The New Yorker:

From 1929: The first baseman’s early Yankees teammates remember him as one of the most bewildered recruits ever to join the club.

By Niven Busch, Jr.
August 2, 1929

Lou Gehrig has accidentally got himself into a class with Babe Ruth and Dempsey and other beetle-browed, self-conscious sluggers who are the heroes of our nation. This is ridiculous—he is not fitted in any way to have a public. I don’t think he is either stimulated or discouraged by the reactions of the crowds that watch his ponderous antics at first base for the Yankees, or cheer the hits he knocks out with startling regularity and almost legendary power. He enjoys playing ball and indicates his enjoyment by grinning at everyone he sees and occasionally running around four bases on a diamond-shaped field, his big calves pumping methodically under his baggy pants, bulging in an outer as well as inside curve like those of football players in old drawings. Aside from baseball his principal amusement is fishing, and his principal associates are his mother and Babe Ruth. Mrs. Gehrig has exercised a good deal of care on his upbringing—he is her only child—and it was she who took him where he could learn the game in the first place.

The exact spot at which the athletic career of Louis Henry Gehrig may be said to have begun is the Sigma Nu fraternity house of Columbia University, to the back door of which, one morning fifteen years ago, came a man, a woman, and a boy. The woman knocked, and when the door was opened explained that she had come in answer to an advertisement which the manager of the fraternity house had inserted in the papers that morning. The manager himself was called and Mrs. Gehrig answered his questions, saying that she could do plain or fancy cooking and that her husband would see to the furnace and do any odd jobs that might be needed around the place. Their clothes were old, but the couple looked so healthy and good-natured that the manager, who liked German cooking, asked them to come in and, after a few more questions, hired them. For several years after that the Sigma Nu brothers enjoyed very good meals. They became used to having Mrs. Gehrig in the kitchen and to the presence there with her, at certain times of day, of her eleven-year-old boy who went to day school somewhere and came to the fraternity house, when he had time, to help his mother with the dishes. He was the sort of boy who laughed whenever you spoke to him. Big for his age, he had reached the period when the change from short to long trousers was imminent, but he still wore short ones; their tightness exaggerated the size of his fat round legs. Sometimes fraternity brothers who were having a catch in the yard after supper let him get in it. He threw well and liked to play ball.

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