Path lit by lightning, p.55
Path Lit by Lightning, page 55
It was his familiar lament. He and Patsy were living in a trailer park at the corner of Indianapolis Avenue and 106th Street on the far South Side of Chicago, the Calumet River and belching steel mills on one side, the grinding terminus of the Indiana Toll Road on the other. The day Nichols met him at the bar, Jim took out a dog-eared scrapbook that showed all the extraordinary things he had done in his life. But memories alone could not satisfy him. He had to keep moving in an unceasing search for something right, a quest that seemed to keep taking him around in circles and leading to places like the dreary industrial rim of Chicago. “I’m not through. Don’t put that down,” he told Nichols. “Another guy and I are planning on starting a hunting and fishing lodge down in Florida on the Indian River. Me as a glad-hander and maybe as head guide.”
What happens to a dream deferred? Jim’s sagged like a heavy load, as the poet said.
Three weeks before Christmas, thieves broke into his car and stole five hundred dollars’ worth of his clothing. When he reported the theft to the Chicago police, a desk sergeant asked if he would have chased down the culprits if he had caught them in the act. “I couldn’t have done anything but yell,” said Jim Thorpe.
30 Thunderbirds
ON SATURDAY MORNING, MARCH 20, 1948, Jim and Patsy left Chicago to spend the weekend in New York City. They stayed at the Pennsylvania Hotel across from Penn Station, where Patsy set up shop working the angles of her twin causes of the moment. Her usual focus was on three interrelated pursuits, but one of them, Jim’s employment, had been temporarily resolved when the Chicago Parks District hired him as a youth athletics coach earlier that week. The trip to New York was to negotiate with executives interested in the movie about her husband’s life, and to entice the big-city press into writing more stories about Jim, particularly the restoration of the medals and trophies that had been taken from him thirty-five years earlier.
That campaign now focused more than ever on the one man Jim and his advocates considered the story’s villain: Avery Brundage. While Jim struggled to earn a decent living after his athletic career, Brundage had become a multimillionaire developer and Asian art collector, operating his construction business from offices in the La Salle Hotel, his prized piece of real estate in Chicago’s Loop only blocks from the bar where Jim had worked as a greeter. Brundage also dominated the Olympic movement, both nationally as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and globally as the first vice president of the International Olympic Committee. In both positions, he consistently dismissed the idea that Thorpe deserved to have his medals and trophies returned.
When Jim confronted him directly, Brundage responded by restating his philosophy of amateur purity and asserting that what had happened to Jim was no big deal in any case because the entire world recognized Thorpe as the world’s greatest athlete. That argument was his means of deflection. When a reporter in Dallas asked Brundage about the Thorpe situation, his answer diverted into praise of Thorpe the athlete, saying that he was one of the great natural athletes of all time and with modern training techniques and facilities would be “as big a sensation [today] as he was in his day.” It was hollow praise that required no hint of corrective action, and it was not enough to satisfy Jim.
At the hotel in New York, Patsy announced that she and Jim hoped to talk to Brundage soon, though she also expressed fear about how such a meeting might go. “I’m sort of afraid Jim will hang one on him,” she said. To Thorpe it was a matter of pride and justice. He wanted the trophies so he could put them on display in Oklahoma. He wanted his decathlon and pentathlon records back on the books because he felt they had been unfairly erased from history. He called Brundage “stubborn and opinionated” and suggested he should retire from his Olympics positions, but added: “To give him a break, however, I think he’s followed his convictions.”
While disparaging Brundage, Jim held no grudge against the Olympics. On the contrary, he was a vocal supporter of the amateur games. As part of his job in Chicago, he had been appointed to a committee seeking to bring the 1952 summer games to the city. He also proposed that Soldier Field host a national junior Olympics, with young athletes converging from around the country to compete in track and field events. “We could have short distances and light weights for boys between ten and the junior high school age and other divisions for high school and military academy athletes,” Thorpe said. It was a “one-man proposition,” he acknowledged, but one that officials might adopt as part of the federal effort to combat juvenile delinquency. While the national event never happened, a local variation was sponsored by a local Amvets post, with eight parochial and public school teams competing and Jim shepherding the event as referee.
