Path lit by lightning, p.14
Path Lit by Lightning, page 14
Wrong in every respect. Although Thorpe had been at Carlisle since 1904, he still had years to go before he could graduate, and Superintendent Friedman, despite earlier run-ins with his star athlete over occasional absences, urged him to stay at school that summer. When Jim asked for a leave to play baseball, Friedman balked, saying Thorpe had exhausted his leaves the previous summer when he went home to Oklahoma and had promised then that he would continue at Carlisle until he graduated. In the end, the superintendent reluctantly granted a second leave, fully aware that Thorpe was heading south to play ball. In Carlisle records, if a student was gone for good the notation was “Departed.” There was no such notation for Thorpe in 1909. Instead it read “On leave.”
For Pop Warner to assert that he knew nothing about this strained credulity. By Thorpe’s own account, he was recruited to play baseball that summer by one of Warner’s athletic-world compatriots, Charlie Kelchner, the baseball coach at Albright College in nearby Reading, Pennsylvania, who coincidentally was also called Pop. Kelchner was among dozens of bird-dog scouts combing eastern colleges for talent to fill minor league rosters, and Carlisle was fertile territory. Scouts had been looking for promising Indian ballplayers since the discovery at Carlisle in 1902 of Charles Albert Bender, a Hall of Fame pitcher upon whom sportswriters inevitably bestowed the nickname “Chief.” Bender was an Ojibwe from Minnesota who went from Carlisle, where he was an excellent student, setting the record for most books checked out of the school library, to become the ace pitcher for Connie Mack’s championship Philadelphia Athletics, where he would set a record of nine consecutive complete games in the World Series. Year after year, other Carlisle Indians followed Bender into organized ball, though none approached his level of success.
The Carlisle diaspora in the summer of 1909 saw Bill Newashe playing in Atlantic City, Michael Balenti going off to St. Paul, and Joe Libby, Jesse Youngdeer, and Thorpe taking the twelve-hour train ride south to play in the Eastern Carolina League. They were all Pop’s boys. Libby later claimed that it was their coach who arranged everything.
The lines between amateur and professional were blurry in that era and players frequently crossed between them. Thirty-five minor leagues slotted teams into hundreds of cities and towns throughout America, all thirsting for summer entertainment and in need of ballplayers. It was commonplace for college athletes to slip off to play in the minors as a means of summer employment, often using fake names to maintain their amateur status. One among the hundreds was a young West Point cadet named Dwight David Eisenhower who played in the Kansas State League under the alias Wilson. The joke among college boys was that they were joining the Pocahontas League because so many of them were named John Smith. Michael J. Finn, a longtime minor league manager and scout for the New York Giants, once recalled that players in the Eastern Carolina League “had as many aliases as the gunmen of New York.”
Jim Thorpe was not among them. He came to Rocky Mount using his real name and never considered having an alias. Sportswriters throughout the Eastern Carolina League knew who he was and made certain their readers did as well. His name was in the box scores every time the Railroaders played the five other teams in the league, most located within convenient reach of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad: the Wilson Tobacconists, the Goldsboro Giants, the Raleigh Red Birds, the Fayetteville Highlanders, and the Wilmington Sailors. At least once Thorpe made the front section of the Raleigh News & Observer for a “rampage” that had nothing to do with his work at the plate. He was usually referred to in the press by some variation of the appellation sportswriters gave Bender and every other Native American who achieved prominence. Jim “Big Chief” Thorpe was a gate attraction and good copy.
The excitement in Rocky Mount when Jim and his Carlisle teammates reached North Carolina “stemmed from the fact that these men were said to be full-blooded Indians,” Mallison later wrote. “Few Rocky Mount citizens had ever seen one of these American originals.” Original, yes; full-blooded, no. It was an expected part of the embellishment. A description using the terms “full-blood” or “pure-blood” was something Thorpe dealt with incessantly throughout his career, a notion in Anglo culture that an Indian untouched by white heritage was more mysterious, exotic, and perhaps dangerous.
