King Kelly - Death

Death

In November 1894, Kelly died of pneumonia in Boston. He had taken a boat there from New York to appear at the Palace Theatre with the London Gaiety Girls. At the start of the final week of his life, an advertisement in Boston read: "Slide, Kelly, Slide. Palace Theatre. The London Gaiety Girls, Chaperoned by King Kelly, the Famous $10,000 Base Ballist." During the week, his name was deleted when he was too ill to appear. "He caught a slight cold on the boat from New York, but thought little of it," a writer said upon his death.

During that week in Boston he stayed in the Plymouth House, owned by Bill Anderson, a fellow Elk. Noticing how ill Kelly seemed, Anderson had him rest and called for a doctor. The doctor had him taken to his private room in the hospital. Kelly's wife and brother were notified and did not arrive in time to see him alive. Anderson, fellow Elk John Graham and the former secretary of Boston of the Players’ League and the American Association, Julian B. Hart, were with him at the end.

About 7,000 people passed by the open casket. At a benefit for widow Agnes "Aggie" a week later, some of the songs performed were "The Irish Queen," "Nothing is Too Good for the Irish" and "Poor Mick."

George W. Floyd, a main organizer of the benefit, wired Aggie with news about the proceeds. Days later, he presented a letter to National League owners meeting in New York. Aggie needed money, he said. Right after adjourning a meeting, the owners pledged $1,400 to her, about $28,000 in today’s dollars.

Aggie, who never remarried, died in 1937 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After Mike’s death, she made her living by sewing, stopping when her eyesight failed. Seventeen months before her death, and her health declining, she was interviewed by the New Brunswick Sunday Times. She said Mike to her was "just an overgrown kid" and, in a reporter's paraphrase, "always eager to help a young fellow on the field, never pugnacious despite his marvelous build of 190 pounds and six feet in height, and charitable to the extreme."

When Mike was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1945, there were no immediate family members to mark the occasion, as his apparently lone child had died in 1894 - after living only an hour.