Published on November 05, 2003
© 2003 Spectator Publishing Company
The Columbia Spectator
By TARA KRIEGER
Spectator Associate Sports Editor

As part of Columbia's ongoing 250th birthday celebration, 200 alumni, faculty, and patrons gathered in Low Rotunda Monday evening to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the birth of the school's most well-known Lion, Lou Gehrig.

The event, emceed by popular Yankee broadcaster John Sterling, and featuring keynote speaker and Gehrig biographer Ray Robinson, served as both a celebration of the life of the legendary ballplayer, who would have been 100 on June 19, and a benefit for amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the crippling degenerative disease that brought about his premature death at age 37 in 1941. Proceeds from the $250-per-person event were donated to the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig MDA/ALS Research Center, located on Columbia's Heath Sciences campus.

"The ALS center is doing extensive research and also patient care for Lou Gehrig's disease," said Hiroshi Mitsumoto, professor of neurology and the center's medical director. "To provide multi-disciplinary care is very costly, and yet Medicare and any other insurance pays just the doctors and any follow-up visits. The cost of all those other health professionals is not paid, so it's a tremendous financial constraint. Our center is the only one where we can officially use [the Gehrig] name because Mrs. Gehrig [willed] part of her estate to our center. If we do not have philanthropic support for our research, we cannot attain our goal, which is to find a cause and a cure of this disease."

Caterers dressed in navy Yankees T-shirts served ballpark peanuts, hot dogs, and pretzels, in addition to fancy pass-arounds, to the guests. Baseballs and bats, along with a gigantic ice sculpture of Gehrig's patented number "4," adorned the buffet table. Clips from the YES network's "Yankeeography" on Gehrig were projected in the background.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame, represented that evening by chief curator and Vice President Ted Spencer, loaned several pieces of priceless Gehrig memorabilia for general display. Among the items exhibited were the Iron Horse's 1939 road uniform, a scrapbook from his 1931 trip to Japan, personal correspondence between Gehrig and his wife, Eleanor, and several props from the movie Pride of the Yankees.

Also on display was part of a collection of artwork--of Gehrig and of baseball in general--by Bill Ross, an ALS patient who, having lost the use of his arms, learned to draw pictures by holding the paintbrush in his mouth.

"We planned this event rather quickly," said Lori Funicello, assistant director of development at Heath Sciences. "We didn't get a final confirmation from the Hall of Fame until August, so we only planned it in two months. Our original expectation was probably a little bit higher than the people who actually turned out, but we covered the cost of our event and raised a little bit more, so altogether about $60,000."

Funicello added that, unexpectedly, many of those in attendance had little connection with ALS.

"A handful of our ALS supporters came," she said. "But the majority of them were just new prospects. It was good for educating new people about the ALS center and building new relationships. Not enough people really know what ALS is. They know it's bad, but that's about it. People have from diagnosis about three years to live, and it's terrible because your mind stays intact while your body is just losing control."