Lou Gehrig

Lou Gehrig. , Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig, the legendary Yankee first baseman and slugger, was the son of German immigrant parents. Born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan on June 19, 1903, he weighed in at a whopping 14 lbs., Nicknamed "The Iron Horse" for his durability, Gehrig played his entire 17-year baseball career for the New York Yankees and became their team captain. He set several major league records including the most career grand slams (23), the most home runs by a first baseman (493) and most famously his 2,130 streak of consecutive games played, set in 1925 (broken by Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995)., Gehrig was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. In 1969 he was voted the greatest first baseman of all time by the Baseball Writers' Association, and was the leading vote-getter on the Major League Baseball All-Century Team chosen by fans in 1999., For most of his career, the "Pride of the Yankees," lived in New Rochelle where his idle hours were spent in or near his home on Meadow Lane. On those rare summer evenings when he was not on the field, he was hitting balls with some lucky neighborhood kids, playing cards with the guys up at the Elks Club on Division Street or fishing off Echo Bay. He could also be found "stretched out on the swing" of his porch , at least until 1933, when he married his wife Eleanor and moved to an apartment on Circuit Avenue., Lou Gehrig's career and life was tragically cut short when he was diagnosed on his 36th birthday as having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of muscular dystrophy. Despite this debilitating and terminal illness, he declared in his moving retirement speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939 "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 the earth."