Remembering Lou Gehrig
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A TRUE HERO ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the Yankee baseball legend who died from the disease in 1941. Full text version of the Farewell Speech "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. "Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that’s the finest I know. "So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for." 1OOTH BIRTHDAY On June 2, 1925, New York Yankees Manager Miller Huggins gave first baseman Wally Pipp the day off to nurse a headache, writing 22-year-old Lou Gehrig into the lineup in his place. It would be almost 14 years before anyone else would start a game at first base for the Yankees. "I took the two most expensive aspirin in history," Pipp would later say. Throughout his incredible streak of 2,130 consecutive games, Gehrig played at a consistent degree of excellence. Between 1926 and 1938, Gehrig became the only player in the history of baseball to score at least 100 runs and drive in 100 runs every year. He was named the American League’s most valuable player three times, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939 — the year he retired because of the effects of a mysterious muscle-weakening disease. Gehrig was also the first player to have his uniform number retired by his team. But Gehrig was much more than a fearsome slugger. He was widely known as one of the game’s great gentlemen. "Lou was the kind of boy that if you had a son, he’s the kind of person you’d like your son to be," said teammate Sam Jones. He also understood that ball-players had a special responsibility to the people who paid to see them play, especially the children. Former MDA National Campaign Chairperson Eleanor Gehrig summed up her late husband, who died in 1941, with these words: "I would not have traded two minutes of the joy and the grief with that man for two decades of anything with another." Happy birthday, Lou. We still miss you. : 
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