greatness.

The thought of Gehrig nearing the end—of his career, not his life—was difficult to accept. He had been there every day since 1925. He was adored. He was heroic. Anything worse than an athlete nearing his natural end was unfathomable.

It was impossible not to notice the sharp diminution in Lou’s skills. Team president Edward Barrow was concerned, saying he wished “the old guy” had played against Kansas City. Manager Joe McCarthy said he was resting Gehrig. Emotional when Lou was the subject, McCarthy was a fierce protector and unlikely to tell reporters the full truth. Lou, however, looked like a different man from the one who showed up at spring training the year before or the one who had played in 1938, when he was good (.295 batting average, 29 homers, 114 runs batted in, especially after a dreadful April) but not as routinely extraordinary as in the past.

James Kahn of the New York Sun detected that something was wrong with Lou during a long slump during the ’38 season: “I have seen him hit a ball perfectly, swing on it as hard as he can, meet it squarely—and drive a soft looping fly over the infield. In other words, for some reason that I do not know, his old power isn’t there. He isn’t popping the ball into the air or hitting it into the dirt or striking out. He is meeting the ball, time after time, and it isn’t going anywhere.”

Once the spring training of ’39 was in full swing, nearly every reporter admitted to seeing what Kahn had seen—and had the guts to say it in print.

“His throwing has been open to question,” the New York Times’s James Dawson reported, “he has not fielded balls like the old Gehrig, he has not been even a reminder of the Gehrig he was. He has committed five errors in ten games. In thirty-eight trips to the plate, he has connected for five hits, all of them singles.”

Something had caused this steep decline. No one knew what; Lou did not learn the diagnosis for another three months, when he went to the Mayo Clinic.

Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press wrote that Gehrig “has slowed up dreadfully and has been brooding for a month over his inability to hit.” Talbot’s AP colleague Dillon Graham described him with delicacy: “not so pert.”

Jimmy Wood of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle said that Gehrig’s failure to end his consecutive games streak was behind his poor play. And George Kirksey, of the United Press, quoted a pitcher who said Lou had lost his batting eye: “Gehrig bends over backward and away from the plate on pitches that are right over.”

Still, Lou had enough goodwill in the press corps that some were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Kieran, for one, refused to make a panicky judgment and cited three minor signs of a change in him: He was thinner (but a “very husky citizen just the same”), his hair was graying, and his step had slowed. He let Lou explain himself (saying he had skipped the Haines City exhibition game the year before and had missed others in previous springs—no big deal). Gehrig joked that the press was casting him in a movie called Buried Alive.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “the pallbearers have me dead and buried. Do I look it?”

On the contrary, Kieran wrote.

Kieran was an intellectual in the midst of a long run as a panelist on the NBC Radio quiz show Information, Please! And in this column, he cited Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” to deflect other reporters’ Gehrig prophecies about a “sudden plunge from his old heights.” Lou, he wrote, was not like the poem’s titular horse-drawn carriage, which falls apart “all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles do when they burst.” He was correct; Lou was falling apart gradually and inexorably, as ALS takes its victims.

The column was a brief in defense of Lou—an influential friend’s plea to stop the drumbeat of grim predictions, most of them right, of Gehrig’s demise.

“Lou’s request,” he wrote, “is for the volunteer pallbearers to stand away from the Iron Horse’s head. He thinks he can pull his own weight and maybe a little bit more.”

It would have been convenient to blame his decline on aging limbs and less supple muscles and the toll of playing in 2,122 games, to that point with injuries and broken bones. His wife, Eleanor, had witnessed a litany of woes that suggested something much more dire: Lou could get inexplicably drowsy; he stumbled over curbs like a “punch-drunk fighter”; he flopped around while ice skating at PlayLand Ice Casino. She remembered, too, a vomiting fit between games of a doubleheader accompanied by a 104-degree fever that a doctor diagnosed as a gall bladder condition.

“Lou had a greenish color,” she reported. Another doctor told him to avoid butter, fried foods, and bread. Another diagnosis suggested he was low on calcium.

His local doctors—none of them yet neurologists, who likely would have understood the signs of ALS—were failing him as surely as his body was.

Lou was understandably confused: How could someone with so much power and coordination—who could hit whistling line drives like no one else, who fielded his position brilliantly, and who, since Ruth’s departure from the Yankees in early 1935, was the team’s undisputed leader—lose his skills so rapidly?