Just being a ballplayer was exotic enough for young Rocky Mount boys awed by the Railroaders. Thorpe and many of his teammates kept rooms at the Cambridge Hotel across from the train depot, their room and board considered part of a salary that amounted to about $30 a month. On game days, local boys lined up outside the hotel, hoping to befriend a player and carry his bat or glove seven blocks north along unpaved Main Street to Falls Road and on to League Park just west of the intersection with Church. A boy named Tom McMillan got to carry Jim Thorpe’s glove and would tell stories about it the rest of his life, saying the big Indian was a gentleman who liked children. There was no locker room at the field, so players usually emerged from the hotel in their uniforms and paraded through town like soldiers marching off to war.
Rocky Mount was mostly flat from end to end but drew its name from rock outcroppings on the nearby Tar River. It was a booming tobacco center in 1909, as were many towns situated along North Carolina’s Inner Coastal Plain. Streets on the north end bustled with block-long tobacco warehouses, regional hubs for a cash crop of the New South, just now replacing cotton. The executives and their moneymen lived along a wealthy stretch of South Church Street in commodious Queen Anne–style homes with ornate friezes on their wraparound porches. To them, the coming of Jim Thorpe could not compare with the grandest event in town that month, the tobacco world’s June German Festival sponsored by the Carolina Cotillion Club. “German” in that context was not about the nationality but described a formal dance. Thousands of Carolinians associated with the tobacco industry, men garbed in tuxes and tails, women in gowns, gathered in a cavernous Rocky Mount tobacco warehouse converted into a dining hall and ballroom for a celebratory midnight supper of ham and fried chicken followed by rounds of dancing that swirled until dawn. One tobacco warehouse participating in the event was, by chance, named Thorpe and Ricks, so Thorpe was a familiar name in town long before the arrival of the Big Chief.
The Railroaders were on the road playing a three-game series against the Raleigh Red Birds when the three Carlisle boys got to Rocky Mount, but they joined the team in time for the second game. With Rocky Mount staggering at the start of the season near the bottom of the standings, two of the three Indians immediately cracked the starting lineup. Youngdeer was put in left and batted leadoff, Libby played right and batted seventh, while Thorpe sat on the bench until filling in at third base late in the game, the only time he played that position all year. Not much material there for anyone to embellish. But the next day Thorpe was sent out to pitch. “Warhoop Thorpe was on the firing line for the first time,” reported the Raleigh Times. After giving up unearned runs in the first two frames, he threw seven shutout innings and finished with a complete-game 4–2 win in which he allowed only five hits, smacked two himself, and scored the go-ahead run. At the end of a game back in Rocky Mount three days later, the local reporter felt that embellishing Jim’s performance would only be “gilding the lily.” Before a standing-room-only crowd of fifteen hundred fans in the bandbox League Park, Thorpe pitched a twelve-inning 1–0 shutout against the Wilson Tobacconists, Rocky Mount’s fierce neighbor and rival in baseball and tobacco.
That promising start did not lead to greatness. On a bad team destined to finish at the bottom, Jim was good enough to keep his spot in the rotation and play first base and the outfield slots most days he was not on the mound, faring better than his Carlisle mates Libby and Youngdeer, who left the club before season’s end. But he was not as consistently spectacular as the Rocky Mount Record folks hoped. He finished the season with nine wins and ten losses and batted .253. That might seem like the definition of middling, but Jim was rarely average; he was either better or worse, flashes of brilliance followed by pitching sloughs and batting slumps when he seemed bored. He had the potential, a combination of speed, power, and a lively arm, but he had yet to acquire the intuitive instincts of a natural baseball player. In football, yes; hardball, no. And he suffered from a flaw common to otherwise brilliant athletes who struggled at the game, as the league’s pitchers discovered. He had trouble with the curve.
