Lou Gehrig

by Paul Gallico

  And so when Gehrig graduated from P. S. 132, instead of being sent out to find work to augment the meager family budget, he was urged to continue school, and entered New York’s famous High School of Commerce at 66th Street and 10th Avenue.

  What Gehrig’s education was like in those years, I know from experience because I was just four years ahead of him through the same mill. My parents had emigrated from Europe in 1897. While Gehrig was attending P. S. 132, I was at P. S. 6. When Gehrig entered Commerce High School, I was just finishing at De Witt Clinton High School, Commerce’s great rival. And when Lou entered Columbia University, I had just finished working my way through the same institution.

  And no one knows better than I the deep love for America that was in the heart of Lou Gehrig, or the boundless gratitude to the country that made caste, race, creed or poverty no bar and provided equal opportunity for all.

  Commerce was a long distance away from upper Amsterdam Avenue, but his parents provided him with carfare, or he walked, or hitched on delivery wagons as all kids did in those days, and they could always provide him with a lunch box, and a nickel to get a bottle of milk in the General Organization lunch room.

  Glimpses of Gehrig in high school may be culled from letters written to me by men who were his schoolmates in high school.

  Arthur Allen Narins writers from Philadelphia—“No one who went to school with Lou can forget the cold winter days and Lou coming to school wearing khaki shirt, khaki pants and heavy brown shoes, but no overcoat, nor any hat. He was a poor boy.”

  Incidentally, that hardening that Gehrig got as a youngster became a lifetime habit. He never wore a hat, vest or overcoat in the coldest weather until after his marriage when his wife, frantic at his flirting with pneumonia, finally managed to get him into a winter overcoat.

  The rebuffs that Gehrig had suffered as a boy when he had tried to play with the kids on the block already had their effect upon him when he went to high school. Oliver Gintel, now a prosperous furrier in New York, writes:

  “In my first year at Commerce, I was trying to get a berth on the Soccer team. In practice one day, I kicked the ball accidentally towards a huskily built boy (Lou) who booted the thing nonchalantly across almost the entire length of the practice field.

  “I approached him to try out for the team. He refused, stating that he wasn’t good at athletics, and besides, his mother wouldn’t give him permission.

  “I arranged for Doc Reynolds, our coach, to watch this boy kick a ball and he repeated his performance. But he turned Reynolds down. Lou was being criticized for his utter lack of school spirit, and was being called a sissy and a mama’s boy. Always smiling, he paid no attention to any criticism and minded his own business. I then went to work on him in earnest for a week. He eventually did make the team, played for three seasons as half-back. He won the winter championship for three successive years while he was a member of the team.”

  3

  THE MAKING OF AN ATHLETE

  Apparently, Lou had managed to convert his parents to the importance of sport in the life of an American boy, something that Europeans would find hard to understand, for he also played on the football team, and returned to his first love in sports, baseball.

  He was ordered to report for baseball practice, and turned up in his street clothes and shoes to drill with the team, for he didn’t own so much as a pair of spikes, or a glove. Eventually he was given a uniform. But the curious thing was that whereas he was a brilliant soccer player and a capable prospect on the football field, he was a poor performer on the diamond.

  He was made a first baseman, because the team was in need of another infielder, and in his first year batted only .150.

  But here entered two factors that were to follow him through life. The first was his own dogged persistence and his desire to learn and improve himself, and the second was the faith in him that somehow, in spite of his clumsiness and awkwardness, he inspired in the men who taught the game.

  Harry Kane, coach of the Commerce baseball team was the first of these, and Gehrig always gave him full credit for correcting his early faults as a hitter. Day after day, Kane would take the boy and pitch to him for fifteen minute stretches. The next year he was already hitting .300.

  Those high school years were important to Gehrig. Things happened to him and to his family that were to have a powerful influence on his future.

