Path lit by lightning, p.43
Path Lit by Lightning, page 43
Good intentions, great expectations, desperate means. On January 10, he wrote:
Well dear the game I wrote about playing at St. Petersburg is on and I expect to make a killing, I mean by this to get plenty as my end. Anyone that promotes a game and can’t figure enough for his self is crazy—so that’s what I’m doing, might as well take advantage of things. I’m not being crooked by any means but just getting the cash… The game at Ft. Myers that I wrote about is off for [the promoter] failed to tie it up. If I am to get along suppose it is up to me and will push on taking advantage of things and keep quiet about it… I am to make arrangements to take two clubs to Cuba, that is if I can get expenses for both teams, shall try to cover fares over and back… I want about five thousand to make the deal which I think I can make in St. Petersburg. I’ve made a friend here with a Mr. Cahill who promises me a job in Cuba making all arrangements for big sports events as prize fighting, football, baseball… How does this sound to you?
But there was another matter Jim knew he had to deal with before he could get Freeda to follow along with his dreams:
Oh say I forgot to tell you about my scrape that I had. I know you read about same in the papers. Where Widerquist and I were put in jail, which was true, but listen dear it was not my fault. Widerquist was so drunk and I was trying to take care of him, he yelled like a wild Indian in my room at the Tampa Terrace, so some people in the next room called the cops [who said] I should go along and only stayed there a short time. Po Lo the Redskin is always the blame.
Thorpe and tackle Chet Widerquist were charged with public intoxication late on the Saturday night after the game against the Bears for “allegedly disturbing other guests” at the hotel. They were released on $20 bond after spending a few hours in jail. In his letter to Freeda, when Jim wrote “Po Lo the Redskin is always the blame,” he was using a shorthand version of Lo, the poor Indian! As his athletic talents faded, he became increasingly conscious of the ways his Indianness was being viewed in the dominant white society. He explained to Freeda:
I can live with it and everybody here thinks a big joke, so don’t feel mean at me, will you dearie. Give me kiss and forgive… If I can only get some real money how tickled your boy will be, want to send for you, but must be sure I have a job or a place for you, at least an income… so I’ll never leave my love so long again.
Lo, the poor Indian! He had said he expected to make a killing in the contest against St. Pete, but hardly anyone showed up for the game. January 14 to Freeda:
Life is such a guess, you can never tell what will happen. Certainly is a blue one at present. The game played today a hard fought battle, the score 0 to 0. The split of the gate was $160 giving each man $13.30 as his share, nearly broke my heart to think how I worked in the advertising end and paid out twice as much money thinking it would be a knock-out. Well such is life… We are playing at Sarasota this Saturday and have guarantee of 5 hundred dollars in expenses so this will help some and maybe we will get a break before long… I guess I should never look for the best in things, have sure gone wrong in my last few years.
Jim kept trying to arrange exhibition games, kept looking for other employment. On Sunday morning, January 24, he awoke early, unable to sleep, and went for a long walk. His mental state plummeted:
Ed Terry of Mt. Gilead [Ohio, near LaRue] has a son living here and might be that I will work for his Realty Corp. that is if the inducement is good might be that I can get a room with them just for a while until I can find something for ourselves… This might be an opening until I can find something much better. What say honey? They are to take me out and see the land lots and whatever they have to sell… I can live here so just as easy for I have nothing to do up there… I’ve never been so unsettled in my life as this last year. Honey I need you to help me and keep my nerves right, so uneasy… where there’s a will there’s a way—that is if you wish.
More than two weeks without writing, and by then his situation had worsened. His teammates returned north without him. The promise of a job with Ed Terry’s son fell through. Overtaken by the blues, trying to resist the temptation of booze:
Well my trip to St. Pete was not what I expected and things look pretty blue. Have a bad check on a man at Winter Haven Florida, which was returned. This I found on my come back from the outing which I had left with the rest now. God honey I’m here with a week’s hotel bill and nothing to pay out with. I am wiring the world over to find money. Don’t I have a great time trying to stay out of jail. I am a good boy, too, makes a man feel like going on a big drunk… Honey if you ever hear me getting drunk just take out papers for a divorce, which I know would certainly hurt me more than anything that could happen. Never again dear.
