Gehrig’s Death Came at End of Long Battle

Fifty-eight years ago today, and 16 years to the day after he joined the New York Yankee starting lineup, Henry Louis Gehrig died.

For two years, Americans had followed Gehrig’s losing battle with a disease few had ever heard of, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. Later, it would be commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He had taken himself out of the lineup in May 1939, halting a playing streak of 2,130 games. In 25 months, at 37, he was dead.

New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed Gehrig to a 10-year term on New York’s parole commission board shortly after Gehrig left the Yankees.

But his physical decline was so rapid he was soon bedridden at home in Riverdale, N.Y., refusing to use a wheelchair after losing the use of his legs and arms. Near the end, he lost the ability to speak and swallow.

It was a shock to friends to see a spectacular physical specimen like Gehrig--6 feet, 210 pounds, with massive calves, hands and forearms--waste away to helplessness.

The end came in the evening, with Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, and his doctor at his bedside .

In her 1976 book, “My Luke and I,” Eleanor Gehrig wrote of the instant her husband died: “The most beatified expression instantly spread over Lou’s face, and I knew the precise moment he had gone.”

Of their six-year marriage, she added: “I would not have traded two minutes of the joy and the grief with that man for two decades of anything with another.”