July 4, 1939 — just days after being diagnosed with ALS — Lou Gehrig retired from the New York Yankees. In his farewell at Yankee Stadium, Gehrig told the crowd that across 17 seasons he had received nothing but “kindness and encouragement from you fans.”
What’s astonishing is that the Yankees’ public‑address system wasn’t working that day. The iconic recording we know — Gehrig’s echoing declaration that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” — survives only because local radio engineers scrambled at the last possible moment to rig an external microphone and patch it into their broadcast gear. Without that improvisation, one of the most famous speeches in American sports history would have disappeared into the summer air.
Image: Lou Gehrig, 1923. Via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
