Lou Gehrig Dies at 37

June 2, 1941. A Monday night in Riverdale, the quiet stretch of the Bronx where the streets slope down toward the Hudson. At 5204 Delafield Avenue, in a house he'd bought with money the New York Yankees paid him to hit baseballs (he'd been extraordinarily good at that particular job), Lou Gehrig lay in bed. His body, which had once carried him through 2,130 consecutive games, hadn't done what he told it to do in months. At 10:10 p.m., with his wife Eleanor beside him, he died. He was thirty-seven years old -- seventeen days short of thirty-eight.

Earlier that same day, the Yankees had already played their game. DiMaggio had a hit against the Browns, the nineteenth straight day he'd managed one. Nobody in that clubhouse knew, packing up for the trip to Detroit, that Gehrig wouldn't make it through the night.

Less Than Two Years

The full accounting of how Gehrig got here belongs to two other stories. His ALS diagnosis came on June 19, 1939, his thirty-sixth birthday, at the Mayo Clinic. His farewell speech came fifteen days later, on July 4, 1939, in front of 61,808 people at Yankee Stadium. Doctors had given him two to five years. He got one year, eleven months, and change -- the short end of a bad bet.

Mayor La Guardia appointed him to the New York City Parole Commission that fall, a ten-year term he was sworn into on January 2, 1940. Gehrig treated the job the way he'd treated everything else in his life -- he showed up, he did the work, and he didn't make a production of how hard it had gotten. Eleanor guided his hand when his fingers could no longer manage a signature. By the spring of 1941, they couldn't manage much of anything. He resigned that April, about six weeks before he died, and stayed home in Riverdale after that. The man who hadn't missed a game in fourteen years spent his last weeks unable to walk across a room.

Word Travels

The Yankees found out the next morning. They were in Detroit on June 3, set to play the Tigers at Briggs Stadium under a gray, chilly sky that matched the mood in the dugout. Joe McCarthy and Bill Dickey weren't in the lineup -- both had already left the team to get back to New York. The Yankees lost, 4-2. DiMaggio hit a home run off Dizzy Trout in the fourth inning, his hitting streak ticking up to twenty games, and it barely registered as news that day (there was only one story in the New York papers that morning, and it wasn't about baseball).

Reporters found DiMaggio in the clubhouse afterward and asked him to say something about the man who'd taken him under his wing as a rookie in 1936.

Like the rest of the fellows, I don't know what to say. He was a wonderful ballplayer and a great individual. He was a good influence on us young ballplayers, to whom he was an inspiration.

Babe Ruth heard the news in New York and broke down. The two men had gone years without speaking after a falling-out between their families in the early 1930s -- a rift that had only thawed in public at the 1939 ceremony -- but Ruth had kept visiting Gehrig as his health failed, whatever was left unsaid between them by then. He and his wife Claire went to pay their respects in person, and by every account, he could barely hold himself together doing it.

Three Hours in Manhattan

The family had planned a private viewing. That plan didn't survive contact with the public. On June 3, Gehrig's body lay in the small chapel of the Church of the Divine Paternity at Central Park West and 76th Street, and the crowd outside grew large enough that Eleanor opened the doors. Thousands filed past the casket over roughly three hours -- fans, strangers, people who'd never met the man but felt like they'd lost something anyway.

That's the part of Gehrig's death that's easy to lose track of forty years past his final at-bat: he wasn't just a Yankee by then. He was a New York institution, and New York showed up to say so.

Eight Minutes

The funeral came the next day, June 4, at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverdale, almost directly across the street from the Gehrig house. This service was smaller and stayed that way: roughly a hundred people, family and teammates and baseball men, Ruth and McCarthy and American League president Will Harridge among them. At the family's request, there was no eulogy.

We need none, because you all knew him.

The whole service lasted about eight minutes. Gehrig was cremated that same day and his ashes went into the ground at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. No long procession, no extended ceremony -- which tracks, honestly, for a man whose whole public identity had been built on doing the job without making a show of it.

Sixteen Years

Here's the detail that gets repeated every June 2, and it's worth being precise about it. Wally Pipp's headache put a twenty-one-year-old Gehrig at first base for the first time on June 2, 1925 -- sixteen years to the day before Gehrig died. If you count the streak's true first game as the pinch-hit at-bat the day before, June 1, then Gehrig died one day after the sixteenth anniversary instead of on it. Either way, the calendar landed close enough to feel deliberate (nobody arranges these things, though sportswriters have spent eighty years writing as if someone did). Baseball's ledgers don't always agree with each other, not even about a man as precisely counted as Gehrig.

Flags across New York went to half-staff on Mayor La Guardia's order. Other major league parks reportedly followed. The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown -- which had inducted Gehrig in a special election in December 1939, the standard five-year waiting period waived because nobody needed to wait to know -- draped his plaque in black for thirty days and flew its own flag at half-staff until June 15.

The Yankees kept playing. The 1941 season had a pennant race to settle and a rookie center fielder in the middle of a hitting streak nobody yet understood would become historic. That's what happens after a franchise loses a man like Gehrig -- the schedule doesn't stop to notice, and the team goes back to Detroit and loses a baseball game the next afternoon, because that's what teams do. Gehrig would have understood that better than anyone. He'd spent fourteen years showing up for exactly that reason.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Lou Gehrig die?

Gehrig died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on June 2, 1941, at his home at 5204 Delafield Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He was 37. His wife Eleanor was with him. He'd been diagnosed with the disease at the Mayo Clinic on June 19, 1939 -- his farewell speech came two weeks after that diagnosis, not his death -- and his condition had deteriorated steadily until he could no longer walk without help.

What is the difference between Lou Gehrig's diagnosis, his farewell speech, and his death?

These are three separate dates that often get mixed up. Gehrig was diagnosed with ALS on June 19, 1939, at the Mayo Clinic. He delivered his "Luckiest Man" farewell speech on July 4, 1939, roughly two weeks later, at Yankee Stadium. He died nearly two years after that, on June 2, 1941, at his home in the Bronx.

Where is Lou Gehrig buried?

Gehrig was cremated on June 4, 1941, following a private funeral at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverdale, the Bronx. His remains were interred that same day at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

Did Babe Ruth attend Lou Gehrig's funeral?

Yes. Ruth and his wife Claire went to pay their respects in person when they heard the news, and Ruth attended the funeral at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverdale on June 4, 1941, along with Yankees manager Joe McCarthy and American League president Will Harridge.

The house on Delafield Avenue is still there. Somebody else's mail goes through that slot now, and somebody else's lights go on in what used to be Gehrig's bedroom. There's a plaque out front so the neighborhood doesn't forget which house it is. That's about the size of the monument he would have wanted -- not a shrine, just a marker, and a quiet street that kept going after he stopped.