MY LUKE AND I

A simple love story, simply told--the improbable match and marriage of Eleanor Twitchell, the fun-loving society gift from Chicago, that toddiin' Prohibition town, and the shy Yankee first baseman, Luke Gehrig, whom she introduced to Wagnerian opera and Anna Karenina Forty years later Eleanor Gehrig remembers her ""huge but proper wallflower,"" the dizzy courtship and the jubilant years as Mrs. Luke, baseball wife, before both marriage and career were terminated by the Mayo Clinic's spitball--amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Afterward it was known simply as ""Gehrig's disease."" Eleanor Gehrig tells it without tears; she kept up her chin even as she watched her ""squarely built, squarely oriented"" Eagle Scout sag and decline ""like a great clock winding down.