“What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-baked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming to bat…”—Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)Seventy years ago today, Lou Gehrig passed away, just weeks shy of his 38th birthday, mysteriously robbed of the power that had once made him perhaps the premiere slugger of the 1930s. Death came on the 16th anniversary of the day his 2,130-consecutive-game streak began for the New York Yankees. The two events might have been related.
The man Gehrig replaced at first base, Wally Pipp, had been taken out of the lineup in 1925 after complaining about a terrific headache (he took “the two most expensive aspirin in history,” Pipp noted wryly later).
It would take far, far more than that to dislodge “The Iron Horse.” Here’s what he endured, without complaint, for 14 years:
* A broken thumb
* A broken toe
* Back spasms
* 17 different fractures in his hands
* Lumbago
* Multiple concussions
That last item led neurologists last year to a surprising conclusion: Lou Gehrig might not have died of the disease named for him, after all.
Because he was cremated rather than embalmed, the body tissues that would allow a definitive judgment on this can’t be examined. But doctors found last year that the brain trauma associated with concussions can mimic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. And Gehrig is known not only to have had at least four concussions while playing for the Yankees, but may also have experienced head traumas during off-season barnstorming tours and while playing as a running back for Columbia University.
Gehrig died nearly two years after his famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium. In the time between his retirement and death, when he wasn’t going to his job in lower Manhattan on the New York Parole Commission, he would listen to Mel Allen broadcast Yankee games. The year after he retired, when he came back one day to visit the stadium, he told the “Voice of the Yankees”: "Mel, I never got a chance to listen to your games before because I was playing every day. But I want you to know they're the only thing that keeps me going."
I like to think that the sustaining magic in Allen’s voice was what fellow Southerner Thomas Wolfe also conveyed: an ability to summon, without visual aids, “the faultless velvet of the diamond.”
* A broken toe
* Back spasms
* 17 different fractures in his hands
* Lumbago
* Multiple concussions
That last item led neurologists last year to a surprising conclusion: Lou Gehrig might not have died of the disease named for him, after all.
Because he was cremated rather than embalmed, the body tissues that would allow a definitive judgment on this can’t be examined. But doctors found last year that the brain trauma associated with concussions can mimic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. And Gehrig is known not only to have had at least four concussions while playing for the Yankees, but may also have experienced head traumas during off-season barnstorming tours and while playing as a running back for Columbia University.
Gehrig died nearly two years after his famous farewell speech at Yankee Stadium. In the time between his retirement and death, when he wasn’t going to his job in lower Manhattan on the New York Parole Commission, he would listen to Mel Allen broadcast Yankee games. The year after he retired, when he came back one day to visit the stadium, he told the “Voice of the Yankees”: "Mel, I never got a chance to listen to your games before because I was playing every day. But I want you to know they're the only thing that keeps me going."
I like to think that the sustaining magic in Allen’s voice was what fellow Southerner Thomas Wolfe also conveyed: an ability to summon, without visual aids, “the faultless velvet of the diamond.”
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