WRIGHTSVILLE Record, June 12, 1913
BENDIGO’S HOMER IN 9TH
BEATS SLOCUM 6—5
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, April 30, 1914
GUNNERY TAKES TRACK-FIELD
MEET WITH 53 POINTS
Big Ben Breaks 3 Marks, Scores 29 Points
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, February 11, 1915:
KANE BENDIGO KO’S JETHROE IN 4TH
Gunnery Star Takes State Junior Light-Heavy Title
“DOC” DOWD
(76, Director of Athletics at Fyfield Gunnery School 1905–1938; retired, now living in Bannock.)
Kane Bendigo was the finest all-round athlete produced by Gunnery in the thirty-three years I directed the school’s athletics... PRINCIPAL WHEELER (OF FYFIELD GUNNERY)
I’m sure my memory can’t be that much off, Mr. Queen...
I’m astonished. Graduated forty-ninth in a class of sixty-three! I could have sworn the records would show he stood far, far higher than that. Of course, Gunnery’s scholastic standards have always been extremely stringent...
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, July 1, 1915
SEN. HUNTER CONSIDERING
WRIGHTSVILLE APPOINTEE TO U.S.
MILITARY ACADEMY
If Kane Bendigo Named, Will Be First Wrightsville West Pointer Since Clarence T. Wright in ’78
Dr. PIERCE MINIKIN
There was a lot of pressure put on Bob Hunter to name the boy, I remember. He wanted to, too — it would have been good politics, because Bob was always weak in Wright County. But in the end he had to say no. The boy’s marks just wouldn’t stand up. And, as Bob told me himself, he couldn’t let Bendigo take the entrance examinations because if he failed that would be a nice big Senatorial black eye. So he gave it that year to a boy from up Latham way...
Kane was furious, deathly mad. I was in the Bendigo house on a professional call to his stepmother when the news came. His face got black, I tell you. The only way he showed his disappointment in action was pretty mild, I thought, considering that look on his face. He kicked the cat through one of the stained-glass side windows of the vestibule. That cat never was the same again, haha!...
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, July 29, 1915
KANE BENDIGO TO ATTEND
MERRIMAC U. THIS FALL
CHET (“IRON MAN’) FOGG
(By long-distance phone to his home in Leesburg, Va. Fogg was football coach at Merrimac University from 1913 to 1942, when he retired.)
I never made any bones about it, and I don’t today. Kane Bendigo put Merrimac U. on the college athletic map. He was real big-time, the kind of athlete a coach dreams about. He was as good as Jim Thorpe any day. There wasn’t anything Kane couldn’t do, and do better than anybody else. He ran wild in the backfield the two seasons he played Varsity. He played baseball like Frank Merriwell — or was it Dick? — anyway, whichever one was Superman, that’s the one he played like. He made track records that still stand. He was a natural-born boxer, and he slugged his way to the state college heavyweight championship — and if he’d ever gone into his senior year, my money would have been on him to take the national. No college wrestler ever took a fall over him, though that’s one he used to say he owed to his old man — the only thing, he’d say, he did owe “the old bastard”. And if you’ll look it up, you’ll find that in 1918 he was named by Collier’s magazine the most promising all-round college athlete in the U.S., even though by that time he was in the Army...
That’s right. He left to enlist in the middle of his junior year — around Christmas of 1917, I think it was...
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, October 10, 1918
KANE BENDIGO WINS NATION’S
HIGHEST MILITARY AWARD
Wrightsville Hero of Saint-Mihiel Gets Congressional Medal of Honor
WRIGHTSVILLE Record, September 4, 1919
WAR HERO FETED;
ANNOUNCES PLANS
Kane Bendigo, Wrightsville’s Congressional Medal of Honor hero of the late conflict, was given a roaring welcome today when he returned to the city of his birth after being mustered out of the U.S. Army...
After the reception, Mr. Bendigo granted an exclusive interview to the Record. Queried as to his postwar plans, Mr. Bendigo said: “I have had all sorts of offers to go back to college, and a dozen pro offers in various fields of athletics, but I am through with that stuff. I am going into business, where I can make some real money. I saw too many young fellows die in France to waste any part of my life on rah-rah stuff or working for somebody else. When my father was killed last year in that construction accident, he left a sizable estate. Most of it is in my stepmother’s name, but she and my brothers have agreed to let me handle the money and I know just what to do with it. I am going into business for myself. I have something all lined up...”
Excerpts from E. Q.’s Digest
Between January 1920 and November 1923 K.B. had four business failures. He went into the manufacture of sports equipment in Wrightsville and at the same time tried to run his father’s contracting business. Result: Both went into bankruptcy. His next venture was to take over a factory that manufactured metal containers. He ran this into the ground in a little over a year filing a petition in bankruptcy in January of 1922. He then negotiated a deal whereby he took over the Wrightsville Machine Shop in Low Village for the manufacture of light machinery. By November of 1923 this had flopped, too. His main trouble, as I was able to piece it together, seems to have been that he always bit off more than he could chew. He constantly made grandiose plans, over-extended himself, and fell flat on his face. What he did have, as evidenced by the record, was the ability to charm hard-boiled New England monied people into loosening up...
Note historic paralleclass="underline" About the time Kane Bendigo was broke and discredited, apparently a total failure, a man in Germany named Hitler was lying wounded in prison as the result of the collapse of his ambitious Beer Putsch march on Munich. Both were at the nadir of their careers...
Abel had had a brilliant scholastic record, and at 17 (Sept. 1921) entered Harvard on a scholarship. He quit college at the end of his junior year (June 1924). Note that between November of 1923 and June of 1924, Kane was licking his commercial wounds. But he wasn’t entirely idle, he was back at his old charm routine. He must have been, because coincidentally with Abel’s leaving Harvard to join him in Wrightsville, we find Kane starting a new enterprise with the financial backing of such a goulash as John F. Wright, Richard Giannis, Sr, the then-young Diedrich Van Horn, and old Mrs. Granjon. Kane took over an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town and went into the manufacture of shell-casings for the U.S. Navy. Abel went in with him...
At this time Judah was in Paris studying music at the Conservatoire...
Mrs. Bendigo, mother of Abel and Judah and stepmother of Kane, died in 1925...
...prospered from the start. The small plant mushroomed into a large plant, the large plant became two large plants. The expansion was incredibly quick. Apparently Abel’s native business brilliance exactly complemented Kane’s charm, drive, and unbounded ambition. They went more and more deeply into the field of munitions. The further they expanded, the smaller dwindled the group which had financed them. One after another Kane bought out his original backers. At this time the company was known as The Bendigo Arms Company (it was in the early thirties that the company name was quietly changed to Bodigen), and Kane was apparently determined to give himself exclusivity in fact as well as in title. There is reason to believe that Kane did not gain total control without a struggle, as the profits and dividends were beginning to be considerable. Talked with old Judge Martin, Samuel R. Livingston, one of the Granjon sons, and with Wolfert Van Horn. The Judge recalls John F. Wright’s battle only vaguely, and Livingston was mysterious. Van Horn cagey but transparent. Convinced me that Kane brought lots of pressure to bear and used methods the victims never talked about as a matter of pride. Considering Wolfert Van Horn’s own business reputation, this shows genius of the lowest order...