In the year 1888, City College of New York played a baseball game against Manhattan College. The leading slugger of the CCNY team was a young man named Bernard Baruch. “Home Run Lefty” was his nickname–he could hit the ball a country mile.
Late in the game Baruch came to bat with the bases loaded, and he clouted a long fly over the center fielder’s head. The runners scored, and Baruch raced around the bases trying to beat the throw. The pitcher was covering the plate, and it would be a close play. The pitcher got the throw, but Baruch slid in hard, knocking the ball from the pitcher’s hand. Baruch had scored.
But there was a big argument between the teams. Manhattan players claimed Baruch was out. Soon the teams were fighting, and during the free-for-all someone hit Baruch over the head with a baseball bat. The blow was hard enough to damage his hearing permanently.
Bernard Baruch’s ambition had been to go to the U.S. Military Academy after college. But his deafness made that impossible. Instead he went into business and finance. In time Bernard Baruch became one of the richest men in the world and a trusted adviser to several presidents of the United States. West Point lost an officer, but America gained a great statesman, all because of an argument at home plate during a college baseball game.
From The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch
Looks like Baruch had a hand in the development of the medical specialty for Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, which was directly connected to his advocacy for wounded veterans. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to get France and Britain to lay off their punitive stance for WWI reparations (which is considered to be one of the myriad influences for Hitler’s rise to power). During the Great Depression he supported Eleanor Roosevelt’s project to relocate unemployed miners to a town in WV so they could have work. When the US entered WWII, his work for the government was largely credited with accelerating our military production targets by two years which caught the Axis by surprise and was clearly a major factor in the Allied victory.
Yet, he also gave a huge endowment to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was accused of war profiteering, made his fortune as a sugar speculator which undoubtedly had a significantly negative impact on the native Hawaiians during that period, and shorted the market big time right before the crash, which means he made a killing on the nation’s collective misery.
So…he’s complicated.
hey…. you think if someone smacks me one with a bat ill get succesfull too?
lord knows nothing else has worked yet
I don’t always comment on these but I do read them and I love the illustrations.