Wally Pipp was a first baseman...

...for the New York Yankees from 1915 to 1925. He retired with a lifetime batting average of .281 and led the American League in home runs with 12 in 1916 and 9 in 1917. (It was the "Dead Ball Era," remember?) On June 2, 1925, Pipp--suffering from an acute case of the "brown bottle flu"--was benched in favor of some young guy named Lou Gehrig. The 21-year-old Columbia University drop-out then went on to play for another 2,130 consecutive games, a record that lasted for 56 years. Pipp? He found work as a writer for Sports Illustrated. (Not a bad gig.)

I know what you're thinking: Fascinating! Who cares?

Bear with me; I have a point to make. Or a story to tell. Or something. Remember how I said I'd tell more stories about my father as I remembered them?

When we were in Minnesota last week, my mother told us how she and my father first met. It seems that a few years after Pipp's benching, in 1934, my mother was scheduled to go roller skating with a friend of my father's. When my dad's friend got grounded for some minor infraction, he asked my father to take his place. And like Gehrig before him, my dad stepped in and didn't relinquish the position for another 76 years.

Beat that, Cal Ripken, Jr.!