It seemed incomprehensible at the time and still does today. Baseball’s “Iron Horse”, one of the game’s greatest sluggers and most beloved players, cut down by an unrelenting disease at age 37. It was almost fitting that rain postponed the original date of a planned Yankee Stadium memorial tribute during the 1939 season. Special tickets had been printed for the July 4, 1939 game. All featured a smiling image of Gehrig in happier times. The event would go on two days later but today, a relatively small number of tickets and stubs from the “Lou Gehrig Memorial” game remain. This week, Just Collect is proud to offer a ticket stub from that moment, five months prior to World War II. It’s already received a lot of attention despite a relatively low technical grade but we’re not surprised. The stub is a PSA 1 due to a virtually unnoticeable pin hole at the top and some minor paper loss on the reverse. Otherwise, we’d label is GD-VG. This is good news for the buyer, who’ll likely get a very nice piece of baseball history for a very reasonable price. On that day at Yankee Stadium, a monument was dedicated in Memorial Park, just behind center field. Gehrig’s was just the second monument erected. Miller Huggins, who had managed Babe Ruth and Gehrig in the 1920s, was the first. Babe Ruth would be added after his death in the 1940s. Nearly 61,000 fans filled Yankee Stadium on that July day in 1941, to honor their hero. Gehrig died just two years after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, today known as ALS or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”. The fifteen-minute ceremony to dedicate the monument and remember #4 was attended by Gehrig’s widow and other dignitaries. The Yankees swept a doubleheader from Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s. Beforehand, Mack said this about Gehrig: “Not only was Lou Gehrig a great player but he was a real sportsman, a gentleman whom we all admired. This was true not only of the players who were his associates, but of all players in baseball as well as those who made contact with him. By his conduct on and off the baseball field he has set an example which I would advise the army of the youth of America, whether it be large or small, to adopt. I know of no more appropriate recommendation than to advise our youth in the footsteps of Lou Gehrig.”
