by Owen J. Hurd
In the off-season, Gehrig had a decision to make. It wouldn’t do to tag along with the team any longer. Besides, the Yankees made it clear that there was no place for Lou in the organization. Owner Ed Barrow—whom Gehrig had mentioned warmly in his farewell speech—informed Lou’s wife that it was time for Lou to move on. As if suggesting that he retire and take it easy, Lou’s teammates gave him a fancy new fishing rod and tackle box. But it wasn’t Lou’s nature to be idle. Besides, he still felt the need to provide for his wife, so he went looking for a job.
He also held out hopes of making a full recovery from this strange and little-known disease because he never truly understood how hopeless his cause was. Doctors told his wife, Eleanor, the truth—that he probably only had months to live—but as a favor to her they never told Gehrig the unvarnished truth. Not that he didn’t ask for it. In one letter to his doctor and friend, Dr. Paul O’Leary of the Mayo Clinic, Gehrig said, “Paul, I feel you can appreciate how I despise…false illusions.” Having said that, Gehrig told O’Leary about an acquaintance of his who made an astounding recovery from a similar condition. Gehrig wanted to know if O’Leary was familiar with this particular case and what hope if any he should take from it.
Following Eleanor’s orders to “lie like mad” to her husband about his prospects, O’Leary replied that the case Gehrig mentioned “is just one of a group that have been improved and I trust that in seeing him you have been reassured that there is a damn good probability that you will do likewise.” What O’Leary neglected to tell Gehrig was that this other person had recovered from a similar but less virulent form of sclerosis. Ignorant of the distinction, Gehrig naturally concluded that he would be “well on the way to recovery very shortly.”
Buoyed by his doctor’s dissembling, Gehrig was eager to find a job that would enable him to do some good with his remaining years. He accepted an offer from New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to take a position as a parole board officer. Either LaGuardia was in the dark about the seriousness of Lou’s condition or he was in on the ruse. Either way he offered Gehrig a ten-year term. Lou’s job was to review cases and make recommendations to the commission about whether an offender deserved parole. One noteworthy person whose appeal Gehrig rejected was future world middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano. At the time, Graziano would later say, he “felt like killing him,” but time and perspective helped the boxer realize that Lou probably made the right call.
Before the 1940 season, the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, in an unprecedented move, waived the five-year waiting period and inducted Lou Gehrig on December 7, 1939. The Yankees also retired his number 4 jersey.
With virtually the same lineup, the Yankees could safely expect to contend for the championship in 1940 as well. But as the season progressed, it was clear that something was amiss with the world champion Yankees. As they fell back in the standings, some might have wondered if the anemic start was due to Gehrig’s absence. Daily News sportswriter Jimmy Powers offered a different theory. In a story published on August 18, 1940, Powers suggested that Gehrig’s disease may have been contagious and that the current players were suffering from the same mysterious lack of strength that slowed Gehrig down in the latter half of 1938. An infuriated Gehrig sued the newspaper for making negligent and inaccurate statements that caused the former slugger undue anguish and damaged his reputation. The paper ran an apology and paid Gehrig $17,500 in an out-of-court settlement.
Meanwhile, Gehrig’s health deteriorated steadily. His wife drove him to work each day, where he sat in his chair watching helplessly as Eleanor performed all the physical aspects of the job for him. He dictated letters that she typed for him. She guided his hand in writing signatures on documents and even had to light his cigarettes for him, placing them gently between his lips. A heavy smoker even during his playing days Lou was unable to kick the habit, and his wife must have known how pointless it would be to deny him any remaining pleasures.
In letters to his doctors, Gehrig expressed frustration at the dissonance between the optimistic prognoses he was receiving and his rapidly worsening condition. He began:
From what I am going to write, please don’t judge me a cry baby, or believe me to be losing my guts, but as always I would like to know the actual truths and not continue to receive encouraging reports which have little or no chance of materializing, or to continue to live in false hopes. There is definitely something going on within my body which I do not understand.
After enumerating various setbacks—violent tremors, numbness in extremities, extreme weakness—Gehrig again beseeched his doctor for his “honest opinions.”
If O’Leary at all regretted the decision to sugarcoat Gehrig’s chances for recovery, the following paragraph of Gehrig’s letter must have struck his conscience like a dagger:
I hate like hell to bother you with these additional burdens of mine, for the Lord knows you have enough misery out there [at Mayo Clinic] each day and week, but I know you will also appreciate the confidence I have in you and your organization, and for that reason an honest opinion coming from you people is of vital importance to me.
Regardless of how it pained him, O’Leary resolved to maintain the charade. He hated to lie to his friend, he wrote Eleanor, “but I feel that with Lou we must keep his morale up, not only for the benefit and help it may be to him, but also in order to save him the shock that accompanies such discussions.”
Good intentions and white lies could not disguise the facts, however, and Gehrig reached the conclusion that he could not go on working at the parole board. Instead of quitting, though, he characteristically requested a leave of absence on April 14, 1941. Just two months later he was dead—on June 2, 1941, sixteen years to the day after he replaced Wally Pipp at first base, at the outset of his record-setting consecutive games streak.
