Path lit by lightning, p.53
Path Lit by Lightning, page 53
In a June 4 letter, Jim told Scott that he could not care for the four boys in Detroit and hoped to place them at Chilocco or one of the other Indian boarding schools. He already would have driven them to Oklahoma, he said, but for “trouble in transportation—meaning my car couldn’t make the trip out there.” Then he said he had to work as a plant guard for a few more months to get the financial means to make the trip. Were these explanations or excuses? Scott kept getting mixed messages but persisted in writing letters to schools to find placements for the boys.
He also contacted government officials to find Jim suitable employment. In a letter to Oklahoma Governor Robert S. Kerr, Scott noted Thorpe’s “marvelous athletic record” and wondered if the state could hire him as a guard or guide at the state capitol building. He also broached the idea that Jim could be hired at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works in Tulsa, where the commander, Colonel L. E. Angle, had expressed interest in him, and told the governor about the need to place the Thorpe boys in Indian schools. The governor responded positively. “I think the plan for returning this world-famous Oklahoma athlete to our state is a splendid one,” Kerr told Scott. If the ordnance job did not work, he added, “I will be glad to discuss the matter of his employment with you and other interested friends in an effort to secure him a job. With reference to his four boys, I am confident we will have no difficulty in placing them in one of the Indian schools referred to.”
Even with the state’s leadership committed to assisting Jim, it was easier said than done. To place the boys in boarding schools, Scott contacted officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and at the Gilcrease Foundation, a wealthy oilman’s charity in Tulsa that provided scholarships for Indian students. Scott advised Jim on how to proceed, but Jim was slow to act. And there was another question: whether he had custody rights allowing him to make decisions about his boys. Emmett Brown of the Indian bureau was assigned to find out. “Had some trouble getting the call past St. Louis and when we got thru to Dearborn Jim was away from the gate,” Brown wrote in an August 10 memo. “On second try an hour later we got thru alright. Jim explained that his divorced wife did get custody of children but since she did not care for them, he brought them all to Detroit with him and has not heard from out there in more than a year. Does not know whether court order has changed or not to permit him to have the boys.”
Brown also reported that Burton Logan of the Gilcrease Foundation had traveled to Shawnee to talk to Jim’s sister Big Mary. “He did not find her but heard she had turned deaf and dumb. He finally found one of Jim’s brothers, George, [who] lived in a shack by the river, but he was gone. His wife told Logan they thought Jim was still living in Detroit, didn’t know he was divorced from his second wife in Los Angeles or even had any children.” George’s wife likely was hedging with the official, wary of his intentions.
Most of the problems were resolved by summer’s end. Jim’s car was repaired, he had enough money to make the trip to Oklahoma, and the boys were admitted to Indian schools—Phil at Chilocco and the younger three at Pawnee. Whether Jim would take a job nearby and stay in the state remained uncertain. On the morning of September 15, he and the boys packed up the green Plymouth coupe and left Detroit. They headed south into Ohio to stay with friends for a day, then drove nonstop through the next day and night from Marion to Tulsa, arriving on the afternoon of September 17. Lon Scott greeted them, and as an inveterate publicist made sure the local press was there as well. A photo in the Tulsa Daily World showed Jim kneeling at the back of the Plymouth with “the gang consisting of his 4 husky sons” who had packed into the coupe for the long trip “like the great Injun football player used to pack the fans wherever he played.”
There were some inaccuracies in the story. Jim left the impression that his wife “remained in Detroit.” He said he had the flu the previous winter and “when he went to a doctor to ask about dizzy spells he was told his heart was at fault.” No matter. “Jim looked hale and hearty and not a gray hair on his head.” All seemed promising. He would visit Big Mary in Shawnee, meet with a Sac and Fox agent to secure the enrollment for his sons, drop them off at school, and return to Tulsa for a longer stay to pursue employment. He wanted to live in Oklahoma, he said, but one thing could change that—Hollywood. If the Knute Rockne story could make the silver screen, why not Jim Thorpe’s? Plans were being made, he said, to film a picture of his life.