  For one thing, a crisis overtook the family, one that threatened to bring his education to an end. His father became stricken with some form of paralysis, temporarily, and was no longer able to work. The meagre Gehrig exchequer dwindled away to nothing. To the rescue came both Mama Gehrig and Lou.

  They were strong, brave, determined people, these old country mothers. No matter what their failings, they could take a blow, and strike back. She went to work, answered an advertisement for a cook and housekeeper for the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house at Columbia University, took in washing on the side, scrimped, saved, worried, nursed her husband and somehow kept her own kitchen going. She was determined that Lou should continue with his schooling.

  Young Lou went to work too, after school hours. He got jobs in butcher shops and grocery stores, running errands, minding kids, delivering papers, any one of the many ways a kid around New York those days could earn a few dollars a week.

  And somehow he was managing to attend baseball practice for the school team as well. It is difficult to realize unless you have been through it, what a fantastic amount of study, work and play can be got in by a kid with a fair constitution and a willingness to be on the go from dawn to midnight. Sometimes I used to talk to other chaps working their way through school, and we agreed that if we should have to sweat as hard in after life as we were then, there wasn’t much to look forward to.

  That was the training that Gehrig had.

  Summer vacations meant steadier work and a little reserve added to the Gehrig bank account. And it also meant that Gehrig on Sundays could pick up ball games around his neighborhood at places like Reservoir Oval and Bennett Field. Those were the famous sandlot games out of which came some pretty fair ball players, though none as famous as Gehrig eventually became.

  He even appeared in a uniform with a petty semi-pro outfit called the Minqua Baseball Club sponsored by the Assembly district Democratic Club of that name at West 181st Street. They played mostly little semi-pro clubs from New Jersey, and also neighboring Democratic districts.

  And it wasn’t idling. The clubs played for $35 guarantees. Of this the battery mates got $5.00 each. Here Lou abandoned first base where the increment was low and became a pitcher. That $5.00 every Sunday was important money.

  Such was life around New York for a poor boy. You will find it paralleled by thousands upon thousands of youngsters in similar circumstances. In many ways it was an exciting and engrossing life, this battle against the world’s greatest city, for education, sustenance and joy. And it too had an important bearing on Gehrig’s character, his make-up and behavior in later life. It imposed upon him virtues that he never lost.

  Gehrig in later years was sometimes snickered at as a paragon of virtues. He didn’t drink or wench, or stay up in night clubs, or get involved in scandals. He kept in rigid training and was always in top condition, his pleasures were simple, he smoked only mildly, he was good to his mother and faithful to his wife.

  Home training had much to do with this, besides the sound soul and spirit of the boy, but the early habits of his life were also greatly responsible. The matter of time takes on a great importance; time, and the games he learned to love to play.

  Even if a boy is basically sound, there is plenty of trouble for him to get into around New York, especially if he lives in a poor neighborhood, where the kids tend to drift into bands, or young gangs, groups that start as a rivalry to the bunch down the next block, and which can easily drift into pilfering, window smashing and other petty offences which later lead to the higher brackets of misdemeanor and crime.

 
But there are just so many hours to a waking day, and if every minute of them is occupied bread-winning, attending school, or playing on some kind of team, there is simply no time left for mischief.

  Physical condition is a part of the American system of competition and free enterprise. The regimens whereby it is achieved are strictly self imposed. It is acquired in direct proportion to the ambition of the boy who cares to practice it.

  The bright and desirable prizes are held out to the youngster—a place on the team, a uniform, a letter, a trip. The coach makes the simple rules of training and points out what kind of an athlete is wanted on the team. And the ambition of the individual does the rest.

  Gehrig’s clean living did not grow out of a smugness and prudery, a desire for personal sanctification. He had a stubborn, pushing ambition. He wanted something. He chose the most sensible and efficient route to getting it. Since control of his body was an important factor in his desire to excel in those sports in which he took part, he took care of it in an intelligent manner. Hundreds of thousands of boys in America are doing the same thing all over the country today.

