If only Lou Gehrig knew

Lou Gehrig bids farewell to Yankee fans in 1939

It seems everyone is dumping a bucket of ice water on their heads these days in the name of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or more simply ALS. The origins of this challenge are debated, but it evolved into the ALS challenge earlier this summer when golfer Chris Kennedy challenged his cousin, Jeanette Senerchia, whose husband has ALS, and was immediately picked up by the social media and television media in turn, and has quickly spread around the world with the mayor of Vilnius recently taking the challenge.

Instagrams make it easy for just about anyone to film and instantly download their ice cold bath, which has become a big hit among teenagers, sometimes with disastrous results. Celebrities try to one-up each other in the name of charity, but the arty poses look more like self-promotionals. Lost in all this is the serious nature of the disease, which was first called to the public eye when ALS ended Lou Gehrig's baseball career in 1939. As a result, it was known as Lou Gehrig's Disease for many years.

Given its very low prevalence, it had pretty much gone under the radar, although it was first recorded in the late 19th century by French and British doctors. It is a motor neuron disease which over time leaves its victims unable to move or speak, but with their mind fully intact. Stephen Hawking has a motor neuron disease similar to ALS.

Stephen Hawking enjoying a lighter moment

Funny enough, marijuana not only provides much needed relief for ALS patients but if used in early stages of the disease can stave off the effects for a longer time. Cathy Jordan helped popularize the use of medical marijuana for ALS patients and has far exceeded the 3-5 years she was given to live by her neurologist in 1985. Lou Gehrig had died within two years of being diagnosed with the disease.

Maybe persons should be lighting up a joint for ALS instead of dumping ice cold water on their head.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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