His teammates saw it. Joe DiMaggio watched him whiff at nineteen consecutive batting practice pitches that he would normally destroy. “He didn’t have a shred of his former power or his timing,” he wrote in his autobiography. Johnny Sturm, a minor leaguer at St. Petersburg that spring, recalled that Gehrig told him, “I can’t do it no more.” In German, Gehrig told Sturm that he felt “schlect,” or terrible.

There was little question of Lou making the 1939 roster. Barrow and McCarthy could only hope that Gehrig would recover his form and give the Yankees a season like 1938.

“McCarthy will keep him in there,” Talbot wrote, “as long as the club is in the race, though he doesn’t hit over .250 and fields only the balls that are hit right down his gullet… They have in Joe Gordon a great second baseman, a kid who can go so far to his left and come up with the ball that few spectators will ever realize he’s helping Gehrig with his chores.”

But that was wishful thinking. His stumbles were only too noticeable.

The Yankees headed north from Florida—at a stop in Norfolk, Lou’s two homers brought fleeting encouragement that he was renascent—and played the Dodgers in an exhibition game at Ebbets Field. Frank Graham of the New York Sun recalled a few years later in his biography of Gehrig that McCarthy sidestepped reporters’ questions about Lou’s condition. He would not concede anything definitive but guided reporters to the all-too-obvious before them.

“Watch Lou,” he told the press as fielding practice began.

“Lou looked very bad,” Graham wrote, continuing:

“He would go down for a ground ball hit straight at him, and the ball would go through him. Or he would come up with the ball and throw it to second or third base and then start for first base to take a return throw but he would be woefully slow. Back of first base some fans jeered at him. ‘Why don’t you give yourself up?’ one of them yelled. ‘What do you want McCarthy to do, burn that uniform off you?’”

Lou played as awfully as he felt, as the season began. Schlect, indeed.

He played eight games starting April 2. His streak was up to 2,130 games.

In 28 at-bats, he had no home runs. Just 4 singles, and 1 run batted in, collected in a game where he had 2 hits but exhibited further proof that his athletic death was moving rapidly closer.

On April 25 against the Philadelphia A’s at Yankee Stadium, he singled DiMaggio to second. In the fifth, his weak dribbler to A’s first baseman Nick Etten scored Henrich. And in the eighth, a weak fly ball—a Texas Leaguer—gave him his second hit of the day. Then, as he tried to turn it into a double—an instinct, perhaps, or a vain attempt to prove that his skills weren’t gone—he was tagged out standing up at second base. Times writer Arthur J. Daley dropped a disquieting note late in his story that Yankee reserve second baseman Bill Knickerbocker “saved Gehrig from an error in the fourth when he fielded a ball that had caromed off Lou’s glove, Ruffing making the putout at first.”

Lou knew it was over. On an off day before the Yankees traveled to Detroit, he came home to Larchmont. Eleanor wrote that she saw a man “troubled, even shocked” by the stinging remark of a teammate—so simple and hurtful.

“He’s through,” he heard the teammate say.

Lou was hurt by whispers that had grown louder about his failures at bat and in the field. He knew he wasn’t giving the team what he used to. Eleanor reminded her devastated husband that “he’d always said he would step down” if he felt he could no longer help the team. Her devotion was to her husband, not his team, although he had, since they wed in 1933, balanced his loyalties to both. Eleanor saw more than a Yankee: She saw the man she loved.

“I told him the heartbreaking words,” she said. “‘Maybe that time’s come.’”

That moment came the next morning in the lobby of the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Gehrig saw McCarthy at the cigar counter and they rode the elevator to the manager’s room. He told McCarthy he was benching himself.

“I’ll let him take a rest,” McCarthy told reporters before the game, “and then when he is feeling better, I’ll put him back in to see how he goes. Meantime, I will give Babe Dahlgren every opportunity to win a regular job.”

That afternoon, when Lou brought the lineup card to the umpires at home plate, Tigers announcer Ty Tyson told the crowd that the consecutive games streak was now over. “Give a good ballplayer a good—” Tyson said, but fans cut him off with rousing cheers. Lou tipped his cap and walked to the bench, his head bowed.

The Detroit Free Press’s coverage of Gehrig’s decision included two large pictures, one of Lou sitting on the Yankee bench, another of Dahlgren at first. Over the images, the headline read: “DETROIT, JINX CITY, IS PLACE WHERE HIS LONG STRING IS ENDED.” A caption explained that he had, over the years, been sick or injured during games at Briggs Stadium but always managed to keep his streak going.