* * *
THE YEAR THORPE came to play ball in Rocky Mount was the year North Carolina went dry. A statewide prohibition against the sale of alcohol took effect on the first of January 1909, after a decade-long campaign led by an odd coalition of Baptist and Methodist preachers, Temperance League activists, and white-supremacist Democratic politicians who considered taverns “Republican recruiting stations.” That was the claim of Furnifold McLendel Simmons, the U.S. senator who used Republican as a code word for black. Simmons was the mastermind of a political machine that stoked a malevolent white-supremacist uprising in North Carolina in 1898 leading to the demise of the post–Civil War participation of black citizens in the democratic process and ushering in the Jim Crow era. In what was called an insurrection but amounted to a racial massacre, marauding gangs of white men roamed black sections of Wilmington murdering citizens, destroying property, and overthrowing the multiracial Reconstructionist city government by force. White-supremacist clubs sprang up in cities and towns throughout the state, including Rocky Mount, where during Jim’s stay an unarmed black man named John Bootman was shot and killed by the chief of police, who was not charged with a crime or suspended from his job. The mission was to make North Carolina white again, by any means necessary. “North Carolina is a white man’s state and white men will rule it,” Simmons declared. “And they will crush the party of Negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever dare attempt to establish Negro rule here.”
When the statewide referendum banning the sale of alcohol drew overwhelming white support on the 1908 ballot, it was seen as another step in assuring permanent white political dominance under the cover of religiosity and propriety. Not that any law could stop drinkers from drinking. Speakeasies and impromptu saloons known as “blind tigers” popped up in the backstreets, supplied by millions of dollars’ worth of Richmond liquor bootlegged across the Virginia state line. There were also pseudo-legal establishments that sold “near beer” with minimal alcohol content, or at least claimed that was all they offered when authorities came around. Carousing young ballplayers in the Eastern Carolina League knew where the blind tigers were in every league town. The state liquor prohibition was not much of an impediment to Thorpe, who struggled with alcohol and came from a family of hard drinkers led by old man Hiram, who used to sell bootleg whiskey from the back of his wagon in supposedly dry Indian Territory.
Jim’s behavior had always been mercurial. As a boy, that meant occasionally running from school and unpleasant situations, disobeying teachers and his father. As he grew older and started hanging out with his older brothers in Oklahoma or the football boys at Carlisle, his unpredictable disposition took on a physical aspect. When things were going well and he was not drinking, he was good company, kind, gentle, and easygoing. “But when something was unfair or he was drinking,” Joe Libby said later, “all hell broke loose.” In those situations, Libby was “scared to death of the man. That damned guy was crazy. He was an Indian’s Indian.” Once during their North Carolina sojourn, Libby and Thorpe were walking through town on the way to a game when a policeman tried to push them off the street. The cop might have been prejudiced against Indians; Libby did not make that clear. In any event, Thorpe turned to his friend and asked, “You like this guy?” and when Libby said no, Thorpe “just knocked the guy colder than hell.” They spent that night in jail.
That was but one of many stories of Thorpe on the loose in Carolina. E. G. Johnston, the team secretary, recalled a time when he and H. L. Holden and his two daughters, Genevieve and Kewpie, traveled to Goldsboro for a series and Holden came running up to Johnston and said he had to get to the Hotel Kennon to intervene because “Thorpe was about to whip the Goldsboro police force.” As Johnston told the story, when he arrived at the Kennon he learned that officers wanted to take Thorpe into custody on a minor charge and Thorpe had resisted. “When Thorpe recognized me the fury in his face disappeared,” Johnston said. “He quieted down and explained that he thought they were trying to keep him out of the afternoon ball game and he wasn’t going to let them do that and he would take orders from me and not them.”
The final road series of the season was played in Raleigh. By then the Railroaders were cemented in the cellar, twenty-five games below .500, and when Thorpe pitched the first game there were no more than a hundred souls in the stands to watch him lose 3–2. After a defeat again the next day, Rocky Mount broke its losing streak on the final afternoon in Raleigh, and Thorpe’s celebration that night made the local newspapers. In the Jim Crow world of North Carolina, Native American athletes, unlike African Americans, could play baseball with white teammates, stay in hotels with them, and party with them, but that did not mean they were treated exactly like them. In the press, it was Thorpe’s Indianness that defined him. “Big Chief Goes on Warpath,” read the headline in the Raleigh Times on August 26. “Big Chief on Rampage,” blared the News & Observer.