Jim said he had to get up to Rock Island and get some more money from Archie Bowlby. The man owed him for four games, he said. He knew he had to change and live up to his promises. So much for those earlier notions of making crazy money in the sunshine:
Don’t I write like I had the blues. A man is a fool with easy money and that I’ve had, now it’s look for real happiness, love first of all and the rest will come, don’t you think sweetheart? I am sorry that things didn’t go through but dear there is lots of time. I thought that athletics, baseball, football was out of my life, but I guess that is what I am made for and the last thing I do here, we’ll see.
What next? He’d heard that Rube Marquard, the old pitcher, once his teammate on the Giants, was managing up in Providence, Rhode Island. Maybe Jim could play there or help coach. He kept telling himself that things would turn brighter, sunshine tomorrow. On February 18 he wrote to Freeda that a company wanted him to sell cars. But he had had enough. He wanted to return north:
Just as soon as I get some cash on hand you can look for me back for I don’t like the idea of being away from you any longer. I really think that you believe I don’t “loves” you now—get that out of your sweet little soul I loves you heaps.
* * *
MARCH 1926. HIS two months in Florida ended like this: Jim did not sell real estate in Tampa. He did not become a sports promoter in Cuba. He did not sell cars in St. Pete. He did not play baseball in Providence. Almost penniless, owed money that he would never get, he returned to Marion, but not for long. The athletic migrant worker kept moving. Another season, another game, another state. He had played professional sports for teams in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina, Oregon, and Florida. Next stop: Shelby, Montana, to play for the Drillers. The Great Falls Tribune announced his imminent arrival: “Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, Indians of all time since the earliest American settlers gave up tossing spears ’n arrows for heaving javelins, pigskins, and baseballs, will be seen here when the Northern Montana Baseball League opens its season May 2.”
24 World Famous Indians
BASEBALL SEASON IN MONTANA WAS short and wild. Its constricted length, from early May to Labor Day, was determined by the rugged northern weather; its character shaped by a collection of outcasts who came in search of another chance, along with money, good times, and bootleg liquor, if not salvation. The state was booming, from the powerful dams and electric power plants of Great Falls to the vast copper mines near Butte to the thriving small towns that traced the Great Northern Railway route across the top of the state, a horizontal stretch known as the Hi-Line bracketed by wheat fields in the east and mountain peaks in the west.
Jim Thorpe’s 1926 season in Montana was even shorter. He lasted two months, playing for a team first called the Shelby Drillers and then, when the club relocated soon after he arrived, the Havre Hillers. Considered the crown jewel of the Hi-Line, Havre was named after the French city but pronounced in a purely American way: “have-er.” Shelby, farther west along the Hi-Line, was in territory familiar to Jim for its proximity to the Blackfeet reservation, home to Sampson Burd, his close friend and captain of the majestic 1911 Carlisle team that upset Penn and Harvard.
In the decade and a half since they were teammates, Thorpe had been in constant motion, his athletic odyssey taking him around the world and to every corner of America, while Burd returned to Montana and stayed, building a family and a ranch on the edge of Glacier National Park, sacred ground to the Blackfeet. He was talented enough to be elected to the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame, but life on the ranch was sufficient; he saw no need to play on as a Canton Bulldog, Oorang Indian, or Havre Hiller. Jim often dreamed of settling down to be a rancher in Oklahoma or a hunting and fishing guide in the South or West, but he never did, propelled by financial need, restlessness, and the burdensome expectations of fame.
Freeda accompanied Jim to Montana. It was not a honeymoon; they had already been apart too long in their brief marriage because of his barnstorming in Florida. A rocky start, but Freeda believed in him the way Iva had thirteen years earlier when she walked down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Church. With his most productive athletic days behind him, Thorpe thirsted for that affirmation. Freeda, he later wrote, “brought hope and confidence and an encouragement which made possible my dreams of beginning again.” The dreams were always short-lived. His life now consisted of beginnings followed by quick endings.
