One Summer: America, 1927

high-school team there, Lane Tech, at Cubs Park. In the ninth inning, with the bases loaded, Gehrig hit a home run that flew over the back wall of the park and bounced into Sheffield Avenue – a feat that would have been astounding in a major leaguer. Gehrig was seventeen years old.
    That autumn he enrolled at Columbia, where his mother worked as a cleaner and cook at the Sigma Nu fraternity house. Not the most outstanding of scholars, Gehrig flunked introductory German even though it was his first tongue. He flunked English as well. He did pass trigonometry, however. His patchy performance almost certainly owed more to a demanding schedule than to any mental shortcomings. Each day he had to rise at dawn and hurry tothe dining hall to clear tables for two and a half hours. Then he spent the day in classes. That was followed by baseball or football practice, depending on the season. After a shower and a quick dinner, he returned to the dining hall to clear tables and wash dishes until late.
    In 1923, he signed with the Yankees and two years later became a regular member of the team. On 1 June 1925, he pinch-hit for a player named Wally Pipp, then did not miss another game for fourteen years until May 1939, a total of 2,130 consecutive games – a continuity record that stood for sixty-four years. fn2
    Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers, the most unstable man in baseball, decided from their first meeting that he disliked Gehrig intensely – for his meekness and lack of wit, and above all for his fixation with slugging. He never passed Gehrig without insulting him. If Gehrig was on base near him, Cobb crept as close as he could and rode him mercilessly. ‘Keep your foot on the bag, Wiener Schnitzel. Go on back there, you thick-headed Dutch bum,’ he would call. When Gehrig was playing first base, Cobb would keep up a string of insults from the bench. Eventually, Gehrig could take no more and charged into the Tigers’ dugout to get him. As Cobb prudently found someone bigger to stand behind, Gehrig smacked his head against a supporting stanchion and fell down senseless. Cobb was so impressed that he never insulted him again.
    Now, in his third year in the majors, it was becoming evident that Gehrig might very well be having the best year that any player had ever had. There was even every likelihood that he would beat Ruth’s home run record of 59. In the last twenty-one games – which is to say, since about the day that Lindbergh had failed to turn up at Yankee Stadium – Ruth had hit 5 home runs, a more or less normal pace for him. Gehrig in the same period had hit 14, including 3 in one game at Fenway Park in Boston – something that no one hadever done before. Gehrig’s pace in those twenty-one games would, if sustained, produce over 100 home runs in a full season.
    In the Fourth of July doubleheader against Washington, Gehrig hit 2 more, including a grand slam. At the end of the day, he had 28 home runs to Ruth’s 26. No one had ever pushed Ruth like this before. The baseball world was about to experience its first great home run race, and the excitement this would generate was almost uncontainable.
    Remarkably, despite the rivalry and the fact that their personalities could not be more different, Ruth and Gehrig were the best of friends. Gehrig often had Ruth to his home, where Babe enjoyed Mrs Gehrig’s hearty cooking and, according to several biographies, speaking German. (In fact, according to Ruth’s own sister, Babe spoke no German at all.) ‘I came to love that big Dutchman like a brother,’ Ruth recalled, with every appearance of sincerity, in his autobiography. Ruth was as excited as any fan by Gehrig’s success, while Gehrig for his part was happy just to be allowed to play in the same ballpark as Ruth. He was especially touched by Ruth’s generosity of spirit. ‘It would be almost impossible to feel envy for a man who is as unselfish as Ruth,’ he told reporters.
    That warmth wouldn’t last, alas. By the 1930s, Gehrig would hate Ruth about as passionately as it was possible to hate a person. The fact that Ruth reportedly had by that point slept with Gehrig’s wife would seem, not surprisingly, to have had something to do with it.
     
    Out west, the good weather was the best possible news, for the waters of the Mississippi were at last receding, if slowly. One and a half million acres were still under water as July began, but the worst was over and Herbert Hoover was finally able to leave