Now it was over, and he poured out his feelings to Eleanor in a letter written on Book-Cadillac’s hotel stationery, with its tiny corporate crest above its name.

Taking himself out of the lineup, he wrote, “was inevitable, although I dreaded the day, and my thoughts were with you constantly—How would this affect you and I—that was the big question and the most important thing underlying everything. I broke just before the game because of thoughts of you—not because I didn’t know you are the bravest kind of partner but because my inferiority grabbed me and made me wonder and ponder if I could possibly prove myself worthy.”

He still had hope, but it was tempered.

“As for me,” he added, “the road may come to a dead end here, but why should it?—Seems like our backs are to the wall now, but there usually comes a way out—where, and what, I know not, but who can tell that it might not lead right out to greater things—Time will tell—”

Nothing could stop ALS. Incurable then. Incurable now.

A month later, Lou was still with the team, slipping into his uniform at home and on the road, still the team captain. On June 1, a team secret became public knowledge. The Yankees were in Cleveland for a three-game series with the Indians with a six-and-a-half-game lead in the American League. Johnny Schulte, a journeyman catcher serving McCarthy as a coach, was speaking to a Knights of Columbus group and blurted out that Lou was headed for an examination at the Mayo Clinic.

“Lou is a sick man,” he said. “Sometime in the next few days he’s going to Rochester to find out what it is that’s been sapping his strength. We hope it’s nothing serious, though it doesn’t look good now,” he said.

Lou denied it as a rumor. A few days later, though, he confessed it was true, and he said that he lied because he hadn’t told Eleanor about his plans. Given their relationship, and Eleanor’s strong personality, not telling her of his pending Mayo visit sounded unlikely and even rash. What he said also contradicts Eleanor’s written account in her memoir, My Luke and I, that it was her idea for him to go to Mayo, and that she called the clinic from the 21 Club to schedule the appointment. She had waited until after the Yankees finished their game in Chicago the following week to call Lou, who quickly agreed to fly to Rochester, Minnesota, the next day. Her version might be entirely true, but her tendency to put herself at the center of a critical event like this makes Lou look almost like a passive player.

Lou’s remarks suggested how worried he was by the early signs of the disease that he preferred not to divulge—typically, they are muscle cramps, twitching, weak limbs, and clumsy hands—and how much denial he was in.

“I’m not sick,” he told reporters. Almost certainly lying, he added:

I feel fine. Never better in my life. But there must be something wrong. A ballplayer of my age and physique doesn’t lose his ability as suddenly as I did. There must be a reason for it… the way the news broke and the way it has been built up, everybody thinks I’m falling apart, and I’m not. I haven’t an ache or a pain. I simply want to find out why I lost my ability to play ball so suddenly.

Finally, he went to the Mayo Clinic, where he was examined and tested over a week. The staff didn’t need much time to determine that he had ALS. Although Lou told the first physician to examine him, Dr. Harold Habein, that his only problem was that his left hand felt a “bit clumsy,” as soon as Gehrig removed his clothes, Habein knew what was wrong.

“There was some wasting of the muscles of his left hand as well as the right,” Habein wrote in his unpublished memoir. “But the most serious observation was the telltale twitchings or fibrillary tremors of numerous muscle groups. I was shocked because I knew what these signs meant—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. My mother had died of the disease a few years before.”

The clinic did not want to rush the diagnosis or keep Eleanor in the dark.

“We think it’s serious,” Dr. Charles Mayo warned her by telephone.

She and Lou had discussed what would happen at the end of his career—that he had to make the decision, probably by age thirty-five or thirty-six, rather than be released for poor play. He had already taken action to remove himself from the lineup with a vague hope that he might, somehow, return, if he regained full health. Now, six weeks after his last game, ALS was taking the bat out of his hand.

“I waited and worried and prayed back home,” Eleanor wrote.

Dr. Henry W. Woltman, the clinic’s head of neurology, continued the examination with a series of questions. He also tested the reflexes in Lou’s knees, ankles, and elbows with a Trömner hammer, a simple tool that had telling results.

Dr. Habein’s early, informed guess was almost certainly accurate.

The doctors told Lou the ALS diagnosis first, then followed with a call to Eleanor, to whom they further elaborated that Lou had perhaps two and a half years to live. Eleanor said that she extracted a promise that the clinic would give Lou a sunnier version of their report, one that would give him a little hope and not put a time limit on his life. Lou seized on the possibility that he might not be an invalid, which acted as a coping mechanism as he cycled through treatments that ultimately did not help. But if his doctors at the Mayo Clinic, with its great reputation, told him something less than the truth, they would likely have been compromising their professionalism. Eleanor’s insistence that she got the doctors to, in effect, lie to Lou suggests her need to be the heroine of the story.

