- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by Wells Fargo.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

Keep getting better.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Fidelco Group.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Moving the region through air, land, rail, and sea.

New Jersey’s Clean Energy program.

Lighting the way to a clean energy future.

Seton Hall University.

Showing the world what great minds can do since 1856.

And by The Adler Aphasia Center.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by BestofNJ.com.

All New Jersey in one place.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - We are honored to once again be joined by Jonathan Eig, who's the author of the book over my left shoulder, "Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig".

Good to see you again, Jonathan.

- You too, Steve.

- Hardcore Yankee fan on this end, but you don't have to be a Yankee fan or a baseball fan to appreciate and respect who Lou Gehrig was and why we remember him.

Why do we remember Lou Gehrig, please?

- Gehrig was not only the greatest first baseman of all time, and is ridiculously talented hitter who played in 2,130 consecutive games.

Led with Babe Ruth, maybe the greatest baseball team of all time.

But I think what really makes him important is the way he handled his hardship, the way he responded when he found out he was dying of ALS, the disease that now bears his name.

And I think that that's why he's become something bigger than a baseball player in American lore.

- You know, it's interesting in reading the book, it's not just the 2,130 consecutive games, wow, from 1925 to 1939, but it's also his relationships with key players in his life.

His relationship with his parents mattered a lot.

We'll talk about Gehrig's relationship with Babe Ruth.

Complicated, but let's talk about Gehrig and his parents.

Great influence on him, please.

- Yeah, Gehrig was a child of immigrants.

You know, his parents came from Germany.

They spoke German in the home.

English was a little rough.

They were poor.

His father was an iron worker.

His mother was a housekeeper and worked as a maid, a cook in fraternity at Columbia actually, where Lou ended up going to school.

And Lou was the only one of four children to survive.

And we forget sometimes how a century ago, it was not uncommon for parents to lose one or more children in infancy because we didn't have the kind of healthcare we have now.

So, Gehrig as the only survivor, was really coddled by his parents and expected to be strong, expected to take care of his family.

And he had this incredible sense of responsibility that he owed his parents.

And I think that's one of the reasons he grows up to be so big and strong, is that he feels like he cannot let his mother get disappointed again.

He has to eat for four really, and has to help out around the house with her chores.

So he's this incredibly sheltered kid, really shy, really afraid to do anything that might upset his parents and a real mama's boy, like attached at the hip to his mom.

- So you got Lou Gehrig trying to do the right thing, the right way.

Trained physically.

He was extraordinary.

His body was extraordinary in large part because of his conditioning and also trying to do the right thing.

Did not party and drink, did not carouse, if you will, the word from back in the day.

Lou Gehrig.

Babe Ruth.

(Jonathan laughs) You laugh because?

- They're the original odd couple.

You know, Babe Ruth is this Bacchanalian figure.

It's the Roaring Twenties, and Babe comes to symbolize it in a way.

You know, drinking, sleeping around, missing games all the time because he's hung over or because he's got a sexually transmitted disease.

And Gehrig is this choir boy.

He goes back to his room and reads every night rather than going out with Babe and the boys.

And Lou is single.

He's probably the handsomest guy in baseball, the most eligible bachelor in New York, perhaps.

And he just doesn't have any interest in it.

He goes home to mom after the ball games.

When they're on the road, he goes back to his hotel room.

It's fascinating, and yet, they become buddies.

Lou and Babe are just one of the great pairs.

And they're the two greatest home run hitters in the game, so the world just can't get enough of them.

- We'll talk about the extraordinary luckiest man speech in Yankee Stadium in just a minute.

But Gehrig gets married.

What kind of husband was he?

- He was an incredibly devoted, loyal, loving husband.

He was so shy around women though that really, I think he might've been a virgin when he got married to Eleanor.

And Eleanor really had to sort of pull him away from his mother and say, "Okay, here's how this works.

No, we're not going to live with your mother and father after we get married."

She literally had to like, they had to fight over that because he thought that she would just, Eleanor would just move in with Ma and Pa. And it was tough.

But he really starts to come out of his shell once he meets Eleanor and gets married.

He begins to get a little more comfortable with his fame.

He didn't like to sign autographs, he was too shy.

