Blindness and Later Life
One night in 1935 while driving home from a performance, Nawahi was suddenly struck blind. No medical cause was ever identified. The loss of vision was permanent, but he never allowed it to impede his life, as he continued performing and touring until the 1970s, when he was partially paralyzed by a stroke.
Nawahi set a remarkable swimming record for blind people in 1946. He swam the 22 miles of choppy Pacific Ocean waters from San Pedro, California to Santa Catalina Island in just over 22 hours, guided only by coach John Sonnichson and a bell on a lead boat.
He appeared briefly in the 1985 Academy Award-nominated documentary film on Roy Smeck, Wizard of the Strings.
He died in Long Beach, California on January 29, 1985.
Read more about this topic: "King" Bennie Nawahi
Famous quotes containing the words blindness and, blindness and/or life:
“cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’
Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“the heart,
this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
this ultimate signature of the me, the start
of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.”
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“To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.”
—Clifton Fadiman (b. 1904)