“There is a fifty-fifty chance of keeping me as I am,” he wrote to Eleanor from Rochester, perhaps overstating his chances for his wife’s sake. “I may need a cane in ten or fifteen years… They seem to think I’ll get along all right if I can reconcile myself to this condition which I have done but only after they assured me there is no danger of transmission or that I will not become mentally unbalanced and thereby become a burden on your hands for life.”

He added: “I adore you, sweetheart.”

Lou was back at Yankee Stadium two days later for the announcement, made by Barrow, that he had ALS. His teammates cheered his arrival in the clubhouse “and then the rafters rocked with the acclaim he received from his fellows,” the Times wrote. As he put on his pinstripes, he talked to reporters eager to understand his reaction to the news.

“You have to take the bitter with the sweet,” he said. “If it’s my finish as a player, I’ll have to take it. But I’m going to give it a fight.”

In the dugout, he sat on the steps and told his teammates about the diagnosis and testing at Mayo. The photograph of the group shows catcher Bill Dickey, Lou’s closest friend, looking devastated.

One reporter labeled the ALS diagnosis “a death warrant in his pocket.”

Lou remained with the team for the rest of the season and joined his teammates for the World Series in Cincinnati. His condition was worsening. He was losing weight and losing his balance as he was walking.

Bill Corum of the New York Journal-American spotted Gehrig at the Netherland Plaza Hotel before Game 3. He decided to follow him and wrote:

He didn’t know I was behind him and I saw him edging over to put his hand against the wall as he came to the first step. So there were tears in my eyes as I turned into the coffee shop and ordered a drink I did not want.

Sue Goodwin, of the Cincinnati Enquirer, a rare female sportswriter in the era, interviewed Gehrig before one of the games at Crosley Field. Then, almost serendipitously, she found herself speaking to one of Lou’s doctors.

“What do you say, Doctor?” she asked the physician.

“Nothing,” he told her. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Standing beside them, McCarthy’s wife, Elizabeth, sobbed.

Lou’s need to earn a living (Barrow offered him nothing in the front office after his 1939 contract, which paid him $35,000, expired) led to an unexpected lifeline from an admiring Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. He asked that Lou join the New York City parole board as a commissioner. The salary would be $5,700, but he would have to move within the city’s geographical limits. He and Eleanor quickly left Larchmont for Riverdale, one of the northernmost burgs in the five boroughs of New York City, to comply with the residency rule. He began work soon after the Yankees swept the Reds in the Series.

For more than a year, he tried to help prisoners and parolees. He felt he had something to offer, even without experience in penology. Eleanor drove him to his office on Centre Street, or to meet prisoners at Rikers Island or the Tombs.

“He’d see them all—rapists, hookers, pimps, addicts,” Eleanor wrote. “It was quite a shock to his noble and somewhat innocent soul but he took it.”

One day, the future middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano came before him. In his autobiography, Graziano said he watched as Gehrig entered the hearing room on crutches, his face creased with pain. Gehrig asked him to stand and told him: “I’ve been over your record, and it’s pretty bad. You’ve caused a lot of grief.” They spoke, and Gehrig ordered him returned to Rikers Island for violating his parole. Graziano cursed Gehrig and was led away by guards but would years later praise Gehrig for a tough decision that eventually benefitted him.

Lou’s body was wasting away. It became increasingly difficult for him to do his job. Eleanor had to help him sign his name and light a cigarette. She knew he could not continue much longer and briefed LaGuardia about his condition and prognosis. Lou followed with a letter, written two months before his death, seeking a six-month leave of absence. Gehrig wrote that his doctors assured him there was an “excellent chance for me to affect [sic] a turn in the right direction,” and added, “It is my sincere wish that Our Lord will look with favor and start me in the right direction so that I may again come down and take up my work where I left off.”

There would be no favorable turns for Lou, only the further descent into paralysis that is characteristic of ALS. In his final stages, he was confined to the first floor of his house, at the mercy of Eleanor; her mother, Nell Twitchell; and two servants. Eleanor kept up a steady flow of visitors to buoy Lou’s spirits, but he invariably lifted theirs with his tenacious belief that he would recover some of his lost mobility. While Lou might have been shielded by Eleanor from his prognosis, he surely knew, at least, that there was no grand future awaiting him. He might even have sensed his doom. Even as he told a friend he had a fifty-fifty chance of regaining enough strength to return to work, he said, “I’m beginning to wonder.”

