There are a handful of giants in the history of baseball.

One was called "The Iron Horse," holding the consecutive-games-played record for 56 years, distinguishing himself as a supremely talented first basemen and being such a powerful and consistent hitter that he stood out in the lineup called “Murderer’s Row.”

Lou Gehrig, fourth in that famous Yankees lineup and No. 4 in the minds of baseball fans for all time, retired July 4, 1939 — giving arguably one of the most famous speeches in American history on that sad day in Yankee Stadium when a disease crippled him without warning or explanation. He was dead two years later, brought down by the terminal disease that now bears his name.

Over half a century later, one Cornell graduate was given the death sentence of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Rather than quietly fading into oblivion, Michael Goldsmith ’72 embarked on a mission. Wanting to help the next generation of ALS victims, he became the father of Major League Baseball’s 4♦ALS Awareness Day — he entreated Major League Baseball to honor one of its own and mark the 70th anniversary of Gehrig’s retirement with nation-wide ceremony: Goldsmith’s achievement was 55 years of normal life and three years with a death sentence in the making.

Austen wheels his father, Michael, up to the plate to throw the first ceremonial pitch

A CORNELL LEGACY

On the surface, Michael Goldsmith and his clan seem like any other Cornell family. After completing his degree from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, he graduated from Cornell Law School in 1975. Michael found his future wife on this campus, marrying his younger sister’s freshman year roommate.

He served as Counsel to the New York State Organized Crime Task Force in White Plains, N.Y., from 1983 to 1985, running investigations about figures such as infamous mobster John Gotti. The racketeering specialist with firsthand experience joined the law faculty at Brigham Young University in Utah, where he has lived and taught for over 20 years. Michael even served as a visiting professor at his alma mater in 2005.

Meanwhile, his children have carried on the Cornell tradition in the family. Austen ’07, an Applied Economics and Manage­ment major, and Jillian ’10, a Human Development major planning to be a teacher, grew up hearing about Cornell.

It was around the time that Jillian had come to Cornell, however, that Michael received some life-altering news.

‘GIVEN A BAD BREAK’

