July 4, 1939 - Lou Gehrig Day - a podcast by Stephen Hammond

Yankee Stadium holds Lou Gehrig Day to honour baseball star affected by ALS. Lou Gehrig went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, but it was his baseball talents that inspired the New York Yankees to sign him on in 1923. Born in New York City on June 19, 1903, Gehrig was the only one of his parents’ four children to survive. By age 20, only months into his Yankees career, he was already playing for the majors. Two years later he was assigned first base, a position he held for 13 years as his extraordinary playing turned him into a baseball legend. When his game started to slip in 1938, doctors spent a year misdiagnosing his ailments until he became incapacitated in 1939 by the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). By then, he’d played a record 2,130 consecutive games. On July 4, 1939, during a speech in his beloved Yankee Stadium, Gehrig called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” for his remarkable career. By the time he died on June 2, 1941, he’d also put a public face on his rare ailment, which became known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.

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