Three U.S. Presidents, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe died on the fourth of July, but only one, John Calvin Coolidge, Jr., was born on this day. The year was 1872 and the place was Plymouth Notch, Vermont. As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he became a member of Phi Gamma Delta.
While working as a lawyer in nearby Northampton, he met Grace Goodhue, a Pi Beta Phi and recent graduate of the University of Vermont. She was working at the Clarke School for the Deaf. The two married in the Goodhue family home in Burlington, Vermont.
Coolidge was proud of his Phi Gamma Delta affiliation and he and his wife were the first President and First Lady to have been initiated into GLOs as college students. George W. and Laura Bush are the only other pair to make that claim.
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On July 4, 1939, “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day,” at Yankee Stadium, the Iron Horse’s number was retired. Gehrig, a Phi Delta Theta, played in 2130 consecutive games, a record which took decades to break. And all of those games were played on one team.
He seemed to be having a little trouble in the last half of the 1938 season and after he collapsed at spring training in 1939, he visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. On June 19, his 36th birthday, after almost a week of testing, he received the diagnosis. His difficulties with motor function were caused by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). He died June 2, 1941. Today, ALS is better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
There was a packed house at Yankee Stadium, when Gehrig gave his heartfelt farewell speech:
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. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
When you look around, wouldn’t you it consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such as fine looking a man as is standing in uniform today.
Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?
Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert; also the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow; to have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow Miller Huggins; then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology—the best manager in baseball today—Joe McCarthy! Sure I am lucky.
When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift— that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something.
When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter, that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it’s a blessing! When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that’s the finest I know.
So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break; but I have an awful lot to live for!”
Since 1955, Phi Delta Theta has presented the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award to the MLB player who exemplifies Gehrig’s spirit and character. A plaque commemorating the winners is located at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY. Additionally, Phi Delta Theta has a partnership with the ALS Association. Individual Phi Delt chapters raise funds for the Association and each chapter is encouraged to connect with the local ALS Association chapters to assist area residents afflicted with the disease.