rel="nofollow">Lou Gherig's Farewell Speech Michael was first diagnosed with ALS in September 2006 at the age of 55 — “given a bad break,” as Gehrig said in his farewell speech. “Actually [my dad] kind of diagnosed himself,” Jillian explained. “With ALS, the first symptom is that you get these twitches in your arms. It looks like a muscle spasm. And he knew that it was a symptom of ALS.” Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder that degrades the neurons controlling muscle movement, eventually leading to paralysis. The doctors weren’t sure that Michael had ALS at first, which is often the case with the disease. They did a series of tests to rule out other diseases; they measured his strength and waited to measure the decline that would indicate ALS. Yet the first visit to the doctor in 2005 yielded no sign of terminal illness. But a year later, something still didn’t feel right. In December 2006, when Austen was a senior and Jillian a freshman, Michael took them out to dinner on New York City’s Upper East Side. Taking a walk afterwards, their father tried to tell them, but the words came slowly. “He couldn’t say it,” Austen said. “He kept taking breaths and finally got it out [that he was diagnosed with ALS].” The crowd at Yankee Stadium RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU HAVE HEARD OF ALS One of the most frustrating aspects of ALS is that it is often overlooked — no one knows what it is, so it is hard to get funding for research. Jillian, for example, had to explain what the disease was to most of her friends. But one person Jillian met didn’t need the explanation. Last fall, Jillian enrolled in DEA 1110: Making a Difference by Design. The course provided her with the most important source of advice she would encounter in coping with her father’s illness — the professor herself, Prof. Sheila Danko, design and environmental analysis, had watched her mother die from ALS. Diagnosed in Fall 2003, she was dead within a year and a half. One week, a guest lecturer talked about a company that designed products to help people with arthritis; one product was a special chair, one helped you button your shirt. Jillian immediately thought of her father. “After the class I went up to [the professor],” Jillian said. “Professor Danko was in the background. She didn’t even know me at this point. It was a big class. I said, ‘Well, my dad has Lou Gehrig’s disease and I’m just trying to get ideas for products to get him to make his life easier. And she heard [me]. … If she had been further away at the time, the connection wouldn’t have been made.” Danko agreed: “I nearly lost it. … It was amazing — the serendipity of it.” With only 30,000 people currently diagnosed with ALS in the United States, the odds that Goldsmith and Danko would find each other were not in their favor. So uncommon that pharmaceutical companies won’t bother to pursue its cure seriously, ALS is not a disease that the average person knows much about. “ALS … I couldn’t have told you what those letters stand for [before my mother was diagnosed],” Danko said. Besides Gehrig, there are few big names associated with the disease. Perhaps theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is the most famous living person suffering from ALS. “Maybe we haven’t had enough stars die of it,” Danko said only half joking. When Danko talked to the doctor to get a diagnosis for her mother, the doctor shrugged his shoulders. Another doctor eventually settled on Lou Gehrig’s disease, but ALS is often mistaken for something else. At least confirmed patients can put a name to their suffering — however useless that name is in terms of finding a cure. “[The thing that people just don’t know about ALS is] how tough it is to get a death sentence,” Danko said. “That’s what [ALS] is. With other terminal illnesses, every once in awhile there’s a miracle. There are no documented cases of miracles with ALS.” LIVING WITH LOU GEHRIG’S DISEASE “Physically, and this is something that readers probably don’t know, every case is different,” Jillian explained. “They call it the snowflake illness. Every individual is completely different. People with ALS will eventually become immobile, lose their voice … but the one thing you can count on with ALS is if it starts out slow, the whole thing is slow. If it starts out fast, the whole thing is fast.” Michael’s disease has been the slow version — he was still teaching until last spring. The slow progression has been a blessing and a curse, however. On the one hand, it afforded him and his family more time together, and more time for him to be an advocate for the victims of ALS. On the other hand, his family has watched him become more and more humbled by this disease. He is in a wheelchair, has a feeding tube because swallowing leads to choking, and his voice is almost gone — he is talking only with the aid of a computer. “When I call him, he’ll hold the phone up like speakerphone,” Jillian said. “He can use one finger still, so he’ll move the mouse and click one letter at a time. … If you’re not a patient person, you become one. He will try to type out a sentence, and I can anticipate what he’ll say. But he’ll continue to type it even though I know what he’s going to say. I know he’s doing it as an independence thing.” Social situations have been difficult, Jillian continued. “He told me on the computer, this disease really sucks but the worst part has been to lose my voice. … To not be able to speak — you really don’t realize how much we use that.” Then, as the symptoms transform in the blink of an eye or over years, the family is forced to play catch-up with the disease. Since the medical establishment can’t predict the progression in an individual, victims and their families are left with vague ideas about the timetable and severity of symptoms. At some point, it becomes a 24-hour job watching ALS patients, often to prevent a fatal fall. “[My dad] did fall,” Jillian said. “He hit his head and was in critical care and was not conscious at all. It was very scary.” Both Jillian and her former professor agree on the toll that ALS takes on the family — new symptoms appearing all of the sudden, completely catching you by surprise. “When I go to see him, it’s a completely emotionally and physically draining experience. Especially when it’s a big gap [between visits]. I think last May, May 2008, I hadn’t seen him in five months. That was the first time I had seen a chunk of decline.” Additionally, the traditional roles of parent and child become reversed. Jillian made her father breakfast one morning a few weeks ago; even though he couldn’t eat the eggs, he would still ask for them to establish some sense of normalcy. But before Jillian could stop it, he had fallen out of his wheelchair, and Jillian was not strong enough to hold him up. “I was the only one in the house,” she said, “so I had to get him up and into a sitting position. I don’t know how I did it, but it happened.” “More than ever, this summer, I definitely learned my lesson,” Jillian added. “There are some things a child’s not expected to do. I don’t want to give my dad a feeding tube. … [Danko] really helped set the boundaries of things to come. She knew how to deal with it. She gave me lots of books. She was very supportive. She offered to take me out to lunch a couple times. She was just someone to talk to.” Jillian was a team leader for the ALS walk in Ithaca last September, but she has not found anyone else at Cornell in her situation other than Danko. “[It’s amazing] how little progress has been made with this disease,” Danko said. “ALS is the one that’s been ignored. That’s why Jillian Goldsmith’s dad has done such an amazing thing. He gave people an avenue to act … and baseball was quite proud to support that.” HOPE FOUND ON THE BASEBALL DIAMOND Michael Goldsmith's story on The Today Show Soon after his diagnosis, Michael became devoted to being an advocate for ALS sufferers. He did this mainly by spreading the word throughout his community, on both a one-on-one basis and in lectures. “When he was first diagnosed,” Jillian recalls, “he was like, ‘I’m not a scientist. The cure with this thing is going to rest in some cells. I don’t have any expertise there.’ His expertise is writing and law. So he tried to work it from that angle.” The upside of this disease is that the mind is unaffected, though this blessing is also a curse. “He’ll still be as smart as he is,” Jillian said. “My dad likes corny jokes, he’ll still want to crack those jokes. That’s what’s so difficult for him, not being able to participate. I guess that’s why the MLB was so big for him. It was his last chance to make a huge impact.” Jillian is still astonished that her dad was able to pull it all together in just one year, despite his condition. Fittingly, the idea was born on a baseball field. Turning to the favorite pastime of his youth to cope, Michael attended a Baltimore Orioles fantasy baseball camp in March 2008. While there, he realized that July 4, 2009 would be the 70th anniversary of Gehrig’s retirement. It was like a bolt of lightning — why not dedicate that day to ALS and Lou Gehrig? This was a way to kill two birds with one stone — raising awareness of the disease and also providing a new avenue for raising funds. Austen and Jillian took their father to a Phillies game for Father’s Day in July 2008, where Michael explained his vision to them. They were excited, but cautious. “[My dad said], ‘Guys, I have this idea. I wrote this article, and I think this [event] could happen in a year,’” Jillian recalled. “I remember Austen and I just looking at each other like, ‘No way.’ Driving was going down the drain. Eating was becoming a problem. Swallowing was becoming a problem. It would have been tough for him to do something on this scale. … We were careful not to get our hopes up. Not that I didn’t support my dad, but I was being careful.” That summer he submitted the article to Newsweek outlining his proposal. It took him maybe 90 minutes to write. Newsweek waited to publish “Batting for the Cure” until November — Election Week — which brought many more readers. “A lot of people were talking about it on forums,” Jillian said. “Facebook groups were started, not even by me. I didn’t start anything. And then early November, maybe 10 days later, someone in the MLB world saw it and presented it to [MLB Commissioner] Bud Selig and marketing chiefs in the MLB, and that’s what got the ball rolling.” The planning began, but MLB didn’t go public with its intentions until February. Though Michael’s condition was worsening — his voice failing and typing becoming harder and harder — Major League Baseball involved him in the entire process. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer. “This was his idea and they wanted him to be part of everything,” according to Jillian. “He did everything from the logo design — that was thought up by my dad — the four being used, the date.” And once an Orioles fan, always an Orioles fan. Though he grew up in Queens, Michael has been an Orioles fan since they made a run at the Yankees in 1960. His favorite player is the man who broke Gehrig’s long-held consecutive games played record: Cal Ripken Jr. Despite this allegiance, Michael was willing to do as MLB asked and go to Yankee Stadium for the event in memory of Gehrig. And though it was painful for him to wear the Yankees jersey, but he did it. On July 4th, 15 major league parks commemorated the anniversary — showing a video about Gehrig before the game and reading Gehrig’s farewell speech during the 7th inning stretch. At Yankee Stadium, the thousands of spectators saw Yankee players each read a line from Gehrig’s speech. Then they saw Michael Goldsmith himself, frail but excited, on the big screen in a video intertwining his story with Gehrig’s, then being wheeled out to the mound in his chair and throwing out the first pitch. Jillian was watching from a special suite, but the acoustics were so bad that she couldn’t hear what was going on. “I’m in this suite, and I see my dad,” she said. “They’ve already taken him down because he’s supposed to throw out the first pitch. And I couldn’t hear anything. I just couldn’t! They had subtitles going across, so I was reading them. But it kind of bummed me out because I wasn’t really sure if anyone was paying attention, and I wanted people to pay attention. … He got up out of his wheelchair and walked, which was amazing because he can’t get out of his wheelchair anymore. … Then everyone stood up and gave a standing ovation. That was the moment I realized, [whispering] ‘Oh, they could hear.’ I was so happy I got goose bumps, because there were 45,000 people at this packed stadium standing up clapping for my dad.” Austen described the same experience: “After he got out of the wheelchair, everyone was applauding — that was the validation [for my dad’s work]. It was incredible. I had to take a step back …” Austen paused then — it seemed as if he was reliving the emotion of that moment all over again. “I just wanted to remember that forever.” It was a father-son moment of the highest quality; Austen was there with his dad the whole time, supporting him on the mound. His father had offered him the honor of throwing out the first pitch, but Austen wanted his dad to do it. “It was important for him to do it,” Austen said, “so people could physically see what the illness does.” Michael tossed the ball to current first baseman Mark Texeira, a symbolic move on MLB’s part to honor Gehrig, who manned first for the Bronx Bombers over 70 years ago. “It was very emotional,” Jillian said. “My brother is 24 years old, and he was crying. They wheeled him back. He took the Yankees jersey right off. Honestly, I think there were so many people coming to visit my dad and talking to him that I don’t think he even saw the game.” AFTERMATH OF 4♦ALS When Michael got to his hotel the night before, there was a signed Cal Ripken Jr. jersey waiting for him. “That was just awesome for my dad,” Jillian said, “to know that his heroes were hearing about this story, too.” Such experiences sustain Michael as the disease weakens him further and further. About three weeks ago, his family moved Michael from Utah to Albany, where his mother and sister live. Living outside Park City, Utah was too isolated a place to care for Goldsmith properly. The whole family is on the East Coast, so it made more sense for Goldsmith to be there. Austen just moved to Manhattan last week, so he will be making trips to visit his dad in Albany. Yet amid the sadness of their dad’s condition, Jillian and Austen have observed far-reaching effects from Michael’s activism and the 4♦ALS event in particular. When Jillian went to Utah a few weeks ago, she went to B.Y.U., where he used to teach. Michael’s Newsweek article was still hanging on every bulletin board on every floor. Austen noted how well covered the event was in the media and that ALS advocacy groups were able to take advantage of the extra attention to raise funds toward a cure. “Before the event people didn’t really know what [the disease] was. None of my colleagues at work knew it was fatal,” Austen explained. “Afterwards, when I was talking to my neighbor or just catching up with people, they all knew about it, had either read the sports section of The New York Times or saw it on T.V.” We are one step closer to a cure for the “hidden disease,” as Danko calls it — thanks to a Cornell alumnus with a will, a way and a love of baseball. And as long as he can, Michael will continue to watch his beloved Orioles. Read Jillian's friend's heartfelt tribute to her friend