  Habits formed in youth are apt to last through later life. Gehrig’s did. He never made a parade of his virtues, or even considered them as such. He merely lived the way he liked to live.

  Once he even went on a two weeks bender. It is one of my favorite stories, because somehow more than anything it has the tender quality of the naive simplicity of the guy. To his wife, though it happened long before they met, it is known lovingly as Lou’s two weeks’ drunk.

  It occurred when he was a raw young rookie but recently signed with the Yankees and farmed out by them for seasoning to the Minor League Hartford Club of the Eastern League.

  Midway in the season the boy fell into an awful batting slump. Day after day went by without his getting a hit. He saw his cherished career ending before it had begun. He was certain he would be cast off to some class C club.

  One night he went out with some of the boys on the team and they all wound up in a speakeasy drinking a lot of early prohibition gin. And since nothing seemed to matter any more, and life was over, Gehrig drank too.

  He drank an awful lot of gin and got roaring tight and the next morning felt like the cold clinkers of hell, with a head on him like a Gordon Bennett balloon. Somehow he dragged himself out to the ball yard, into his monkey suit and up to the plate.

  Thereupon the great miracle took place. Aching, foggy, half-sick, he proceeded to tear the cover off the ball. Home runs, doubles, triples rattled off his bat.

  He even fielded his position with an elegance and ease he had never known before, having been named the world’s clumsiest first baseman at the outset of his career.

  That night he went out and bought a quart of gin, imbibed it dutifully and without much pleasure, since it tasted horrible and made his mouth feel like the inside of a second baseman’s glove the next morning, but the results were apparent to anyone sitting in the ball park or looking at the box score, and the opposing pitchers in the end suffered more than Gehrig did.

  To make assurance doubly sure, he took to transferring potions of the life-giving fluid into little medicine bottles and carrying them in his uniform, and he would sneak nips in the dugout while awaiting his turn at bat. He was never sober for a moment.

  Finally, at the end of two weeks, Pat O’Conner, the manager of the Hartford team, caught on and called in his big, awkward slugger for a little fatherly talk. O’Conner had gone to a lot of trouble developing him into the hitter he had become and he wasn’t going to see him turn into a baseball bum like some of the others.

  He said gruffly, but not unkindly—“What the Hell is going on here, Lou? I never knew you to take a drink before. Don’t you know those guys you’re going with are all wrong for you? They’re just a lotta guys on their way out. You’re headin’ to be like them before you’ve got started. Maybe you’re just a big, dumb Dutchman, but I think you’ve got a chance to go places in baseball, or I wouldn’t be wasting my time here talking to you. But you’ll never be a star, drunk all the time and carrying on and carousing with a bunch of bums. Get it?”

  The most surprised man in the world was Henry Louis Gehrig. He turned baffled and horror stricken blue eyes on O’Conner.

  “Drinking and carousing! I wasn’t doing that, Pat. Why looka how I been hitting the last two weeks. It’s wonderful. And two weeks ago I couldn’t lift a fly out of the infield. I just came on it by accident.”

  O’Conner was a wise old gentleman. He didn’t laugh. He explained carefully, patiently and thoroughly the effects of alcohol on athletes, its habit forming proclivities, and what it would do to him eventually if he kept it up.

  And that was the end of Lou Gehrig’s hitting medicine, and his two weeks’ spree. He drank beer in later life, but kept away from spirits. And he kept away from them not because of any prissy notions of righteousness that it was evil or wrong to take a drink but because he had a driving, non-stop ambition to become a great and successful ball player. Anything that interfered with that ambition was poison to him.

  4

  “THERE WAS A MAN NAMED RUTH”

  The high school period continues interesting. For in his final year at Commerce, Gehrig caught his first real glimpses of that other and more luxurious world away from Tenth and Amsterdam Avenues into which he was soon to move.

  For one thing, he took a part time job as a waiter in the Phi Delta Theta house, the famous aristocratic Fiddle-de-thates of Columbia University, just off the campus, where his mother was cooking and housekeeping.