But here was a case where Jim talked a better game than he played. His position with the Chicago Parks District lasted only that summer. His city personnel records are incomplete—some were destroyed in 1972—but point to the probability that he was fired after receiving F marks for efficiency from his supervisor for the second and third quarters, at least in part because he was gone so often. When he was on the job, he produced several good publicity shots and some lifetime thrills for the Chicago youngsters who met him. In May, a photograph went out on the wire showing Jim in a white Chicago Park District sweatshirt and black cap running in the lead of a pack of boys and girls from the Kilbourn Park track club. The caption: “GREAT ATHLETE BACK ON TRACK.” One picture in June showed him in the same uniform teaching a relay team how to pass the baton correctly, and another found him surrounded by children in white T-shirts seeking autographs. And there he was in July with a group of children taking the Freedom Pledge near the Freedom Train, an exhibit of historic documents including the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation being transported by rail from city to city to promote the concept of American liberty.
“I am an American,” Thorpe and the youngsters said. “A free American. Free to worship God in my own way. Free to stand for what I think is right. Free to oppose what I believe wrong….” The red-white-and-blue train sponsored by the American Heritage Foundation rolled into Chicago at a time when President Truman was feeling intense anticommunist pressure as the nation was in the grip of the Red Scare. A grand jury in New York had just indicted the twelve leading members of the Communist Party USA on charges of conspiring to violently overthrow the government. “Free to choose those who govern my country,” Thorpe and the children continued. “This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all of mankind.”
By mid-August, the Chicago Parks District freed Jim from his job, and he and Patsy, with Dick in tow, left Chicago for New York. He had been paid $337 a month for the past five months. Dick would later say that Patsy spent much of it on clothes and jewelry.
* * *
ED SULLIVAN BEGAN his television career during that summer of 1948 as the host of a Sunday night variety show on CBS, but he was already well known for his “Little Old New York” entertainment column that ran in the Daily News and was syndicated nationally. On August 19, after teasing his readers with items about private dicks tailing several misbehaving Yankees and comedian Milton Berle preparing for his gig at the Latin Quarter, Sullivan offered this sighting: “In front of the Hotel Belvedere, Indian colossus Jim Thorpe shaking his head as he reads the Babe Ruth story.”
Sullivan had spotted Jim on the morning of the eighteenth, when the city’s newspapers overflowed with articles about George Herman Ruth’s death from cancer two days earlier. Front-page photos captured the scene at Yankee Stadium, where tens of thousands of mourners filed past the mahogany casket two hundred feet from home plate in the lobby of the House that Ruth Built. Babe was fifty-three when he died; Jim was sixty-one when he stood outside the hotel on West Forty-Eighth Street and read of his death. One giant of twentieth-century sports lamenting the passing of another. Ruth and Thorpe were outsiders who came from troubled backgrounds to forge their singular paths to fame. They were naturals who set the standard as the best ever at what they did. Imposing men with boyish hearts who were light on their feet. The Big Fella and the Big Indian. They had played baseball in the same city for one year, 1919, when Thorpe had his best season in the majors for the Boston Braves and Ruth was playing his last year for the Red Sox before being traded to the Yankees. Through the years they ran into each other occasionally at offseason banquets, and once, when Jim was traveling with the Harjo’s Indians club in 1933, they sat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium before a game and traded good-natured barbs, two old warriors past their prime. In retirement, each suffered a similar fate, largely spurned by the sports to which they brought priceless glory, unable to land management jobs they coveted.