In his final months, there remained unsettled business with his mother, Christina, an imperious German immigrant whose excessive doting on her only surviving child kept her from accepting Eleanor; Lou and Eleanor had arranged their quickie wedding in 1933 without Mom to avoid further friction with her.

One day, Eleanor recalled that Nell was cooking peas for Lou when Mom Gehrig declared that they were no good for her boy because they lacked the vitamins that beans did. Already unwelcome in her son’s home, she told Nell that if Eleanor “hadn’t come into his life, all this wouldn’t have happened, it was all her fault.”

Nell amplified the scene, remembering that Christina raged bitterly, shouting: “If Louie had stayed with me, this never would have happened!”

Eleanor’s subsequent eruption at Mom Gehrig must have been something to behold. “Your face will be awful red someday if it is ever proved that Lou’s disease is inherited,” she recalled telling her. “You’re going to end up a very lonely old woman. You’ve lost your son’s love and now you’ve lost mine.”

In her recollection, Nell added more to what Eleanor told Christina by further quoting an angry remark to her mother-in-law:

“You and your cooking. Look at Pop—he is epileptic. Look at yourself—you have high blood pressure and heart trouble. And that boy upstairs is sick. Now look at me—look at Nell—look at Bud [Eleanor’s brother]. We are so healthy. Maybe some day when the cause of this disease is known, it might be you who will blush.”

Hearing the story, Eleanor said, Gehrig banished his mother.

The relationship between Eleanor and her mother-in-law was fractious and the stories she told are bitter, and perhaps exaggerated; they would play a major role in how Mom Gehrig was painted in The Pride of the Yankees, for which Eleanor spoke extensively with screenwriter Paul Gallico. The truth is that Eleanor adored Lou and that for six years, they had a marriage of joy and discovery; he gave her stability and unswerving love, and she lent him sophistication and an adult love to complement or counter his mother’s. After the ALS diagnosis, though, their marriage gradually turned into a caregiving arrangement with no possibility of the patient recovering.

“Maybe if, one day, he had pulled up a little and he got a little hope out of it, it mightn’t have been so hard for him,” she confessed to the Sporting News. “But he never gained, just died away by inches, every day a little bit more, and if you saw him at the end of a week you couldn’t remember what he had looked like at the beginning of the week.” She added: “Every once in a while, when a new symptom came on, when another part of him fell still on him and became dead, he’d break down somewhat and shake his head and say he didn’t think he was going to come out of this thing so well or say he wasn’t sure he was going to lick it.”

In his final weeks, Lou’s breathing slowed “like a great clock winding down,” Eleanor wrote. About a week before his death when Dickey and Tommy Heinrich called before the Yankees left on a six-city, fifteen-game road trip, Lou assured them, “I’m sure going to beat this. I hope the boys have a good trip.”

A few days later, a Saturday, Barrow visited. Barrow kissed Lou on the head and told him: “Keep your chin up, old boy.” Still alert, Lou responded, “Never mind me, boss. You keep those Yankees up there. I’m going to lick this thing.”

Early on June 2, Gehrig looked up from his bed at Eleanor, Nell, and a doctor and said, “My three pals.” At that stage of his illness, his voice likely would have been barely audible, so it is possible he whispered or mouthed the words. Soon after, Lou slipped into a coma, and “everything was still,” Eleanor wrote.

“The most beatified expression instantly spread over Lou’s face, and I knew the precise moment he had gone. His expression of peace was beyond description. A thing of ecstatic beauty, and seeing it we were awestricken and even reassured. We didn’t cry. We seemed stronger, and not one of us left that room without feeling: There is a better place than this. Whatever it is, no tears, no tyrant.”

As she wrote her autobiography thirty-five years later, she pondered three questions: Did she have an answer to “two years of ruin” after six years of “towering joy”? Did she waver between bitterness and anger, or was she simply filled with anguish? Would she trade her life with Lou for “lesser joy and lesser tragedy”?

To the final question, she responded: “Not ever.”

