The Second-Luckiest Man In The World
At home with the Upper East Side's Lou Gehrig expert, on the anniversary of the famous speech
Every year around the 4th of July, the phone in Ray Robinson's Upper East Side apartment, where he has lived for the past 57 years, starts to ring again.
Though it's been nearly a quarter century since the publication of "Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time," Robinson's definitive biography, the anniversary of Gehrig's "Luckiest Man" speech, delivered on Independence Day in 1939, inevitably brings Robinson back into the limelight. This year marked the 75th anniversary of the speech, creating a particular celebrity moment for Robinson, a crisp 93-year-old who, before the Gehrig book, spent most of his journalism career as an editor at women's magazines.
The Daily News sent a reporter to interview him last week, as did Newsday. Bob Costas, a friend of Robinson's, came by the apartment to interview him for a Gehrig special on the MLB Network. Though the Yankees held a special commemoration ceremony for Gehrig this year-every first baseman in the league read a line from the speech ? Robinson had to skip it because of a persistently painful toothache.
Does it bother Robinson that it's now looking like his own legacy will forever be tied to the baseball player he first watched at the age of two? "Not a bit," he said. "He's remained my hero."
Robinson's ties to Gehrig long predated the book. First there was that toddler outing, when his father took him to watch Gehrig hit balls on South Field at Columbia, near the Robinson home at 115th Street and Broadway. Gehrig was attending Columbia and Robinson's father, a lawyer, was an alum. "Everyone had heard about this young guy Gehrig, who seemed to have muscles on his ears," he said.
Then, at the age of nine, Robinson and a pal of his at P.S. 165 wrote to Gehrig requesting an interview "for our nonexistent school newspaper." Amazingly, Gehrig wrote back, telling the boys to come to the stadium for the interview, using the letter he had written as their entry pass. (Today, Robinson still marvels at Gehrig's penmanship, which was being taught in public school at the time and which, he said, was unusually tidy.)
The cops at the stadium didn't buy it, though, and the pair waited outside of the players' entrance for five hours, to no avail. At the end of the game, Gehrig finally did emerge, saw the boys, told them he felt terrible for their wait, and promised he would do the interview if they returned. He gave them two crumpled ticket stubs and told them to come back.
"He could not have been nicer," said Robinson, who laments that neither the stubs nor Gehrig's original letter survived his adolescence.
Gehrig went on to thank his manager, his teammates, his mother-in-law, and his wife, "who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed ? So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
Gehrig died two years later, in his home in Riverdale. The speech, though, lived on as one of the greatest sporting moments in the nation, a pivot point for a country emerging from a Great Depression, but about to enter a horrific war.
Asked if he's got another book in him, as he approaches his 94th birthday, Robinson sighs and looks toward his beloved wife, the beauty in the bathing suit in the old photos, who now suffers from a long illness and whose care has consumed him in recent years.
"Under these conditions, I can't do it," he said. "I've lost my heart for it."
Then he's out of his easy chair, and into his study, where he pulls the cover off his Olivetti typewriter and plans a trip downtown to see the writer Pete Hamill, an old friend. "The world just doesn't stop, does it?"