Death
On October 27, 1941, Berry was travelling by car between gigs in Brookfield, Ohio and Toronto. Visibility was poor due to heavy fog. Approximately 15 miles from Conneaut, Ohio, the car in which he was a passenger skidded and crashed into the end of a steel bridge. Berry sustained a fractured skull and other internal injuries in the automobile accident. He was taken to Brown Memorial Hospital in Conneaut, where he died on October 30, 1941 aged 33 years.
Berry was survived by his wife, Mrs. Geraldine Berry; mother, Mrs. Margaret Berry, and sister, Miss Anne Berry. Over a thousand persons viewed Berry's coffin before his funeral at the Simpson Church. Cab Calloway came by plane from Rochester, N.Y. to attend the funeral. The pallbearers were: Duncan Hill, John James, Charles Scott, William Riley, James Wood and Wilkes Kinney. Hundreds of cars were in the funeral procession towards Peninsula Cemetery in Wheeling, West Virginia where Berry's remains were initially interred. In 1964, due to construction work on the I-70 Wheeling Tunnel thoroughfare, his remains were exhumed and moved to nearby Mt. Zion Cemetery. His remains now rest in an unmarked grave in a grassy knoll section of the cemetery.
Author Jack Kerouac was a Chu Berry fan, referring to him as "the great Chu Berry" near the beginning of The Subterraneans.
Read more about this topic: Chu Berry
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Hunger shall make thy modest zone
And cheat fond death of all but bone—”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“... the heart monitor,
the death cricket bleeping.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)