Bart King - Early and Personal Life

Early and Personal Life

King was born in Philadelphia in 1873. Early in his life, he worked in the linen trade. Although this was the family business, his father later allowed him to leave to enter the insurance industry. King was not a member of the aristocratic and wealthy families of Philadelphia that produced many of the era's top cricketers. King's obituary in Cricket Quarterly suggests that his career in insurance was set up for him by those families to allow him to continue playing the game. In 1913, King married a young woman by the name of Lockhart; the marriage lasted for fifty years. King's wife died in 1963, and he died in 1965 in his native Philadelphia just two days short of his 92nd birthday. This was also the year which saw the United States gain membership in the ICC after it had been denied during his playing career.

Bart King was regarded by many of his contemporaries as an affable person. Ralph Barker called him the Bob Hope of cricket thanks to his quips and stories. King was also noted for making jabs at opponents, but leaving them laughing at themselves. The same held true when he would question umpires that turned down his appeals. He is said to have spoken for ninety minutes at a dinner during his last tour to England, punctuated every few seconds with laughs. The dinner guests were kept laughing even while King spoke with a dead-pan expression. One man who attended the dinner noted that King "told his impossible tales with such an air of conviction...that his audiences were always in doubt when to take him seriously. He made their task doubly difficult by sprinkling in a fair mixture of truth with his fiction."