But Eleanor gets him not only signing autographs, but gets him to try out for the part of Tarzan in Hollywood when Johnny Weissmuller was in contract dispute over his pay and- - He didn't, hold on a second.

I'm sorry for interrupting 'cause you wrote the book, I didn't.

He doesn't get the part because his legs were too muscular?

- Yeah, he was too muscular to be Tarzan.

That's what the Hollywood people say.

They said they didn't think women were gonna be attracted to that 'cause his legs and butt were too big.

- So I'm curious about this.

So many aspects of, first of all, the Yankees, those of us who love the Yankees in 2024, it's hard to appreciate how often they won in the 1920s.

Gehrig begins to, while he's playing extraordinarily well, he and Babe Ruth are third and fourth in the lineup, right?

- Yep.

- Babe Ruth hits all these home runs.

Gehrig plays every day.

Can you do the Wally Pip thing for real quick?

Just gimme 30 seconds of Wally Pip and why that matters.

Wally Pip was the first baseman for the Yankees, please.

- Yeah, Wally Pip was the starting first baseman for the Yankees.

Gehrig was this kid just out of college, sitting on the bench.

And one day, Pip got pulled from the lineup.

The story goes, the myth is that he had a complaint.

He had a headache and wanted the day off and never got back in the lineup 'cause Gehrig took over and just killed it.

That's not exactly true.

Pip was really slumping and was nearing the end of his career.

And the manager, Miller Huggins wanted to shake up the lineup.

The Yankees weren't playing that well at the time.

So it wasn't the headache that really doomed him, but the important thing is that Gehrig, when he got the opportunity, seized it.

He made sure that he was never going to be out of that lineup again because he played so well and went on to play 2,130 consecutive games.

And Pip had to find a new team.

- Put in perspective the speech, in Yankee Stadium, what year?

- 1939, July 4th.

- July 4th, 1939.

But ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, known later because of Gehrig's fame, when did he begin to physically feel that something was wrong?

- It's really interesting.

And my research showed that Gehrig probably played the entire 1938 season with ALS.

That you can see in spring training even, he's complaining about cramps in his hands and in his legs.

And he starts ordering lighter bats.

He starts adjusting his batting stance.

You can look at the statistics and see how he's off that year.

He plays every day, doesn't miss a game.

Ends up hitting 29 home runs, 114 RBIs, a 295 batting average.

A terrific season by anyone else's standards, but he knows that something's wrong with his body because this, for him, is by far, the worst season he's ever had.

And by the end of the season, you can even see in pictures how much weight he's lost, how much muscle he's lost.

And ALS is a disease that melts your muscles away.

And Gehrig was so strong and had so much strength that he was able to carry on reasonably well, even as the disease sapped him.

But by 1939, he couldn't play anymore, and played just a few games before giving up, and then going to the Mayo Clinic where he got his diagnosis.

- Talk about July 4th, 1939.

- This is the day that the Yankees decided to honor Lou with Lou Gehrig Day at Yankee Stadium in between games of a double header against Washington.

And what's so special about it is that Gehrig was shy and everybody knew it.

And for him to stand up there in front of 61,000 people, and he didn't wanna speak.

He actually tried to get out of it at the last minute, and his manager pushed him up to the microphone and made him speak.

And for him to stand up there and to find the courage and to find the words, words that even people who aren't sports fans know today, where he said... - Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Crowd cheers and applause.

-Where he said, "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

That just changed everything for Lou Gehrig and for our perception of him and for what it means to be a sports hero.

Because he basically said, "Yes, I'm dying, but I've been lucky to have such a great life."

And he gave people, everybody goes through tragedy in their life, he gave us a way of looking at it.

It's focusing on the good and not the bad break, as he called it.

- A bad break.

Yeah, he thanked the ball boys, he thanked his manager, he thanked the players, he thanked the fans.

- Even thanked his mother-in-law.

- So when we talk about grit, an overused word.

Class in the face of adversity, he's known, again, as Jonathan said, he knew he was dying.

What do we take from Lou Gehrig's career, the way he lived, the way he played, and the way he died?

- Well, he just showed such enormous strength and dignity and unselfishness.

You know, that's the thing.

When he found out he was dying, he said, "It's not about me.

I wanna help others.

I want to do research on ALS.

I wanna make sure my family's okay."

You know, in my research with this book, I found 200 pages of letters that Gehrig wrote as he was dying.