Lou and Eleanor Gehrig never had any children, so Gehrig left behind no descendants, and Eleanor never remarried. Like a latter-day Elizabeth Custer, she devoted herself to elevating and preserving her husband’s reputation in the public consciousness. She signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn for a motion picture to be made about her husband’s life. The Pride of the Yankees, released in 1942, starred Gary Cooper in the title role. Masterfully replicating Gehrig’s famous farewell speech—with minor revisions—the movie was a huge hit, earning eleven Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor (Cooper), Best Actress, and Best Picture.
Eleanor also wrote a memoir, My Luke and I, in which she described their romance and married life as well as her squabbles with Lou’s overbearing mother. Lou’s parents, Henry and Christina, always had a chilly relationship with their daughter-in-law, but the rift deepened after Lou got sick. At one point, the elder Mrs. Gehrig criticized her daughter-in-law’s care for Lou. When Eleanor told Lou about it, he vowed never to see his mother again. But as his health faltered even more, he relented, and all three were there at his deathbed. Animosity between Eleanor and her parents-in-law intensified after Lou’s death. His parents disputed the validity of their son’s will. Ultimately, the parties settled out of court, but they never reconciled.
Eleanor was a loyal supporter of efforts to find a cure and treatments for ALS, which has of course come to be known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She died in 1984 at the age of eighty.
LOOSE ENDS
Wally Pipp was the player that Lou Gehrig replaced at first base on June 2, 1925. Pipp had been playing poorly and made the mistake of taking his manager up on the offer of a day off. Gehrig stole the position, playing the next 2,128 games. Wally Pipp sat on the bench for the remainder of the 1925 season, pinch-hitting on occasion, but he never started another game for the Yankees. Sold the following year to the Cincinnati Reds, Pipp played a couple more years, then retired to play the stock market in October 1929—ever the master of bad timing. He wrote a book called Buying Cheap and Selling Dear and even wrote a few pieces for a fledgling magazine called Sports Illustrated. When World War II broke out, Pipp worked in a Detroit
factory that produced military aircraft. After the war, he took a job selling parts to automakers. Pipp died of a heart attack in 1965. To this day, the baseball terminology used to describe a veteran’s replacement by an upstart rookie is getting Pipped.
Lou Gehrig was himself Pipped when he surrendered his place in the lineup to Ellsworth “Babe” Dahlgren on May 2, 1939. In his first game Dahlgren hit a home run and a double in a lopsided Yankee victory. Dahlgren batted only .235 that year, but his fifteen home runs and eighty-nine runs batted in contributed to another Yankees world championship in 1939. Apparently he got on the bad side of manager Joe McCarthy who arranged for his trade between the 1940 and 1941 seasons. Dahlgren bounced around from team to team, all the while trying to live down a rumor that he was a marijuana smoker. A recent book by Dahlgren’s grandson, Rumor in Town, makes the case that McCarthy was the source of the rumor. Perhaps the manager’s loyalty to Gehrig permanently distorted his attitude toward the Iron Horse’s replacement.
Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Leader,
Nixon Pal
As civil rights icons go, some might consider Jackie Robinson a fairly benign figure. Sure, he broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, and he did it with class and dignity, despite the ignorance he was routinely confronted with. But few would consider him a controversial or antagonistic figure. He never advocated separatism or violence. He was no Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael. And as far as most people know, Jackie never committed any overt acts of civil disobedience. In other words, he was no Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, either. No, in most people’s memories, Jackie Robinson was a baseball player—but what a player.
Despite the death threats and the malevolent abuse heaped on him by ignorant fans, by opposing players and managers, and even by some teammates, Robinson excelled on the field. The Brooklyn Dodgers infielder played well enough to be voted Rookie of the Year in 1947. He was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1949, when he led the league in batting average (.342) and stolen bases (37). In his stellar career, he batted .311 and stole 197 bases, with an amazing 19 steals of home plate—straight up steals, not double steals, wild pitches, or pass balls. He led the “boys of summer” to six pennants and one World Series championship in his ten-year career.
But there was another side to Jackie Robinson, a far more complex and sophisticated side that is often overshadowed by the feel-good story of his athletic career and successful desegregation of America’s pastime. This other side of Jackie’s character emerged almost as soon as he retired from baseball after the 1956 season: Jackie Robinson, the business executive, civil rights leader, political campaigner, entrepreneur, and columnist.
The first thing Robinson did after retiring from baseball was to accept a job as head of personnel for the Chock Full o’ Nuts chain of coffee shops. He also began his lifelong association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His first initiative at the NAACP was to spearhead a national membership and fund-raising campaign. Robinson was elected to the NAACP board of directors in 1958. But even while on the board, Robinson expressed frustration with what he considered the organization’s conservative approach to overcoming segregation and racism. People were going to have to get used to the fiercely independent, outspoken Jackie Robinson who railed against injustices wherever he detected them and expressed his opinions no matter who they offended.
As the 1960 presidential election heated up, Jackie’s independent nature was again put on display.
“I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat,” he declared. “I vote for people who I believe in, regardless of their party affiliations.”
