4 Days to Opening Day

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 4 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s book is Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig by Jonathon Eig. This is a quick sketch of the parents of the Iron Horse.

Heinrich left Germany at the age of twenty. He may have emigrated illegally, since there appear to be no records of his journey in either Germany or the United States. He settled first in Chicago, didn’t like his prospects there, and soon tried New York. Long after most men his age had married, Heinrich remained single. No doubt his pokey work habits made him something short of a prize catch. He had no known family in the United States and probably lived alone, renting a bed or sofa from a family that needed whatever pittance he could afford to pay. In 1901, at the age of thirty-four, he finally met the woman he would marry.

Anna Christina Fack was born in 1882 in Schleswig-Holstein, a German province near the Danish border. When Christina was one year old, her mother died after delivering a stillborn son. Her father, a carpenter, quickly remarried. It’s not clear whether Christina continued to live with her father’s new family or moved in with her grandparents. She grew into a tall, sturdy woman, with powerful hands and forearms, like her father, and no waist whatsoever. Her hair was curly and blond, but there was nothing cute or girlish about her. As soon as she was old enough, she began working as a servant around Schleswig-Holstein, saving her money and plotting her escape.

She left home in May 1900, five months after her eighteenth birthday, sailing from Hamburg to New York in third-class steerage on a ship called the Pennsylvania. She had no friends or relatives waiting for her in the United States, no job and no place to live. As she stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, she told the clerk recording her arrival that she had twenty-five dollars to her name. She may well have been lying. Immigrants often exaggerated their wealth for fear of being turned away, and twenty-five dollars was a considerable sum for a new arrival traveling in third-class steerage.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.