News of Lou’s death was page one news, above the fold, in the New York Times, next to a report of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes and to the left of the day’s top news about a meeting in the Alps between Hitler and Mussolini. The Times’s headline told the story in four decks:

GEHRIG, IRON MAN OF BASEBALL, DIES AT THE AGE OF 37

Rare Disease Forced Famous Batter to Retire in 1939—Played 2,130 Games in Row

SET MANY HITTING MARKS

Native of New York, He Became Star of Yankees—and Idol of Fans Throughout the Nation

In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, ten-year-old Larry Merchant came home from school to see his mother, Anne, weeping. The Merchants were Yankee fans who had just moved from the South Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. Larry and his father, Emanuel, whose favorite player was Babe Ruth, regularly attended Yankee games.

His mother loved a certain muscular first baseman with dimples.

“She told me that Lou Gehrig had died,” said Merchant, who would become one of the nation’s leading sports columnists two decades later. “And it struck me: I didn’t know until that moment that he was so important to her.”

In faraway Nebraska, the Lincoln Star’s headline used a cliché to convey the gravity of Lou’s death: “DEATH CALLS STRIKE 3… ON LOU GEHRIG.”

In western Pennsylvania, which is Cleveland Indians country, the News-Herald in Franklin offered a lesson in local priorities. Under a banner headline across seven columns about Indians pitcher Bob Feller’s victory over the Yankees that moved the Tribe into first place was the less prominent and somewhat curious one that heralded Lou’s death and could have been written by his mother:

Lou Gehrig, Good Boy of Baseball, Is Dead.

The afternoon after his death, his body was put on view in Manhattan at the Church of the Divine Paternity on 76th Street and Central Park West. Lou was dressed in a dark, pinstriped suit. Among those who filed past him were forlorn members of the baseball team at Commerce High School, Lou’s alma mater, all carrying their gloves. Firefighter Patrick McDonald delayed the start of his vacation to take a final look at his favorite ballplayer. When he left, he said Lou’s face showed no sign of his fatal illness. Instead, it bore the hint of a smile.

At some point before or after the viewing, Lou’s body rested on the funeral director’s couch at the church—a solitary image. A widely circulated photograph showed him, behind two ornate, open gates and beneath stained glass windows, alone.

“Baseball Idol in Death,” read one caption for a private, if not intrusive shot.

In his office that day, Barrow told reporters how much Lou’s body had deteriorated. He had lost sixty pounds, Barrow said. His hair had gone white at the temples. He needed help to eat. “He went to sleep about noon yesterday still thinking he would get well,” he said, “and he just didn’t wake up.”

Lou’s body was moved later that afternoon to Christ Episcopal Church, near his home in Riverdale, for a second viewing that extended into the evening, and for the next day’s funeral. Thousands stood on line to pay their respects to Gehrig in a church that Eleanor could see from the windows of her home on Delafield Avenue. Babe Ruth arrived with umpire Bill Klem. As Ruth looked at his teammate and sometime friend in an open casket, flowers surrounding it, he wept so hard he had to be led by an attendant into an adjoining room. This was yet another ending for the Babe: in 1934, the Yankees released him; in 1939, owner Jacob Ruppert, who had acquired him from Boston, died. Now Lou.

When the Babe left the church, “he brushed unsmiling through a hundred fans who had trooped with him to the door of the church,” Gayle Talbot reported.

The doors to the church closed at ten p.m. “and the lights behind the stained glass windows went out one by one, until only one remained,” William Dickinson of the United Press wrote. “A half moon was luminous in a hazy sky and the hum of cars along the parkway sounded louder now. The little groups of Lou Gehrig’s fans lingered a few moments more, and dwindled away.”

Rain came down steadily the next morning for the funeral. Hundreds of people stood outside as the service began at ten o’clock. About a hundred people were inside, about half the church’s capacity. The Reverend Gerald V. Barry led the honorary pallbearers, among them McCarthy; Dickey; tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; Andy Coakley, the baseball coach at Columbia during Lou’s years on the team; Lou’s physician, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn; and Lou’s fellow parole commissioners.

Eleanor followed, with her brother, Frank Twitchell, Jr., and their mother, Nell. They sat with Lou’s parents, Christina and Henry, in front, close to the altar.

The funeral lasted seven or eight minutes.

Reverend Barry read the Episcopal service for the dead.

“Frequently,” he then told the mourners, “it is the custom to deliver an address at a funeral, but it is the wish of the bereaved that this not be done. I am requested to say simply that there will be no eulogy because you all knew him.”

Mom Gehrig wept. So did Bill Dickey and Giants manager Bill Terry.

When it was over, a hearse took Lou’s coffin to a crematory in Queens.

Outside, hundreds of fans bid him a final good-bye.

In fifteen days, he would have turned thirty-eight.