After reading stories about Ruth’s death, Harry Keck, sports editor of the Sun-Telegraph, the Hearst paper in Pittsburgh, ruminated about the post-career fates of Ruth and Thorpe. “Baseball has been falling all over itself the last week or so in paying tribute to Babe Ruth now that he is dead. For years the Babe was eating his heart out to get back into the major league picture in some capacity, and everybody was looking the other way. Which of course is the way life happens to be,” Keck wrote. “People always send flowers for the dead, rarely for the living.”
This line of reasoning led Keck directly to Thorpe. He had recently received a postcard from one of Jim’s former Carlisle teammates asking why “some professional football team doesn’t give Jim a job.” The postcard was unsigned, but likely came from Gus Welch, the quarterback and best man at Jim’s first wedding, who had taken up Jim’s cause with renewed vigor. Earlier that year, Welch had gone to the American Football Coaches Association meeting at the NCAA convention in New York to campaign for his old friend. “It’s a black mark on sports that such action hasn’t been taken before this,” he told his coaching colleagues there. His defense of Jim even elicited a mild endorsement from Pop Warner, ten years retired from his final coaching job at Temple, who told the press he thought Jim got “a rough deal.” Time had healed some wounds that went back to the congressional investigation of 1914, when Welch had led the player revolt against Warner in part because of his anger over the way Pop and the Carlisle administration abandoned Jim to save their reputations.
To the question of why some football team would not give Thorpe a job, Keck responded, “Why not indeed…. True enough, Jim was a wild one in his early days, but he’s mellowed with age and, far from being a problem man, he could be quite helpful in teaching some of these young ’uns the tricks of the trade in the capacity of an assistant coach, and he would be good publicity copy.” Thorpe’s sin, playing summer baseball for little money, was “something almost any college player does with impunity these days,” Keck argued. He urged the powers that be to act before it was too late, as they’d failed to do with Ruth. “If we’re going to shed a lot of tears for Jim Thorpe when he’s lying in his casket, why not make them mean something by doing something substantial for him while he’s alive?” That meant restoring the medals and giving Jim a job. “Professional football is a good spot to do that for him,” Keck wrote. “It might even make him curator of the Hall of Fame which it is planning.”
A month after his Thorpe column ran, Keck was in New York to cover a boxing match and spotted Jim crossing the street near Madison Square Garden. It was a serendipitous encounter; he had been trying to find Thorpe’s address. Jim told him that he and his family—meaning Patsy and Dick—were putting up at the Hotel Belvedere and planned to stay in New York into the holiday season. Professional football had not sought him out for a job as Keck had suggested, but he was finding interesting sports-related piecework here and there, Jim said. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had hired him to give some baseball tips to Jimmy Stewart for his role in The Stratton Story, a movie about Monty Stratton, a star pitcher for the White Sox who tried to make a comeback after having his leg amputated following a hunting accident on his farm in Texas. Stewart was disarming as usual in the role, but even with expert tutelage he looked no more a ballplayer than a spunky young June Allyson pounding a catcher’s mitt as his wife, or old Frank Morgan, who went from being the wizard in The Wizard of Oz to portraying Barney Wile, a vagabond bird-dog scout who discovered Stratton and brought him to the majors.
On September 21, Jim was in the welcoming party at Idlewild Airport when the national soccer team from the newly formed state of Israel arrived from Belgium to prepare for matches against the U.S. team, which had been eliminated from the 1948 Summer Olympics in London that July, trounced by Italy 9–0. The Israeli team, formed too late to compete in London, had hired Thorpe to help coach Egon Pollak train his players for a series of friendly matches in New York and Philadelphia to benefit the United Jewish Appeal. Jim knew conditioning drills better than he knew the sport of soccer, but hoped he could show the players “some tricks about kicking and running that they didn’t know existed.” His main contribution might have been as a drawing card. At halftime of the first match at the Polo Grounds, he trotted onto the field in full football uniform, with high-top black cleats, white padded pants, a round strapless leather helmet, and a jersey sporting the number 68, the same uniform he had worn earlier that year at an exhibition at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Still, at age sixty-one, he had the leg power to put on a drop-kick and punt exhibition. “MIGHTY REDMAN,” read the wirephoto caption.
