Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig, the legendary Yankee first baseman and slugger, was the son of German immigrant parents and was born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan on June 19, 1903, weighing 14 pounds. Nicknamed "The Iron Horse" for his durability, he played his entire 17-year baseball career for the New York Yankees, became their team captain, and set several major league records, including most career grand slams with 23, most home runs by a first baseman with 493, and most famously a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played set in 1925 and broken by Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, was voted the greatest first baseman of all time by the Baseball Writers' Association in 1969, and was the leading vote-getter on the Major League Baseball All-Century Team chosen by fans in 1999. For most of his career, the "Pride of the Yankees" lived in New Rochelle, where he spent idle hours in or near his home on Meadow Lane, hitting balls with neighborhood kids, playing cards at the Elks Club on Division Street, fishing off Echo Bay, or relaxing on his porch until he married Eleanor in 1933 and moved to an apartment on Circuit Avenue. His career and life were tragically cut short when he was diagnosed on his 36th birthday with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of muscular dystrophy, yet in his moving 1939 retirement speech at Yankee Stadium he declared, "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I Got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