Flush with Roaring Twenties cash, every town in Montana seemed to be looking for athletes who could give them an edge. Thorpe, who signed for $600 a month plus expenses, was the best known of the ballplayers who found their way to Montana, but not the best. The team in Plentywood, tucked into the northeast corner of the state, brought in John Wesley Donaldson, one of the great pitchers of his era, who stood out because of his entertaining presence as a mound wizard and the fact that he was the rare black man playing for a white team at a time when organized baseball banned blacks. Donaldson was as peripatetic as Thorpe; by the time he reached Montana he had already played for white teams in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Saskatchewan as well as the Tennessee Rats, World’s All Nations, Los Angeles White Sox, Brooklyn Royal Giants, Indianapolis ABCs, Detroit Stars, Chicago American Giants, and Kansas City Monarchs. His Montana stop came during the middle of a legendary thirty-year career in which it was said he won more than four hundred games and influenced the style of young Satchel Paige.
To compete against Donaldson and Plentywood, the team in nearby Scobey, a small town with a big reputation as the largest wheat shipping center in the nation, strengthened its club by recruiting two former major leaguers, Swede Risberg and Happy Felsch, who found liberation in Montana after receiving lifetime bans from organized ball for their role in the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal. Although opposing fans enjoyed heckling them for their plummet “from the big leagues to a cow pasture,” the Montana milieu suited their personalities. Much of the state was in wide-open defiance of Prohibition; Al Capone was a frequent visitor to examine his mob’s business smuggling bootleg liquor over the line from Canada. Swede and Happy were known for their heroic appetites for the state’s three b’s—brawling, booze, and broads.
During his career, Jim had been known to brawl occasionally and drink often, but with Freeda by his side he seemed to be on good behavior during this brief spell in Montana. It was trying too hard on the field, rather than lapses off it, that shortened his stay. Characteristically, he started strong, batting over .400 and driving in key runs in several early games against the Great Falls Electrics and Anaconda Mining. And, much as he had done in the years since his breakout 1919 season with the Boston Braves, he sustained his pace as one of the league’s leading hitters. Even acknowledging that the competition grew weaker as he descended into lower leagues, it nonetheless seems apparent when examining Thorpe’s baseball career that it was played upside down. He likely would have had a better chance at success had he started with several years in the minors, playing every day, instead of spending five unproductive early years mostly riding the bench in the majors, there because of his fame, not his still-undeveloped skills.
Before the end of May, the club left Shelby for Havre. The local paper promoted the move as though Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show or the Barnum and Bailey Circus were coming to town: “THEY’RE ON THE WAY—OLD HERB HESTER AND THE FASTEST PLAYING BALL TEAM ON EARTH—STARRING JIM THORPE WORLD FAMOUS ATHLETE—THEY’RE THE CHAMPION REPRESENTATIVES OF ALL NORTHERN MONTANA AND THEY ALL OFFICIALLY SIGN THE HOTEL REGISTER ‘HAVRE.’ ”
The pennant race in June was “as tight as a shoemaker’s stitch,” but then Havre started losing, through no fault of Thorpe’s. On June 11 he “brought a thousand spectators howling to their feet” by hitting the longest home run of the year, deep over the center-field fence. Three days later, in a loss to Anaconda Mining, he strained a leg muscle while legging out an infield hit, leaping “ten feet for the first sack, stumbling as he crossed the bag.” He sat out an exhibition series against the Happy Felsch–led Scobey team, then returned to lead the Hillers on a winning streak. By June 20 he was fourth in league batting with a .404 average, tied for fifth in runs, leading the league in doubles, and second in total bases. When his leg tightened, Havre announced that he was taking a “leave of absence” while the team traveled north for a three-game series across the border in Climax, Saskatchewan. An anticlimax: Jim never played for the Hillers again. The manager figured there was no use paying him to sit on the bench. By the Fourth of July he and Freeda had returned to Ohio. They found a house in Marion near her father’s not far from the golf club. By August, Freeda was pregnant.
