Frank's Place: Gehrigs had unusual Mother's Day story

In the years I covered the Phillies, the memories of dads living and dead floated in the stale clubhouse air like watchful spirits.

The bond between father and son, so central to the sport's mythology, had given rise to virtually all their professional careers. And the dads of those mid-'90s Phillies were as varied as the players' personalities. There were gentle nurturers and cruel tyrants, absent fathers and those who hovered, tender men and some unable to express affection.

Not surprisingly, on those teams for whom macho was a much-used adjective, and for whom women were most often objectified as beef, you rarely heard a story about mom.

Those Phillies weren't unique. The baseball locker room - the game itself - has always been a male fortress. (Strangely, while ballplayers dream about making their fathers proud, their football counterparts mouth, "Hi, mom!" to TV cameras.)

Which is why the story of Lou Gehrig and his mother, Christina, remains so unusual as well as so strange.

On this Mother's Day, 75 years after the Yankee Hall of Famer's premature death finally separated them, that mother-son bond endures as one of the sweetest - and, in many ways, creepiest - relationship tales in sports history.

Writer Tara Krieger, in her Society of American Baseball Research biography of Gehrig's wife, Eleanor, termed the connection between the Iron Horse and his mother, "borderline oedipal."

William Kashatus, the Chester County native who has written a Gehrig biography, said that classical analogy might imply a little too much.

"I think 'momma's boy' is a more accurate description," Kashatus said via email this week. "He was by nature a sensitive, shy, and awkward youth with an unusually mature respect for authority."

Gehrig, of course, was so talented a player that any clubhouse razzing was probably limited. But that unusual closeness to his mother and their often public displays of affection must have prompted whispers and snickers from teammates, something the 1942 Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees only hints at.

The Philadelphia-born sportswriter, Fred Lieb, a close friend of Gehrig's, once witnessed a reunion between mother and son following a brief, spring-training road trip.

"Mom and Louie kissed and hugged for fully 10 minutes, as though they had been parted for years," Lieb wrote in his biography, Baseball As I Have Known It.

Gehrig lived at home until he was 30. "Mom" Gehrig was a frequent visitor to the Yankees clubhouse and always traveled to spring training, where she cooked and kept house for her boy.

When, just as the Yankees' pennant-winning 1927 regular season was ending, his mother was hospitalized, the team's star first baseman was ready to sit out the World Series to be with her.

"She is worth more to me than any ball game or World Series that was ever invented," he told reporters.

Christina Facke was born in Germany in 1881; came to America in 1899; and two years later married another German immigrant, Henry Gehrig. Much of the intense devotion to her son derived from the fact that Henry Louis, born in 1903, would be the only one of four offspring to survive childhood.

His father's discipline could be harsh and physical, and it was Lou's mother who, because of her husband's frequent illnesses, supported the family and became the boy's source of comfort.

Time didn't alter that closeness. When she got a job as a maid in a Columbia University fraternity, Lou tagged along as an assistant. When he himself attended Columbia, she hoped he'd become an architect and had little affection either for baseball or the girls who interested the strong and good-looking young man.

"Even though he was shy, he had known lots of girls," Lieb wrote, "but whenever he started to get serious with one, Mom Gehrig filed her objections. He loved his mother dearly and could not think of marrying a girl unless he obtained his mother's okay. At least twice he brought prospective wives over to our house, asking us what we thought of them. Lou's girls were always attractive, with both brains and humor. Then one time, he had been smitten with a girl and was thinking of proposing. On learning this, Mom journeyed to the young lady's hometown, looked around, made some investigations, and filed an adverse report, which Lou accepted."

Mom Gehrig didn't much like Eleanor, either, and, following a memorable quarrel on the subject with her son, only reluctantly attended his wedding.

"Eleanor was yet another intruder swooping in to steal away her only child," Krieger noted.

According to Lieb, when the couple considered adopting a child in 1939, the mother put her foot down.

"She wouldn't have any of that," he wrote. "She said she didn't want a grandson if it wasn't a Gehrig."

Gehrig apparently acquiesced. He and Eleanor would remain childless.

At the Yankee star's 1941 funeral, Christina Gehrig could not control her grief. A United Press story on the event noted that, with Eleanor sitting stoically in a front row, the mother "cried aloud as she entered the chapel."

No one was shocked when, after Gehrig's death from the neurological disease that would forever bear his name, the feud between mother and daughter-in-law continued.

At first, they battled over Gehrig's estate. Then, in 1949, plans to move Gehrig's ashes to Cooperstown, which Christina Gehrig endorsed, were scuttled by Eleanor.

Widowed and without her beloved child, Christina Gehrig spent her final years alone, drawn to the game her son had played and she belatedly learned to love.

She liked nothing more than attending Milford (Conn.) Little League games. She was such a regular that in 1952, two years before she died, the league was renamed in her son's honor.

"The kids just loved her," a friend told the New Haven Register in 2012.

But, as she must have known as she sat there alone watching them play, nowhere near as much as her son.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz