Eighty-two years ago, Lou Gehrig gave his famous retirement speech at Yankee Stadium, telling fans about a neurological disease with which he’d been diagnosed.
“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
I quoted that speech once to Morrie Schwartz, my beloved college professor and the namesake of the book “Tuesdays With Morrie.” He, like Gehrig, was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, which is what everyone called it before it became Lou Gehrig’s Disease.