October 29, 1941: The Tragedy of Harvey Hendrick

October 29, 1941: Harvey Hendrick shoots and kills himself at his farm in Covington, Tennessee. He was only 43.

He was born on November 9, 1897 on a farm near Mason, Tennessee, about 40 miles northeast of Memphis. A star football player at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he and Lou Gehrig were both rookie 1st basemen on the New York Yankees' 1st World Championship team in 1923, backing up Wally Pipp. "Gink" Hendrick also played the outfield. After Gehrig, a rookie at the time, he was the 2nd man to have played on that team to die.

He was also with the Yankees in 1924, and the Cleveland Indians in 1925. He spent the 1926 season with the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association. He returned to the majors with the Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were known while managed by Wilbert Robinson) in 1927. The Robins traded him to the Cincinnati Reds in 1931, the Reds traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1932, and he spent 1933 with the Chicago Cubs and 1934 with the Philadelphia Phillies.

His baseball career ended in 1934, with a .308 lifetime batting average, though as mainly a reserve player. Apparently, by 1941, his farm wasn't working out well.

Judging by the reaction when active Yankee Cory Lidle was killed in a plane crash just after the 2006 regular season, I can imagine that, today, if a former Yankee player committed suicide, the story would soak the news (in blood) for days.

But Hendrick has been just about forgotten. The Yankees did not wear black armbands, or any kind of memorial patch, during the 1942 season -- just the red, white & blue "HEALTH" shield that all teams wore in that 1st full year of World War II for the U.S. And there is no mention of him in Monument Park, or anywhere else in the new Yankee Stadium.

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October 29, 1941 was a Wednesday. This was also the day of the Kaunas Massacre, in which the Nazis killed over 9,000 Lithuanian Jews. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball season had ended 23 days earlier, with the New York Yankees winning the World Series over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season wouldn't start for another 3 days. So there were no scores on this historic day.