Train Accident and Life After Baseball
After the 1893 season, Bennett went hunting with pitcher John Clarkson. Bennett got off the train in Wellsville, Kansas to speak to an acquaintance. When he tried to reboard, Bennett slipped and fell under the train's wheels. Bennett lost both legs in the accident. He was fitted with artificial limbs but his baseball career was over.
After his injury, Bennett moved to Detroit, where he operated a cigar store. Detroit fans held a day in his honor, and he was given a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars. When a new ballpark was opened in Detroit in 1896, it was named Bennett Park in his honor. Bennett caught the first pitch at Bennett Park in 1896. It became a Detroit tradition for Bennett to catch the first pitch in Detroit, an honor that Bennett continued for every home opener through 1926.
Bennett died in February 1927 at age 72 in Detroit.
Read more about this topic: Charlie Bennett
Famous quotes containing the words train, accident, life and/or baseball:
“We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
““You are old, Father William,” the young man cried,
“And life must be hastening away;
You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death:
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“I am cheerful, young man,” Father William replied;
“Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remembered my God,
And He hath not forgotten my age.””
—Robert Southey (1774–1843)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)