* * *
THEY WERE BACK in Ohio, but Jim did not settle down. He was thirty-nine, an age when most athletes have retired. “My best deeds had been done, my greatest victories won,” he later reflected. But he could not quit. When his leg improved, he finished the late summer playing baseball with old Oorang teammates, finding games where they could. Then he rejoined his first pro football team, the Canton Bulldogs, a once-dominant squad now in as much decline as he was. Even after the discouraging one-game tryout with the Giants a year earlier and the drubbing his Florida barnstormers had taken from Red Grange and the Bears, the fire was not extinguished. The NFL had grown to twenty-two teams by 1926, and Canton finished in twentieth place, winning only one and tying three of thirteen games. Jim started at his traditional left halfback position, but as the season wore on he switched to the line, where he was still feared for his sure and violent tackles. Not through quite yet.
When the NFL season ended in late November, Jim did not rest. He organized a barnstorming basketball team called the World Famous Indians. The squad’s composition changed month by month. It started with a few Oorang teammates including Long Time Sleep. Then, briefly, after an unsuccessful tour of Indiana, Jim took on a few white players from an Indiana industrial league, and for the third iteration he recruited a group of talented players from Haskell, the national Indian school still thriving nearly a decade after Carlisle’s demise. Jim suited up but played intermittently, always a fan favorite, never the star, better at passing and defense than scoring.
The inaugural barnstorming tour of Indiana took the World Famous Indians—or WFI, as they were identified on their uniforms above the logo of a brave in headdress—to Indianapolis, Rushville, Muncie, New Castle, Portland, Spiceland, and Richmond through much of December. They lost those games, or as local newspapers could not refrain from declaring, got scalped. The Indians, at least one of them, might be famous, but they could not compete in territory where basketball was the state religion. Fans turned out to see Thorpe and cheered heartily when he entered a game, but that was often not until the second half, by which time the contests were out of reach. “It’s rather doubtful whether the Indians could cope with the class of basketball played by any of Indiana’s better known high school teams,” noted the Muncie Evening Press.
At New Castle, it was the World Famous Indians against a company team from the Chrysler auto plant. After losing again, most of the Indian players were so disheartened they quit and went home, leaving only Jess Parton, a Delaware known as Swift Deer, and Thorpe, who played under the name Bright Path, a concise translation of his Sac and Fox name. Scrambling to keep his tour going, Thorpe recruited the coach and several members of the Chrysler team to join him for the next leg in West Virginia. “When is an Indian not an Indian?” asked a columnist in the Richmond (IN) Item. “When he is a white man, of course. It seems that the World Famous Indians… successfully read five automakers and paleface basketball players out of the white and into the red race by securing them to play with the great Jim Thorpe and his Indians who are trekking eastward where football is football and basketball is not basketball as she is played in Indiana.”
The use of faux Indians was temporary. They were soon replaced by young stars from Haskell as the WFI swept victorious through West Virginia. The new players included former hoops captain Raymond West, known as Light Foot, a Cheyenne from Oklahoma and relative of the famed chief White Buffalo who was born with white hair; Dennis Hildebrand, or Eagle Feather, a Cherokee from North Carolina and descendant of Chief Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee alphabet; and Leo Wapp, Running Hawk, a Sac and Fox whose grandfather was a scout for Union troops during the Civil War.
Nearing the third trimester of her pregnancy, Freeda stayed home in Marion. Jim saw her for only a few days when he stopped on the way from West Virginia to another leg of the tour in Michigan, and then again for a few more days between Michigan and a final barnstorming tour of Pennsylvania. If he wrote letters to her on the road, as he had from Massachusetts and Florida, Freeda did not keep them.
When the team reached the Penn-Harris hotel in Harrisburg, a reporter found Jim in the lobby and peppered him with questions.
“Do you think that the highly developed social life of the present day is having a deleterious effect upon present day athletics?” the reporter asked.
