This Fourth of July brings with it a special anniversary for New Yorkers. On this day 85 years ago Yankees baseball great Lou Gehrig, suffering from ALS, the neurodegenerative illness now known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, delivered his famous “luckiest man on the face of the earth” farewell speech at Yankee Stadium between games of a 1939 doubleheader with the Washington Senators. Gary Cooper would deliver the speech in the 1942 biopic “Pride of the Yankees,” and as Gehrig’s biographer Richard Sandomir has pointed out, it is that film, not old newsreels or recordings, that has made the speech accessible over the years. But what makes the speech memorable today is more than Cooper’s moving delivery or Gehrig’s long career as a first baseman for the Yankees. The speech is memorable because of the passion with which it makes the case for kindness as a public and private virtue and because it has a sequel: the decision Gehrig made after he left baseball to help others by working as a parole commissioner in the administration of New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Gehrig declared in the lines of his speech that are most often quoted. Unexpected words from someone whom illness was forcing into early retirement. But Gehrig was not being ironic in saying he was lucky. ALS — his “tough break,” as Gehrig called it — could not, he believed, negate the good life he had led. For Gehrig that good life consisted of “kindness and encouragement from you fans . . . a mother and father who work all their lives so you can have an education . . . a wife who has been a tower of strength.” It did not mean the number of home runs he hit or leaving baseball with a lifetime batting average of .340. In his farewell speech Gehrig was aligning himself with feelings that we don’t typically associate with professional sports, especially today when fist pumps and trash talk are routine. Gehrig feared that many would look on what he said as too sentimental. Later in the Yankees clubhouse, surrounded by teammates and a roomful of reporters, Gehrig asked, “Did my speech sound silly?” The fans who heard Gehrig speak certainly did not think so. Much of his career had been played during the Great Depression of the 1930s. If the kindness and compassion that mattered so much to him were not always part of baseball, they were part of the political legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. A few years before Gehrig’s farewell speech, Roosevelt had used a different New York sports arena, Madison Square Garden, to deliver a campaign address in which he insisted that kindness and compassion, more than any specific political program, were the core of the New Deal. “Your government is still on the same side of the street as the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side,” Roosevelt declared. After he left baseball, Gehrig did not look on the second act of his life as anticlimactic. “I have an awful lot to live for,” he insisted at the end of his farewell speech. In spending as much time as his health would allow working for the LaGuardia administration as a parole commissioner, Gehrig was able to be a vital part of the city he had grown up in and gone to college in. The position, which paid $5,700 a year, far less than Gehrig’s Yankees salary, centered on giving others hope for a second chance in life — exactly what he wanted for himself. As his disease eroded his mobility, Gehrig’s wife Eleanor drove him everywhere, taking him from their home in Riverdale to his office in Manhattan and from there to local jails. Only reluctantly did Gehrig stop his work for the LaGuardia administration Unlike the most famous contemporary victim of ALS, the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who lived more than 50 years with the disease, Gehrig survived just two years after his diagnosis by doctors at the Mayo Clinic. Gehrig died quietly on June 2, 1941, but not before expressing his hope in a letter to Mayor LaGuardia that he might get well enough to return to his job. At his family’s request, there was no eulogy at his funeral service. Whatever needed to be said about him had come two years earlier in his own goodbye to baseball. Mills is professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 — The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.”