29 Road to Utopia
THE PAWNEE INDIAN SCHOOL WAS sixty miles west and slightly north of Tulsa, separated from the town of Pawnee by Black Bear Creek. It opened on reservation land in 1878 after the Pawnee had been removed from their homeland in Nebraska and relocated to Indian Territory. But the coed student body included more than Pawnee. There were also Ponca, Kickapoo, Kaw, Shawnee, Otoe, Tonkawa, and Sac and Fox. By the time Jim’s sons arrived in the fall of 1943, the school had been operating for sixty-five years. To students and alumni, it was known as Gravy U, a nickname inspired by the chipped-beef gravy served in the cafeteria for breakfast. The Thorpe boys hated the place. They knew they were sent there because of their father’s heart attack and thought he probably assumed that if Indian school was good enough for him it was good enough for them. It also lessened his financial burden, since the government would pay for their room, board, and education.
Jack, the youngest of the Thorpes, was not yet six when he was sent to Pawnee with his brothers. His life had been chaotic enough already, first separated from his mother and shipped off from sunny California to gritty Detroit to live with his father, and now separated from both parents to live the regimented Indian boarding school life. The boys’ dormitory had a leaky roof. It was drafty in the winter and always overcrowded. Some boys were housed in a sleeping porch built in the rear. To get to the toilets and baths you entered a stone annex connected to the porch. Little Jack was asthmatic, and when he caught a cold or flu his asthma worsened and he had trouble breathing. One day that first winter he fell so sick he fouled his bed. An older boy pulled him out of bed, discovered the accident, found a razor strop and started beating him, then dragged him off to the shower. One more trauma in a young life. One of his older brothers ran away briefly and hid out at Aunt Mary’s cabin in the countryside near Prague until an Indian agent tracked him down.
Jim was long gone from Oklahoma by then, despite the efforts of Lon Scott and others to find him a job. Scott was so devoted to Thorpe that he paid off a parking ticket Jim received in Tulsa one day after walking in circles, unable to remember where he had left his car. Scott also concocted a plan for the two of them to go into business when the war ended “making swell looking, great big cowboy type western hats which we will call the Jim Thorpe hat.” After hard lobbying, he even landed a solid job offer for Jim. The state highway department would hire Thorpe to travel across Oklahoma, delivering inspirational speeches to schools and civic clubs, tossing in a few lines about roads along the way. Jim declined, saying his heart was in sports. Half his heart, at least. He knew that friends in Holdenville had circulated a statewide petition asking the University of Oklahoma regents to appoint him to a position with the athletic department in Norman. That job, he said, would be “the finest thing I could hope for.” The petition drive failed; the offer never came.
Telling only his sister, Jim left for California, a departure that Scott discovered by reading the newspapers. On November 9, 1943, the Shawnee paper ran an article under the headline: “JIM THORPE DREAM FADES; HEADS WEST.” The wire service piece said Jim had been “keenly disappointed” not to be hired by the state university and intended to work at a war plant in southern California. But that did not happen either. He ended up in Los Angeles, working as an extra in movies again and living with Chief Many Treaties and another friend in a house on Seventh Street.
“Well, Xmas is over, thank God, and had just a little ‘cheer’—handled it better than former years,” Thorpe wrote in a letter to Scott on December 27. He said he had been invited to a sports award banquet that night where he would see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, along with his former coach Pop Warner and Amos Alonzo Stagg. That got him thinking about his own movie again. “Oh well… I honestly believe my life story is going to be made but every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants the story for nothing. Have had propositions running around 20 grand mark feel that is my last stand… so I am sitting tight signing nothing until the right time and plenty of dough behind it.”
