Eleanor Grace Gehrig

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Wife of Lou Gehrig. She was a spirited young woman from a well-to-do Chicago family who met the straight-laced star player for the Yankees in Comiskey Park and married him after a long-distance courtship. Those were the days when Babe Ruth and Gehrig were the home run heroes of championship teams, and the Gehrigs became prominent in New York's sporting and social life. The marriage ended tragically on June 2, 1941, when Lou Gehrig died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. After her husband's death, Mrs. Gehrig never remarried and lived quietly in her apartment on Manhattan's East Side for more than forty years. She occasionally visited her upstairs neighbor Jack Dempsey, and regularly went to Yankee Stadium with Mrs. Babe Ruth to attend old timers' games or the World Series. Eleanor Gehrig was quoted as saying, "I had the best of it with Lou. I would not have traded two minutes of my life with that man for 40 years with another." The dramatic and tragic story of her nine year marriage to Gehrig became a familiar one, chiefly because it was told in books and two films. During the 1950s, she became the national chairman of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Eleanor Gehrig never forgave Ed Barrow, the short-tempered General Manager of the Yankees, for his ruthless treatment of her husband after Lou Gehrig became ill in 1937. Barrow had told her in no uncertain terms that it was time for Gehrig to find another line of work. The story of Eleanor and Lou Gehrig inspired the movie "Pride of the Yankees," which stars Teresa Wright and Gary Cooper as the famous couple. (bio by: Anthony B)