n the spring of 1940, a year after the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig, stepped down from what appeared to be a career in perpetuity at first base for the Yankees, he was serving on Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's New York City parole board. Doug Gruber, a student at Columbia who played on the university's baseball team, had long been an admirer of Gehrig's and wanted to interview him. A meeting was arranged for Gruber by Columbia's dean, Herbert Hawkes, and Gruber excitedly rushed downtown to meet him.

"He looked fit enough to go back up to Yankee Stadium and hit more home runs," Gruber recently recalled. "But how wrong I was."

Gruber asked Gehrig if he would have finished his last two years at Columbia to earn his degree if he had it to do over again.

"Yes, I think I should have done that," Gehrig said.

Gehrig remains one of Columbia's most celebrated dropouts, along with Alexander Hamilton, who quit Kings College (later Columbia) to help George Washington defeat the British. But if Gehrig had completed his studies at Columbia and turned down the scout Paul Krichell's modest offer of $1,500 to join the Yankees — which would have pleased his adoring parents, who dreamed that their son would become an engineer or an architect — would the world have ever heard of Henry Louis Gehrig?

On Thursday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Gehrig's 100th birthday (he was born in the lower-middle-class section of Yorkville on Manhattan's Upper East Side on June 19, 1903) will be remembered and celebrated. He departed baseball in 1939, after setting a record of playing 2,130 consecutive games (since broken by Baltimore's Cal Ripken Jr.) and hitting 23 grand slams, a record that still stands.

His body had been unmercifully attacked by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (now known as Lou Gehrig's disease). On July 4, 1939, he delivered his memorable farewell speech at Yankee Stadium before a hushed crowd of 60,000 fans. Less than two years later, Gehrig was dead at age 37.

Such a birthday celebration is an uncommon tribute to a player who died more than 60 years ago. But it is fitting that the man once characterized by the late Stephen Jay Gould as a person "who lived and died with nobility" should be so memorialized.

The Yankees, the team Gehrig played for in the Murderers' Row era of Babe Ruth, will do the honors. Columbia intends to rename its baseball field after Gehrig, and the university is also considering granting Gehrig the degree that he never earned.

Not long ago I journeyed to Washington, along with more than 600 A.L.S. advocates from across the United States, including 50 victims of Lou Gehrig's disease. The purpose of this mission was to impress upon dozens of legislators the need to raise more money to fight this still incurable affliction.

There are about 35,000 people in the country suffering from this neurodegenerative disease, and each year some 5,000 die from it. According to Lewis Rowland, chairman of the neurology department at Columbia from 1973 to 1998, the medical community is still uncertain what causes A.L.S. But Rowland points out that the research is now "focused mainly on the genetic susceptibility factor and the possible environmental link."

The A.L.S. patients I spoke to, even those who were not baseball fans, talked about Gehrig with reverence. They feel his name has played a major role in attracting attention to their plight, thus his legend has touched them deeply. They would agree with Paul Gallico, a fellow Columbian and a sportswriter of Gehrig's era, who said Gehrig was a splendid human being. Frank Graham, another prominent newspaper columnist who knew Gehrig, referred to him as a quiet hero.

One of the A.L.S. advocates, Elizabeth Angell, 28, who is writing her master's thesis at Columbia on the disease, has a quadriplegic mother, Jean, who has A.L.S.

"I never knew much about Gehrig until my mother got A.L.S.," she said. "Then I heard so much about him. Now I regard him as a beloved figure, a man of strength and consistency, who means so much to A.L.S. sufferers."

Mitch Albom, the author of the best-selling book "Tuesdays With Morrie," recalls that when Morrie Schwartz, a college professor of his, learned he had A.L.S., he thought immediately of Gehrig.

"When Gehrig said in his speech that `I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth,' I didn't feel that way," Morrie said to Mitch. "But Lou did."

When Ripken was challenging Gehrig's consecutive games record, Albom mused about how similar the two players were. "They were both quiet and committed, by nature," Albom said. "Both unusual men."

Though Gehrig played in the shadows of the larger-than-life Babe Ruth and the enigmatic Joe DiMaggio, his durability on the diamond and in the public mind has enhanced his reputation.

"The Pride of the Yankees," released in 1942, continues to bring tears to the eyes of television viewers. Gary Cooper, who portrayed Gehrig, and Teresa Wright, who played the role of Eleanor, Gehrig's wife, were nominated for Academy Awards.

Certainly, Gehrig was not a saint. He had his share of run-ins with umpires and he participated in a few fights in a major league career that began in 1923. But in one of the more vicious team brawls, between the Yankees and the Washington Senators in 1933, Gehrig remained on the sideline, a conspicuous absentee. He was tight with his money, an obvious carry-over from a youth when cash was always short in his house. He was basically a shy man, and Dan Daniel, who covered the Yankees as a newspaperman, once commented that every time Gehrig went to bat he anticipated it might be the last time he would get a hit, despite his extraordinary ability. Gehrig was also moody and occasionally indulged in unseemly practical jokes, much as the rambunctious Ruth did.

Despite these all-too-human flaws, Gehrig was as deserving an icon as the game has ever produced. He had an appreciation of his role as a team player and as the Yankees' captain, and was ungrudging in the time he spent chatting with youngsters and signing autographs for them. He wrote feeling letters to Eleanor and others, an unusual practice for a player in those days.

He was also ahead of his time in his attitude about that vast, neglected pool of black players who had been cruelly ignored by baseball.

"I have seen a number of Negro players," he said, "and many belong in the big leagues. There's no room in baseball for discrimination. We are, after all, the national pastime."

Ray Robinson is the author of “Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time” (Harper Perennial, 1991) and a member of the board of directors of the A.L.S. Association Greater New York Chapter.