And they had never been published before.

And what's so extraordinary about these letters is that first of all he's talking to the doctors about what he can do to try to find a cure.

And then at a certain point he says, "Okay, it's not working for me, but maybe we can learn something from these experiments that will help the next person who's diagnosed with ALS."

And he's also asking doctors to take care of his wife and to maybe hide the truth from her a little bit.

Don't let her know that there's no chance of me beating this thing.

So he just continues in these letters to show us his real character.

Lou Gehrig, again, don't have to be a Yankee fan, a baseball fan to appreciate everything he meant.

Not just to baseball, but to American culture and to people, so many people who are facing ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease and other tragedies in their lives that have to do with their health or declining health.

Just an extraordinary, iconic figure in the 1920s and thirties in American history.

That's why we remember Lou Gehrig.

Jonathan, thank you so much.

And right after this, we're gonna switch gears dramatically and talk about a very different American figure who was famous/infamous for very different reasons.

Stay with us.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

- We're back with Jonathan Eig.

We just did something on Lou Gehrig, 1920s and '30s in the United States.

We remember very different character, Al Capone, did not play baseball, loved baseball, was a criminal.

Listen, I'm obsessed by this book, this is all marked up.

Why did Al Capone matter in American history and why does his name still live on in the world of organized crime in American culture?

- Al Capone is really our first celebrity criminal, you know, to the point where, you know, we'd had these Western outlaws before, but Capone is the one who embraces the American celebrity machine.

He actually wants the attention.

And, you know, it's important, and first of all, you know, he is born in New York, turn of the century and makes his fame in Chicago during prohibition where he recognizes that Americans-- - Hold on Jonathan, I hate to do this, that's what happens when you read the book.

He doesn't just go to Chicago for the sake of it.

He goes to Chicago because he killed someone in New York and there was a lot of heat on Al Capone and he was told by the mobsters in New York, you gotta get outta here.

And I think it was Frankie Yale who said, you gotta get out, go to Chicago and he started working for a guy by the name of Johnny Torrio, who was the organized crime leader in Chicago.

As if I know all this stuff.

I'm just, I know it because of you, but go ahead.

- No, it's great.

- So he is in Chicago as a very young man, and what happens?

- He moves to Chicago, you know, again, as you said, fleeing the police in New York moves to Chicago and just happens to arrive there as prohibition is becoming the law and he's thinking he's just gonna be, you know, maybe a bartender or a bouncer, but suddenly there's an opportunity if you know your way around a bar and a brothel to make some real money, if you're willing to keep doing it after it becomes illegal.

So the breweries are shutting down.

A lot of the bars are shutting down and Capone with the help of his mentor, Johnny Torrio, they decide to step in and take over these businesses.

They know that people still wanna drink and now they know that they can corner the market, that they can take over one of the biggest industries in America, really.

Now, they're not gonna take over the entire national distillery business, but they can do Chicago pretty well.

So there's just an enormous opportunity to make super crazy money really fast if you're willing to take the risk of getting arrested and if you're willing to, you know, use violence to control the competition.

And, you know, Capone is comfortable with that and he rises to power, rises to fame.

- How young?

- And as I said-- - I'm sorry, tell everyone, he's in his early twenties.

- Yeah, he is in his early twenties.

He's like 21 when he gets to Chicago and by the time he's 26, he's a celebrity.

And he's a celebrity because he's basically saying, yeah, I'm breaking the law, what're you gonna do about it?

And he's giving interviews to reporters about it, saying, sure, you know, you call it a crime, but what about the people who are drinking this stuff?

Are they all criminals too?

What's the difference here?

So he's really challenging the American system and he's positioning himself.

He's basically saying, I'm just an entrepreneur.

I'm just an immigrant's kid trying to live out the American dream and nevermind the, like the Tommy guns and the, you know, the violence.

Let's not talk about that part.

You know, that's why he dresses in these pinstriped suits.

He wants to be seen as like a, as a legitimate businessman.

- This is pre obviously John Gotti who had to be influenced by people like Capone.

But let's talk about what a bad guy Capone really was in this sense.

first of all, he and those connected with him killed a lot of folks who they were competing against.

There was a south side of Chicago and the northern part of Chicago, which was dominated by, let's say Italians were more dominant where Capone was.