The banquet was the first annual Los Angeles Times National Sports Award Dinner, a gathering of eight hundred members of the sports tribe at the Biltmore Bowl, the grand ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel. Hope and Crosby cracked jokes; Bing sang “White Christmas;” Sergeant Joe DiMaggio, gone from the New York Yankees to play for the Army Air Forces during the war, came from his station at Santa Ana to sit at the head table; and fifteen athletes were honored with sterling silver medallions as the best in their fields that year. They included Byron Nelson in golf, bantamweight Manuel Ortiz in boxing, national champion Pauline Betz in women’s tennis, Ann Curtis in women’s swimming, quarterback Sammy Baugh in pro football, and Heisman Trophy winner Angelo Bertelli, the quarterback at Notre Dame, in the college game. Jim was asked to accept the trophy for Bertelli, who could not attend.
The opportunity to rub shoulders again in 1944 with Bob Hope connected Jim to another movie opportunity. It was an uncredited role in Road to Utopia, one of the “Road to” musical comedies, starring Hope and Crosby. This time the traveling duo played vaudeville charlatans who called themselves Professor Zambini and Ghost-O and ended up skedaddling out of San Francisco on a ship to Alaska, where they discovered a map leading to a secret gold mine. Jim is one of the passengers on the ship. He can be seen standing near Hope and Crosby in winter garb as the vessel docks in the frozen north. The men disembark one by one, each stating his name to a customs clerk at the bottom of the gangplank. Jim’s speaking part consists of one word, his last name. “Collins,” he says.
Road to Utopia did not show in theaters until after the war was over. By then, Jim had sailed around the world for the second time in his life and gotten married for a third time.
* * *
THE MARRIAGE CAME first, but only two weeks before he began his journey, and Jim’s new bride did not sail away with him. It was common then for couples to take vows shortly before one shipped off to war, but not many involved a man who had just turned fifty-eight. Phil Thorpe, now eighteen, had enlisted in the navy, and Jim wanted to do his part as the war dragged on into 1945. Although the navy made it clear it would not take him, he obtained a seaman’s certificate and signed up with the United States Merchant Marine for the maiden voyage of the Liberty ship SS Southwestern Victory.
His third wife was different from the first two. Both Iva Miller and Freeda Kirkpatrick were young and naïve, smart but unworldly when they met and were wowed by the great athlete. They had been warned about his bouts with drinking but thought he would reform or that they could change him. Patricia Gladys Woodbury Askew was a well-traveled woman of forty-seven when she became Mrs. Patsy Thorpe, and was on a third marriage of her own. Born in Joplin, Missouri, she had followed a meandering path around the country, travels brought about by her marriages and her career as a husky-voiced, piano-playing bandleader in cocktail bars in a group called the Patricians. She lived for a stretch in Louisville, Kentucky, and a shorter spell in Rock Island, Illinois. That was in 1926 and 1927, when Jim, at the end of his football career, was playing for the Rock Island Independents on land where his ancestor Black Hawk had once stood. Patsy met Jim there, and admired him thereafter, but as she put it in a letter to an acquaintance, “the romantic angle did not develop until the past year,” meaning 1944, after Jim had returned to California from Detroit and Oklahoma and she was living in Lomita not far from him.
They originally met in a bar. They got married in Tijuana on the second of June, 1945, full of liquor. She was a hard drinker herself. As his wife, but also his business manager with full power of attorney, she did not want to change how Jim dealt with the world so much as how the world dealt with him.
Jim had received his seaman’s certificate two weeks before the quickie marriage. The U.S. Coast Guard issued it on May 19, with Jim posing for the photo on the ID card tieless in a wide-collared white shirt. He listed his address as 26208 Belle Porte Avenue, where Patsy lived. He said he was born on May 28, 1888, a date he often gave though in fact he was born on May 22 a year earlier. Under the category Color, the card said White, though his proof of citizenship was a 1939 registration paper from the Sac and Fox Census Rolls as a full-blood Sac and Fox Indian. His height was listed as 6' 1 ½" and weight 215. Brown hair, brown eyes. Next of kin: Mrs. Patricia G. Askew, relationship—friend.
