Local Playwright Reveals Hidden Story of Yankee “Iron Horse” Lou Gehrig

Lou Gehrig may be one of the best-known sports figures in history, but that’s just the beginning. On April 16th, the Binghamton High School International Baccalaureate Theatre Class will present a local playwright’s original vision of a period of Gehrig’s life that has been hidden from the spotlight -- a vision that casts new light on a hero who is revered to this day, seventy-five years after his death.

The staged reading of D. Keith Van Derbeck’s new one-act play My Luke, the Iron Horse (Gehrig’s wife Eleanor always called him Luke) tells the story of how the former Yankee first-baseman found fulfillment in the final two years of his life, through his early advocacy of music therapy, his wife Eleanor, and the work New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia offered him as a parole commissioner after the Yankees refused to offer him front-office employment. Half of all proceeds will go to fund research into the disease that disabled and then killed Gehrig, ALS.

For Van Derbeck, a first-time playwright, the production is a culmination of three

years of work. As he explains, “I was a probation officer for 29 years. And I’m sitting in my friend’s office, another probation officer. The Press used to have a ‘Fifty Years Ago Today’ feature. The June 2, 1991 feature was: ‘Fifty Years ago Lou Gehrig died in New York City as a parole commissioner.’ And I said, ‘Lou Gehrig was a parole commissioner? He did basically what I’m doing?’ So I hold this thing in for twenty years. I don’t tell anybody. And then the New York State Probation Officer’s Association asked me to write an article for their newsletter. I write the article, just a one page article. People like it, and then they ask me if I would write another. So I did. And it kind of morphed into a play.”

Van Derbeck took his idea to his friend Larry Kassan, head of theatre at Binghamton High School and director of the upcoming production. Kassan, a recognized expert on Van Derbeck’s favorite playwright (and Binghamton’s native son) Rod Serling, encouraged him to develop the concept and to take a playwright’s seminar in New York City. The seminar, “The Play Only You Could Write,” featuring Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristoffer Diaz, lit the flame that allowed Van Derbeck to turn little known history into his own dramatic piece of non-linear historical fiction.

“I’ve written this play six times. I didn’t even know what an internal monologue was. I took the idea of using a prologue and an epilogue, which Rod Serling had in everything he wrote, and used that in my play.”

In the case of My Luke, that prologue-epilogue form centers around the famous “today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech delivered at Yankee Stadium in 1939, shortly after Gehrig’s retirement was announced. For Van Derbeck, the speech was an inspiration in that it left a mystery open for him to solve. He explains, “The Gary Cooper movie [“The Pride of the Yankees”] has him give that famous ‘Luckiest Man’ speech, then basically going into a tunnel and dying. I would watch that and say, ‘Hold it now, there are two more years to this man’s life!’ He does give the ‘Gettysburg Address’ of sports, and it is a nice way to end a movie, but that’s where I pick it up.”

Gehrig made it clear to many people that he wanted to work for the Yankees’ front-office or in the organization as a scout after his retirement. But the team’s General Manager at the time was Ed Barrow, an old-style baseball executive who becomes in some way’s the the villain of Van Derbeck’s piece. To Barrow, front office jobs were reserved for family and the recipients of favors. Players didn’t get them -- even Gehrig, who as a Columbia University man, almost certainly had the intellectual chops to handle the job.

It is legendary New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia that Van Derbeck turns into the hero of My Luke. Mayor La Guardia stepped up to the plate and gave Gehrig a ten-year term as a parole commissioner -- in which capacity he worked hard until his death, always believing he could beat his disease. Gehrig introduced at least one unheard of innovation to the profession -- taking parolees to hear open-air concerts of the New York Philharmonic, so that they could share the delight he took in classical music. Gehrig went to performance after performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, crying in the seats as he followed the sung German, his own heritage language.

As Van Derbeck puts it, My Luke is “the story the New York Yankees do not want you to know” of how they denied one of their greatest heroes a place with the team. The author looks forward to his first night as a performed playwright, explaining, “I don’t know how I’m going to feel. I feel it’s going to be a sense of accomplishment. The students I know are going to do a great job. I’ve seen several of their plays. Staged readings are great because you get to actually put your mind and your imagination into what is going on. They don’t show everything for you. “

The play promised to tell an inspiring story of a little-known period in Lou Gehrig’s life, as well as to embody the inspiring story of a new local theatrical writer. As Van Derbeck puts it, “If you read about eight books, have compelling characters, and obviously have a good story, you can write a play. It started, and then I did the research on him and found some really interesting things that nobody knows, things that I wanted to share.”

‘My Luke, the Iron Horse’ will be performed just in time for the opening of baseball season, on Sat. April 16th at 3 and 7pm at Binghamton High School’s Black Box Theater. Tickets are $10, available by calling (607) 762-8202. Proceeds benefit the ALS Association of Central NY and the BHS Drama Dept.