That same week, Jim and Patsy heard some positive news on the movie front. MGM had hired a new batch of writers to adapt Red Son of Carlisle from the as-told-to manuscript written by Russell Birdwell. The writers were Doug Morrow and Vincent X. Flaherty. Morrow had credentials in the sports biopic field; he had written the screenplay for The Stratton Story, for which he would later win an Academy Award. Flaherty was a well-known sportswriter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner who socialized with the Hollywood crowd and earlier that year had completed a screenplay about Walter Johnson, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the Washington Senators, a gentle man with a big heart who had struggled after his playing days. When Bob Considine, a fellow Hearst journalist, heard about Flaherty’s Johnson script, he wrote in his “On the Line” column: “There is material for a great sports epic in Johnson’s life. He was perhaps the most exploited athlete of them all, with the exception of… Jim Thorpe.”
Morrow and Flaherty had little use for the Birdwell manuscript. They started instead with Thorpe material compiled by Flaherty’s brother Edmund, known as Pat, a former athlete and an actor who had been Jim’s friend for decades. Pat and Jim had played against each other in the minor leagues and for one year in the NFL when Thorpe was with the Oorang Indians and Pat was with the Chicago Bears. They also had encountered each other in Hollywood and were on the set together for Knute Rockne, All American and for Frank Capra’s 1941 film Meet John Doe, where Flaherty had a bit part and Jim was an uncredited extra in a courtroom scene. Vincent was the writer in the Flaherty family and became as obsessed with the Thorpe story as his brother Pat. He would figure out the story arc; Morrow would work on dialogue. There was no director yet, and no movie star to play Thorpe, but the project that had been dormant for nearly two decades now seemed like it might happen.
* * *
BY THE START of 1949, Jim and Patsy had abandoned their migrations on the East Coast and around Chicago and returned to southern California. In the yin and yang of Jim’s life, the closer he thought he was to having the movie made, the more stress fractures showed in his relationship with Patsy. This time, unlike his marriages with Iva and Freeda, the blame was not mostly his. Jim was passive by nature, unless he was fueled by alcohol, and felt he needed an aggressive person like Patsy to champion him, but it came at a cost. It was not only her propensity to hang out in bars and play the piano and drink. In dealing with Jim, she could be supportive and loving but also condescending, verbally abusive, and cruel. And in pushing Jim’s cause to others as his self-assigned business manager, she often seemed unrealistically demanding and unpredictable, helping and hurting him with equal force.
Her negotiations with MGM were as counterproductive as they were Machiavellian. When it was mentioned that perhaps the four sons could have minor roles in the movie, Patsy brought the youngest, Jack, back from his latest boarding school, the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, and moved to take custody of him from Freeda, who was a remote parent. She then assumed the role of agent for him and the other sons, but MGM became so tired of her money demands that the studio decided to drop the biography project entirely rather than deal with her. What seemed like a disastrous situation was saved when Flaherty bought the rights for $8,000 and scrambled to find a new home for the movie. Warner Bros. bought it for $35,000, though that price did not involve Patsy, meaning the studio still had to deal with her demands.
So did young Jack Thorpe. After he was no longer of monetary value, Patsy shipped him back to Chemawa. He felt lost: unwanted at home, unhappy at school. The people most concerned about him were Frank Hardy and his wife, who worked at Chemawa as the plumbing instructor and office secretary. With no children of their own, the Hardys would take Jack home from school on weekends and eventually said they wanted to adopt him. As Jack later recounted the story, they contacted Patsy to work out an adoption. “Patsy wanted ten thousand dollars to sell me to the Hardys,” he recalled. “Once they told me what was taking place I refused to be adopted or sold. The Hardys were sure nice people and it broke their hearts when I refused to be adopted. Even though I hated the Indian school system and wanted to be out of there I would rather stay at boarding school than to be sold.”