At four on the afternoon of May 23, Southwestern Victory was degaussed at the California Shipbuilding Company at San Pedro, reducing the magnetic field in the hull to make it less detectable, and moved to Pier 1 at Long Beach, where she was outfitted with a Zig Zag Clock used to plot swerving courses to confuse the enemy, a vital timepiece for a ship traveling across threatening seas to India without convoy or escort. Eleven days later, the ship was moved to Victory dock for loading army explosives—drums of 100 octane aviation fuel and racks of 500-pound bombs. Volcanic hell tucked into the belly of the beast. Another four-day break before the full crew reported: fifty-three merchant seamen and an Armed Guard detachment of twenty-five sailors from the Naval Reserves. Jim was ship carpenter and oldest of the crewmen. They called him Pop.
On June 13 they pushed out to sea. The first leg was across the Pacific from Long Beach to Australia, 7,081 miles in 21 days, 5 hours, and 37 minutes. Along the way, they tested the Zig Zag; fired four practice rounds of the 20 mm guns on the aft, midships, and forward decks; suffered boiler trouble; sighted two other Liberty ships and a Norwegian steamer but no enemy vessels; and gathered for nightly bull sessions on deck or in the mess hall. Jim was friendly but quiet during that first leg, and some mates seemed not to know they were traveling with a man who once was the greatest athlete in the world. He was not an old salt, but he had traveled these waters once before, on the world tour with the Giants and White Sox in 1913, so he helped initiate first-timers into the ritual when they crossed the equator. In later years, one seaman vaguely remembered that Jim might have played King Neptune in the ceremony. He certainly had the necessary look for the part.
When they anchored at the Gellibrand pier in Melbourne, the Naval Armed Guard were given shore leave. One guardsman was picked up and put in the brig for drunkenness, and another failed to report back to the ship and was found the next day by an Aussie civilian who said the sailor had been struck over the head and knocked unconscious while drunk. No such trouble with Jim.
With the boiler fully repaired, the ship set off on the second leg from Melbourne to Calcutta, 5,565 miles over fifteen days. Along the way they took evasive Zig Zag action when an unidentified steamer was noticed four miles to port. The crew held more evening bull sessions, with Jim now the star attraction after someone had notified Stars and Stripes about his history and whereabouts. “He had lots of tales to tell and kept everyone’s interest,” recalled Wesley A. Nimtz, a third engineer who worked belowdecks. He could tell tales about Oorang Airedales and hunting coons and playing football against Ike at Army and Knute Rockne in the pros and sailing around the world with Little Napoleon and trying to get a hit off Walter Johnson.
By the time Southwestern Victory slipped into King George Docks in Calcutta on the afternoon of July 24 to pick up censored mail and unload the aviation fuel and 500-pound bombs, word had reached the port commander at the army base station that Jim Thorpe was aboard. That commander was Brigadier General Robert R. Neyland, who likely knew more about Thorpe and his athletic significance than any general in the army this side of George Patton, who had been a 1912 Olympian with Thorpe, and Dwight Eisenhower, who had faced him in the Army vs. Carlisle Indians football game on the Plain.
Neyland had been an Army plebe in 1912 and did not take the field against Thorpe, but sat in the stands and watched Jim blast through the Black Knights defense in leading Carlisle to its historic upset. Thorpe was gone into pro baseball by the time Neyland starred as an Army football end and baseball pitcher in 1914 and 1915. They might have been teammates on the New York Giants after that, except that Neyland turned down McGraw’s contract offer and devoted his life to generalships of two sorts: in football and the military. From 1926 to 1952, with two military interruptions, he served as head football coach at the University of Tennessee, leading the Vols to two national titles and becoming such a legend that they named the stadium in Knoxville after him. The second interruption was for five years, when he returned to the army for service in the war that eventually took him to the posting in Calcutta.
And so it was that a commanding general summoned not the captain but the lowly carpenter of the offloading Liberty ship to be his special guest on shore. “The captain of our ship… could not understand why a brigadier general and people like that would be glad to see someone who was as far down in the ship as I was,” Thorpe recalled. There was something larger than chain of command at play here. An army reporter noted that when “Big Jim” and General Neyland met, “tales of olden times” flowed forth. Tall tales, no doubt; football stories were like war stories.
