There are only going to be two more excerpts including today. This week a simple funeral service for a good man
The next morning, June 4, a cool rain pattered the trees. The ivy-covered church glistened in the shades of green and gray. Inside, the altar was banked in flowers.
Christina and Henry Gehrig were the first to arrive. They were joined in the pew closest to the altar by Eleanor, Nell Twitchell, and Eleanor's brother, Frank Jr. The Yankees were in Detroit to play the Tigers, but [Bill] Dickey and [Joe] McCarthy had flown home to attend the funeral. The game that day was eventually rained out.
The ceremony began promptly at ten o'clock. About one hundred people clustered inside the church [Christ Protestant Episcopal]. The service, which lasted about seven minutes, was as simple and straightforward as the public image of the man being remembered. Eleanor sat silently. Christina wept. The Reverend Gerald V. Barry read the Episcopal service for the dead. "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away," he said. He paused and announced there would be no eulogy.
"We need none," he said, "because you all knew him."
With that, Gehrig's mahogany coffin, blanketed in red roses, was carried to the hearse. His body was taken to the Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens, the same place his baby sister had been cremated thirty-five years earlier.
As the hearse pulled out of the church driveway and onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, hundreds of strangers stood in the pouring rain along the side of the road, saying goodbye.
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