The stories reported similar accounts, though in different languages, the News & Observer for the most part using typical newspaper jargon, the Times relying on hackneyed Indian stereotypes. “Overjoyed by finally winning a game after fourteen successive defeats ‘Heap Big Chief Thorpe’ eased an over-amount of firewater to his system last night and immediately started out upon the warpath. Ramping to and fro, giving war-whoops, the near beer and other stuff causing the old thirst of blood to return, the Red Skin…,” and the Indian stereotypes rolled on from there.
Taking into consideration the hyperbolic proclivities of the scribes, the events of the evening went something like this: After the game, several players from both teams ended up at one of the near-beer saloons on Exchange Street, an establishment that apparently surreptitiously sold “other exhilarants.” The Railroaders were leaving for Rocky Mount later that night for a season-ending home series against the Wilson Tobacconists, while the Red Birds would board a predawn train to the coast to play the Wilmington Sailors. At some point in the evening, a group was out on the street and Thorpe got into a tussle with a teammate, Marvin O’Garra, the second baseman. “It is said that O’Garra tried to get [Thorpe] to go to his boarding place. Thorpe got angry with O’Garra and thumped him, there being a scuffle,” reported the News & Observer. The other Raleigh paper propelled the story into more colorful language. “With a mighty swing he landed his huge colossal lunch-hook upon the cranium of the brave aforesaid O’Garra,” reported the Times. “Reeling and rocking under the weight of the blow, O’Garra fell sprawling near the opposite side of the battle-ground—Exchange Street. Hearing the heart-rending cries of distress the boys in blue—two in number, with billets drawn, rushed to the rescue of the smitten one, hoping to avoid an impromptu scalping.”
Thorpe was a handful for the two coppers, and it wasn’t until a third, “the big Captain, Jack Beasley,” came on the scene that they were able to subdue him, clasp snippers—handcuffs—on him, and haul him off to the station, where “he had to be dragged bodily down the steps, putting up a vigorous resistance. Thorpe is much of a man, having been on the Carlisle football team.” O’Garra had slipped away by then, but another ballplayer, Reddy Rowe of the Red Birds, followed the officers and Thorpe back to the station, and insisted that he wanted to see Jim, calling for him through the sidewalk grating. The men in blue obliged by arresting Rowe and placing him in the same cell. After team officials interceded with the judge and minimum fines were agreed to, the players were released well after midnight. Jim’s Railroaders were gone by then, and he missed the season-ending doubleheader against the Tobacconists.
Thorpe’s night scuffling with teammates and cops in Raleigh seemed tame compared with the riotous events going on among executives in the Eastern Carolina League that week. In response to accusations by the Wilson management that Rocky Mount had thrown games in a spiteful effort to keep the Tobacconists from winning the pennant, representatives of the six clubs gathered in Goldsboro at ten o’clock on the Tuesday night of August 24 and talked, argued, heard charges, made motions, tabled motions, voted, rescinded votes, and argued some more until five thirty Wednesday morning.
R. B. Evans of Wilson came to the meeting armed with affidavits from seven witnesses to make his case. William Phoenix, after acknowledging that he played for Wilmington under the alias Lennox, swore before a notary public that his manager had told him Rocky Mount promised to throw all its games to Wilmington. Two Wilson players, John Cowell and Dick Miller, swore that during one game they told a Rocky Mount player that they had a good chance of winning the pennant, to which the Railroader replied, “Yes, if Wilmington doesn’t beat you out,” because Rocky Mount was going to “throw all games to that team.” T. T. Fulghum certified that he heard “three or four” Rocky Mount players standing outside the New Briggs Hotel in Fayetteville saying they planned to throw all their games to Fayetteville, and one even boasted that he planned to bet five dollars the Highlanders would sweep the series. R. H. Howell’s affidavit said that he was outside the New Briggs Hotel and heard Pat Krebs, the Rocky Mount centerfielder, say: “I swear I will do anything in my power to defeat Wilson for the pennant—lie down to any club to accomplish that purpose.” G. D. Stanley, an agent for the Atlantic Coast Line, and J. L. Moody, a Wilson lawyer, swore they heard the director of the Rocky Mount club, J. M. Mason, threaten that Wilson “had to figure with Rocky Mount. I am in a position to know what I am talking about.”
