One Summer: America, 1927

trampled.
    Barnstorming proved to be the undoing of Gehrig and Ruth’s friendship. To widespread astonishment, Gehrig in 1932 started going out with a young woman named Eleanor Twitchell. They were married the following year. In 1934, Eleanor accompanied Lou and several of his teammates on a post-season tour of Japan. On the ocean crossing, Eleanor disappeared for some time one afternoon. Lou, frantic that she might have fallen overboard, searched everywhere for her. Eventually he found her in Ruth’s cabin. Eleanor andRuth had been drinking. She was decidedly tipsy. Whatever else may have been going on in there is unknown, but for years rumours persisted that it was considerably more than conversational. When Yankees catcher Bill Dickey was asked about it years later, he acknowledged that ‘something happened’, but would be drawn no further. ‘I don’t want to tell you about it’ is all he would say. What is known is that communication between Gehrig and Ruth ceased more or less completely from that day.
    In early 1939, after playing nearly fourteen full seasons without missing a game, something went wrong with Lou Gehrig. He became clumsy and seemed to have no strength. After eight games he asked to be benched, ending his streak at 2,130 consecutive games, a record that would stand for half a century, and went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. There it was discovered that he was suffering from motor neurone disease, a gradually fatal condition. His career was over.
    Shortly after his diagnosis was made public, the Yankees held a Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. Awards were presented and tributes paid. Joe McCarthy, the Yankees’ new manager, wept as he described Gehrig’s virtues. Gehrig wasn’t expected to speak – he was petrified of crowds – but he stepped to the microphone and made what has long been considered the most moving speech ever given in a sporting context in America. He began:
     
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them even for one day?
     
    He spoke for no more than a minute, mostly to praise his teammates and family. It wasn’t the words so much as the sincerity thatmoistened every eye in the park. When he finished he received an ovation greater and more heartfelt than any given before or since in Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth stepped forward, whispered something in his ear and embraced him. It was the first time they had spoken in nearly six years. Just under two years later, on 2 June 1941, Gehrig was dead. He was thirty-seven years old.
    Ruth had retired in 1935. He had wanted to be made manager of the Yankees, but Jacob Ruppert dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘You can’t even manage yourself,’ he said woundingly. Ruth instead was traded to the Boston Braves, one of the worst teams in baseball. He played just twenty-eight games there, but finished with a Ruthian flourish. In his last game, against the Pirates on 25 May 1935, he hit three home runs. At the time he retired, he held fifty-six major league records.
    On 13 June 1948, Babe Ruth made a farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium not unlike Gehrig’s nine years earlier. He was dying of cancer and looked unmistakably frail. He wore a Yankees uniform, which hung loosely on his much reduced frame. He said a few words of thanks into a microphone set up at home plate, but his cancer made it difficult for him to speak.
    He died two months later aged fifty-three. Harry Hooper, his old teammate, said Ruth was ‘a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equalled before or since’. Waite Hoyt put it more simply: ‘God, we liked that big son of a bitch. He was a constant source of joy.’
     
    Henry Ford at last produced his long-awaited Model A automobile in early December. To make sure that no one was unaware of this milestone event, the company placed full-page ads in 2,000 daily newspapers.
    People flocked to showrooms to gaze in wonder at the novelty of a Ford that came in a range of exotic colours – Arabian Sand, Rose Beige, Gunmetal Blue, Niagara Blue and Andalusite Blue – and was reasonably stylish, well appointed and comfortable,