  And for another he took his first trip away from home, pullman, first class best hotel, all expenses, when that recently-born tabloid, the Daily News, sent the championship Commerce baseball team out to Chicago to play an inter-city game with Lane Tech High, winners of the Chicago title.

  The New York boys beat the Chicago boys by the score of 12 to 6. Lou Gehrig the first baseman didn’t get a hit in three times at bat, but the fourth time he appeared at the platter the bases were full and Gehrig poled one over the right field wall, out of the park and down the street. It was an adult wallop that any major league ball player would have been glad to have hit.

  It was a red blooded robust clout. And as the result of it, for the first time the shadow of another man, a Great Personage fell athwart the kid player. A reformed pitcher had come to the New York Yankees from the Boston Red Rox, and was piling up a prodigious amount of home runs for them. His name of course was Babe Ruth.

  And they called Lou Gehrig the “Babe Ruth of the High Schools.”

  In Gehrig’s own scrap book with the name “LOU GEHRIG” printed on the outside in gold letters, there is on the first page an already yellowing clipping of a photograph of the President of the Board of Education congratulating the victorious team, and there is prominently displayed a sign—“OH YOU BABE RUTH,” while another says “HAIL TO THE VICTORS!”

  Babe Ruth! Lou Gehrig! Two names that were to be coupled for so long. And always Babe Ruth first and Lou Gehrig after. Strange that even his first day of glory he shared with the Babe and was named under his great shadow. Strange, that is, now that we can see his career as a whole and realize how long Lou Gehrig played in the shadow of Ruth in every way, how long it was before he came into his own, and how tragically short his glory was then.

  But the big Dutchman from upper Amsterdam Avenue was probably quite delighted with the honor done to him. To be called a “Babe Ruth” was better even than being called conqueror, or mayor, or president.

  Mama and Papa Gehrig did not quite know what the fuss was all about, or who this “Baby Root” was, but it was nice their boy Looie’s picture was in the paper, along with a write-up, only now it shouldn’t go to his head so he should become a bummer like some of them other kids what used to be on the block, but he should work hard and study and maybe he could go inside Columbia and be a “Collision” which was Mama Gehrig’s version of a collegian.

  It should be
added here that neither Mama nor Papa had ever seen a baseball game or had any idea what that was about except that it seemed to amuse Looie and keep him off the street, and sometimes when he got older he brought five dollars home from it, not from gambling, but what he got paid.

  But what Mama Gehrig did know through her labors at the fraternity house was that collitsch was a fine place, and collisions were fine boys and that in this amazing country her boy could be a collision too and carry books and later have a fine job or profession, whereas in her country they would have tossed him into the Army when he came of age and the Prussian Junkerdom wouldn’t have let him come near a university.

  Lou Gehrig graduated from Commerce and in 1922 matriculated at Columbia University, aided by a scholarship awarded him not for what lay between his ears but because he was 210 pounds of bone and muscle and was willing to give on the field of sport.

  About this time you will find in his scrap book mysterious clippings referring to one “Lou Long,” a husky left-handed hitter and first baseman who played in the Oranges and around Newark with the Westinghouse semi-pro team, and again a newspaper notice of a certain first baseman, Gerry of the Yonkers team, who lifted one over the Scoreboard at the West New York playground, with two aboard in one of the longest hits ever seen on that field.

  It was just little Looie doing his best to help out Mom, the summer of 1922 before turning up at Columbia.

  But it should be here noted and recorded that for all his clippings, for all his semi-pro earnings and for all of being called “The Babe Ruth of This,” and “The Babe Ruth of That,” Henry Louis Gehrig had no idea of a career as a major league ball player when he entered Columbia University, because he signed up for the pre-engineering course. He wanted to become an engineer. Why, he did not know exactly, but he later told his wife Eleanor that he kind of liked the picture of himself in riding pants and leather boots, shirt open at the neck and wide brimmed hat, reading from a blue print out West and telling the boys where to put the dam.