And there were Irish and Jewish mobsters in the other part of the city.

And very often, Capone and those around him would simply just kill his competition, did he not?

- That's right, no, it's true.

And it wasn't just Capone, it was open season because the, first of all, they took the precaution of buying off the police and the courts and they bribed everyone in sight.

So it was almost impossible to get arrested for Gangland attacks in Chicago.

They had almost complete immunity, and Capone knew that.

So if a rival came on his turf and tried to start selling booze where he was selling it, they knew that there was gonna be violence and then the violence just became a back and forth until, you know, whoever was left standing won the day.

And Capone was usually in Chicago, the one who was left standing because he was the most willing to dish out the violence.

- Let's do February 14th, 1929, otherwise known as the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, please.

- Yeah, Valentine's Day in Chicago, 1929, a cold and snowy day, and a bunch of members of the Moran Gang are found dead in-- - "Bugs" Moran.

- Bugs Moran gang are found dead in a garage on the north side, just about a mile from where I'm sitting right now.

The assumption immediately is that Capone must have done it.

Now, Capone was in Florida at the time, and I didn't find any evidence that he ordered this hit, but doesn't really matter because everybody just assumes that Capone has something to do with it and it's really gruesome.

You know, you've got bodies lying on the ground.

You've got newspaper photographers taking pictures and because the tabloid era is really starting, newspapers are running photos that they wouldn't have run a while back.

And Americans are waking up and looking at their morning papers and seeing these horrible images of kind of violence that just seems shocking.

And it's really that Valentine's Day Massacre that finally forces the federal government to step in and say, Chicago may not do anything about this, but we are not gonna let this continue anymore.

And the president himself, Herbert Hoover, makes it his mission to get Capone off the streets and that's when you start to see the crackdown on Capone.

So even if he had nothing to do with the Valentine's Day massacre, it's an important part of his undoing.

- What's ironic is that after all the murders, all the violence, right, the feds get Al Capone, and P.S.

it was not Eliot Ness in spite of the movies and what people wanted to believe in terms of the glorified story about Eliot Ness and Al Capone.

It was not Eliot Ness, it was someone else in the FBI who went after him and they got him, they got Capone on tax evasion, talk about that, sloppy with his taxes and his accountant.

And his accountant.

- Right, he even went and offered to pay his taxes, you know, estimating 'cause the Supreme Court actually had to rule that you, that you do have to pay taxes on illegal income.

So that puts you in a kind of a strange situation.

You know, if you have to pay taxes on illegal income, what do you do?

You declare all the ways that you were stealing, you know, so most criminals were not going to file taxes and the FBI knew that, I mean, the IRS knew that.

So they couldn't prove that Capone killed anybody.

They couldn't even prove that he was selling booze illegally.

He was very careful in keeping his hands off of the evidence like leaving no paper trail.

So finally the feds decided that let's just get him off the street any way we can.

And it might be a little embarrassing, it might make us look a little wimpy if tax evasion is the best we can do, but at least we take him out of operation and that's what they did.

They couldn't find enough evidence to do anything else.

So they charged him with income tax evasion, sentenced him to 13 years in federal prison, which is unheard of-- - Goes to Alcatraz, goes out to Alcatraz, goes to Alcatraz, right?

- Yes, right, they sent him first to federal penitentiary in Atlanta and then to Alcatraz.

And you might ask yourself, why does an income tax evader need to go to Alcatraz, this high security prison?

And it's because they wanted to send a message, they wanted to send a message that the federal government's getting tough on crime.

- Let's do this.

I skipped a couple of things.

I wanna talk about Capone as a husband and father, it's important to do that.

In the 1929 meeting in Atlantic City where the other mobsters are just not thrilled with him because he was so public.

he brought so much attention, it was a problem for them.

That being said, Scarface, the scar comes from a fight he had, correct?

- Yes.

- What was the scene?

- Capone got his scars, three slashes across the cheek in a bar in New York on Coney Island called the Yale Inn.

- Yeah.

- Where he was hit by-- - Owned by Frankie Yale.

- Owned by Frankie Yale and he was, he was hitting on a girl in the bar.

The girl didn't like it, told her brother.

and the brother came after Capone with a knife.

So he had these three really prominent scars on his face.