For Robinson, the litmus test was always the same: Which candidate will help further the African American cause? Before the primaries, Robinson believed that person was the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, whose civil rights record aligned with Jackie’s dream of a country that recognized the rights and freedoms of all its citizens, regardless of race, creed, or color. But when Humphrey lost the nomination to John F. Kennedy, a curious thing happened. Instead of throwing his support behind the senator from Massachusetts—as Humphrey and countless other Democrats urged him to do—Jackie actively campaigned for the Republican nominee, Richard Milhous Nixon.
This did not come as a shock to anyone who knew Jackie. Rigidly principled and stridently independent, Robinson frequently took political stances that confounded and frustrated his friends and colleagues. He didn’t judge people by their ideologies or their associations, but by their words and deeds. So, for him, Kennedy was not the champion of civil rights that Humphrey was. He was a smooth politician whose politics and alliances changed with his present company. In Jackie’s estimation, Kennedy was too willing to placate the segregationist southern Democrats to get votes. When Kennedy selected Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, it all but confirmed Jackie’s suspicions.
Nixon, it’s true, was a member of the Republican Party, a party that Jackie had many times chided for dragging its feet on civil rights initiatives. But Jackie had personal relationships with both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. He carried on an active and provocative written correspondence with both leaders, never hesitating to thank them when they helped advance civil rights or to scold them when they didn’t. For example, Eisenhower frequently made vague declarations of unity with the civil rights cause but also urged that Robinson and his supporters show more patience. Robinson replied that “seventeen million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans.” These are hardly the words of a complacent man.
“You unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes,” Robinson went on, “by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those pro-segregation leaders…who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy.”
In addition to his private correspondence with government leaders, Jackie used the megaphone provided by his weekly column in the New York Post. Topics ranged from sports to politics, but usually politics. It was in his column that Robinson first announced his support for Richard Nixon. So what, in Robinson’s mind, did Nixon have going for him? As vice president, he toured Africa, making respectful statements about the prospects for self-rule in newly forming or recently liberated African nations. And Nixon rarely missed an opportunity to issue statements that were sympathetic with the civil rights agenda, even if they were equally vague in terms of action steps.
Jackie took a leave of absence from his job at Chock Full o’ Nuts and put his column on hiatus to dedicate all his time and effort into getting Nixon elected. In the process, he butted heads with Republican strategists and with Nixon himself over messaging and even the campaign itinerary. Robinson’s enthusiasm for Nixon was not contagious among the overall African American population, however. Nixon lost the black vote and consequently the election to Kennedy. In one of their several spats, Malcolm X chided Robinson, saying, “Evidently you were the only Negro who voted for Nixon.”
In hindsight, Jackie was disappointed to say that he was wrong about Nixon, but he was ultimately glad to admit being wrong about Kennedy. After Kennedy’s June 11 televised speech on civil rights, Jackie wrote the president, “Thank you for emerging as the most forthright President we have ever had and for providing us with the inspired leadership that we so desperately needed. I am more proud than ever of my American heritage.” In his Post column, Robinson enthused, “Speaking as one person, I can honestly say that Mr. Kennedy has now done everything I hoped he would do.”
Robinson’s renegade ways landed him in hot water on both sides of the political spectrum. Although he was an indefatigable supporter of civil rights, he was considered an Uncle Tom by the more radical factions in the civil rights movement. At the same time some in the Republican Party considered him to be a radical. When Robinson opposed Nixon’s bid for the Republican nomination in the 1968 presidential election, f
avoring Nelson Rockefeller, William F. Buckley wrote a column saying that “it is surely time to put an end to the mischievous national habit of taking seriously this pompous moralizer who whines his way through life as though all America were at Ebbets Field cheering him on against the big bad racist St. Louis Cardinals.”
Responding to charges of race-baiting, Robinson declared, “I am proud to be black. I am also embattled because I am black; but for white Americans of the Buckley ilk, I am only one of millions of blacks who are tired of it!”
When Nixon won the Republican nomination, Robinson again threw his support behind Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey. Explaining his flip-flop, Robinson presaged, “If Nixon is elected President, we as Negroes are in serious trouble; we would, in my opinion, be going backward.” After Nixon won the election, Robinson continued to criticize the Nixon administration’s actions—or lack thereof—and especially took issue with the inclusion of “known segregationists” in Nixon’s cabinet, like Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell, not to mention Nixon’s alliance with Senator Strom Thurmond.
To the very end, in letters written in the last months of 1972, just before his death, Robinson maintained the pressure on the Nixon administration, taking it to task for failing to show any inclination to advance civil rights any further than was politically prudent. But Jackie never gave up on Nixon the man. He seemed to harbor a personal respect for Nixon not shared by others in civil rights circles. Never one to take chances, Nixon directed J. Edgar Hoover to open a file on his old friend, Jackie. They didn’t find much, except for his early involvement in a couple of organizations branded communist. If Nixon planned to use any of this information to discredit Robinson, he never got the chance. Jackie died of a heart attack on October 24, 1972, at the age of fifty-three.
LOOSE ENDS