And he was someone who liked to think of himself as a fashionable dresser.

He actually complained to newspaper editors.

You know, why can't you take a picture of me from the other side when you're gonna put me in the paper.

- On this side.

- Yeah, He was very sensitive about it.

- And, of course, you know, he got the nickname Scarface, which is not exactly a nickname anybody would like.

- Hmm, Capone as a father and husband.

- He was a very loving father and husband, only had one child and raised him in Chicago in a house full of family.

You know, he had a big house on the south side of Chicago where his mother and some of his brothers and his sister lived as well.

Big Sunday dinners.

He was gone a lot, of course because he was running a busy underground dangerous business and he often had to hide out with bodyguards.

But when he was home, he was by all accounts, a loving father.

- Hmm, again, the meeting in Atlantic City, 1929, other mobsters not happy with him.

and they're having discussions as they're walking on the beach in Atlantic City trying to figure out what to do.

Do they kill this guy?

What do they do with him?

Why was Al Capone the most famous mobster in America?

Such a problem for Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and others, why was he such a problem for them?

- You know, every city in America had a big bootlegger like Capone.

Every city in America had a big mafia leader who was running a big portion of the operations.

Capone was the only one who talked about it, who gave interviews to the media who attracted attention and as a result of that, it increased scrutiny.

You know, these guys had a good thing going.

They were almost invulnerable.

Police didn't come after them 'cause they were bribing the cops.

But when Capone began calling attention to himself, it created a problem for everybody because it got the federal government involved and the federal government had not really been enforcing prohibition.

And suddenly they started getting more heat and they felt like if Capone just shut up, our problems would be a lot lighter.

So they all met in New Jersey and tried to convince Capone to change, but at that point it was too late and Capone couldn't change.

He actually got arrested on his way out of New Jersey-- - For a gun charge?

- for carrying a gun, right.

- Yeah.

- And some people have speculated that maybe, you know, he was set up for that arrest by one of the people in New Jersey who were tired of hearing him yapping so much.

- Yeah, we are not tired of hearing Jonathan Eig talk about his books.

By the way, check out our interview with Jonathan Eig on Dr. King, the other one with Lou Gehrig we did, another one on Muhammad Ali, extraordinary.

Before I let you go, Al Capone how he dies and how pathetic that is, please.

- So while Capone was in prison, he began showing symptoms of syphilis, tertiary syphilis, which was, you know, causing neurological damage and causing his mind to start to rot.

He had probably had a sexually transmitted disease early in his twenties and not treated it.

And as a result of that, he was suffering severe neurological damage.

So by the time he gets out of prison, he's kind of a mess and no longer capable of even thinking about getting back into the business.

So he retires to Florida where he sits on the edge of his pier at this house that he bought, and somehow the IRS did not repossess and he's fishing off the end of the pier and really babbling like a child much of the time and didn't seem to have a lot of money either.

It's not really clear what happened to Capone's money.

Did he have it hidden away somewhere?

Or did he lose it all?

You know, a lot of people felt like Capone never really saved any money.

He never kept a big stash because he just liked to live so well.

So, you know, a lot of people wonder if there's still a Capone stash out there somewhere.

I guess that's what Geraldo Rivera was looking for back in the day.

- Yeah, the vault and when Capone dies, not a lot of people go to his funeral.

So Jonathan, I cannot thank you enough.

It's one thing talking about Al Capone, but talking about Lou Gehrig was, I'm not gonna say more enjoyable, but 1920s, 1930s, Al Capone, Lou Gehrig, famous in Capone's case, infamous for very different reasons, cannot thank you enough, Jonathan, for your time, for your writing, your expertise, and you are an extraordinary historian, thanks so much, Jonathan.

- Thanks, great talking to you.

- Cannot thank you enough for joining us.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by Wells Fargo.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Fidelco Group.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

New Jersey’s Clean Energy program.

Seton Hall University.

And by The Adler Aphasia Center.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by BestofNJ.com.

(light music) - The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, in partnership with utility companies throughout the state, can help you save money and create a more comfortable home through Comfort Partners, a free program that helps income-eligible customers reduce their utility bills through cost-effective measures that save energy, including lighting, hot water heaters, large appliances, heating and cooling improvements, insulation, and much more.

Learn more at NJCleanEnergy.com/CP.