Path lit by lightning, p.66
Path Lit by Lightning, page 66
20 When Thorpe returned to Carlisle from his Olympic triumph, the town shut down in celebration.
21 The business office of the New York Baseball Club in the Fifth Avenue Building was the place to be on the afternoon of February 1, 1913. Before an off-camera throng of sportswriters and fans, the world-famous Thorpe signed a contract to play in the National League for John McGraw’s Giants.
22 Jim married Iva Miller, a Carlisle student described as a “dark-eyed princess of the Cherokee tribe,” although it was later learned she was not Native American. The marriage lasted a decade before Iva tired of his excessive drinking and divorced him.
23 McGraw signed Thorpe in part to use him as a featured attraction on a world tour staged by the Giants and White Sox after the 1913 season.
24 Thorpe had power and speed but like many great athletes had trouble hitting the curveball. He was also misused by McGraw and spent most of his time on the bench.
25 A brilliant runner, placekicker, and punter for the Canton Bulldogs, Thorpe was also the first president of what became the NFL and star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
26 “There’s nothing too good for the boy, I can tell you,” Thorpe said of Jim Jr., but his first son died at age three during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
27
28 Jim (top row, center) became player-coach of the Oorang Indians, an NFL team comprised entirely of Native Americans and named after a breed of Airedales. The players trained the hunting dogs at the Oorang Kennels in LaRue, Ohio.
29 Grace Thorpe, youngest of three daughters, saw little of Jim in her early years. “A lump bigger than a football came into my throat when I had to tell her who I was,” he recalled after visiting her at the Haskell Indian School.
30 Jim playing with his sons Phil and Billy near their home in southern California.
31 Desperate for work during the Depression, Jim took a job as a laborer with a pick and shovel at the construction site of a Los Angeles hospital.
32 “A man has to keep hustling,” Thorpe said when he became player-coach of Harjo’s Indians at age forty-six.
33 When columnist Grace Wilcox visited Thorpe and his second wife, Freeda, and their three boys in the mid-1930s, she described “a world in which simplicity, charm, and love make a home fit for a king.” The reality was different.
34 Thorpe’s favorite sport was not football, baseball, or track and field, but hunting racoons and squirrels with his hounds.
35
36 During his Hollywood years, Thorpe became a leader of Native Americans lobbying for roles at a time when the studios often hired white actors to play Indians. Jim had bit parts in more than seventy films.
37 Thorpe (far left) and cast members assume formation during a break on the set of Under Pressure, a film about laborers known as sandhogs who dug the tunnels under the Hudson River.
38 The Chicago Park District hired Jim as youth director in 1948. The press ran photographs above the caption, “Great Athlete Back on Track,” but his attendance was spotty and he was let go within a year.
39 Jim consults with star Burt Lancaster and director Michael Curtiz on the set of Jim Thorpe, All-American. The 1951 movie was empathetic but misguided in some important ways.
40 “The Chief is really something. What a wonder he must have been in his prime,” said Ted Williams, who appeared with Jim at autograph sessions in New York and Boston in 1952.
41 In an AP poll, Thorpe was voted the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. At a Touchdown Club banquet in 1951, he huddled with a team of all-time All-Americans. Back row, from left: Alex Wojciechowicz from Fordham, Thorpe, Pudge Heffelfinger of Yale, Don Hutson from Alabama, Sammy Baugh from Texas Christian, and Ernie Nevers from Stanford. Front row, from left: Bennie Ooseterbaan from Michigan, Bob Suffridge from Tennessee, and Ki Aldrich of TCU.
42 Avery Brundage, who had lost to Thorpe in the 1912 decathlon, refused throughout his later career as Olympics potentate to restore Jim’s rescinded medals. They posed for a cool handshake in Los Angeles in 1952.
43 Jim with third wife, Patsy, his chief promoter and business manager. His sons viewed her as a slick manipulator while his three daughters considered her a melodramatic woman devoted to getting Jim his due. There was some truth in both perspectives.
44 After Thorpe died of a heart attack in a trailer park at age sixty-five, his casket was taken from Los Angeles to Oklahoma for a burial that never happened when Patsy thought the state’s plans for his memorial were inadequate.
45
46 Patsy cut a deal with Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk to change their names to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and build a mausoleum park in his honor. His sons’ legal efforts to return his bones to Oklahoma failed.
47
48 At least 186 children were buried at Carlisle after dying at school. Their bones, like Thorpe’s, are in Pennsylvania soil far from home, but, at least for some, repatriation is finally underway.
49 Six of Thorpe’s children were in Los Angeles in 1983 when IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch (center) presented them with copies of the medals taken from Jim seventy years earlier. It was a hollow victory in the fight for full restoration.
50 For all his troubles, whether caused by outside forces or of his own doing, Jim Thorpe persevered. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth.
More from the Author
A Good American Family
Once in a Great City
Clemente
Barack Obama
Into the Story
Rome 1960
About the Author
© LINDA MARANISS
DAVID MARANISS is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a dis-tinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s: Rome 1960, Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Award), and They Marched Into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History). Path Lit by Lightning is his thirteenth book.
www.davidmaraniss.com
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/David-Maraniss
@simonbooks
ALSO BY DAVID MARANISS
A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
Barack Obama: The Story
Into the Story: A Writer’s Journey through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss
Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero
They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967
When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi
The Clinton Enigma: A Four-and-a-Half-Minute Speech Reveals This President’s Entire Life
First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton
The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate (with Ellen Nakashima)
“Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (with Michael Weisskopf)
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Gratitude
Nearly two decades ago, in the fall of 2003, my travels around America to talk about They Marched into Sunlight, a book on the Vietnam War, took me to the Denver Press Club. After a session with journalists there, I was approached by Norbert Hill Jr., a writer from the Oneida nation in Wisconsin, my home state. He had an idea for my next book. “Write a biography of Jim Thorpe,” he said. I thanked him, explained that I was already working on a biography of Roberto Clemente, that I had other projects beyond that lined up, and that the subjects of my books had to be things about which I was obsessed. I did not realize that a seed had been planted that day. It took a long time to grow, but grow it did, and four years ago my interest in Jim Thorpe sprouted into obsession. I owe this book to Norbert Hill, with belated gratitude.
Before launching into the project, I wrote to Patty Loew, director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University and a professor at the Medill School of Journalism. Loew, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, had come to Northwestern from the University of Wisconsin, where I knew her as a prodigious documentarian and public television host who loved sports and was an expert on indigenous athletics. I asked her whether she thought Jim Thorpe was worth another look and whether I could be the one to do it. “Yes… and emphatically YES!” she responded, and that made all the difference. Of course, she is not responsible for any mistakes I’ve made, but I would not have started had her response been otherwise, and I’ve benefited from her wisdom all along the way.
One of the first research calls I made was to Suzan Shown Harjo, a longtime American Indian activist who was involved in virtually every important campaign for indigenous rights over the last half century. Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee from Oklahoma, was instrumental in the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Her mother’s grandfather was in Richard Henry Pratt’s first class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, and her mother’s mother was born in Carlisle. It was in my discussions with Harjo that I began to understand how the “civilizationist” philosophy at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools affected generations of Native Americans. But it was something more personal that struck the most powerful chord—her description of what happened to her father, Freeland Edward Douglas, as a boy. “My dad used to say that when he was in federal boarding school in Oklahoma at age nine, he didn’t know why he was getting beat up,” she told me. “That he was getting beat up in the lunchroom where they served the food and he thought they didn’t want talking around food. Then he thought, no they don’t want talking in line, no they don’t want talking in Indian, in Muscogee, his language. He said he was beaten with boards. When you think about it, a nine-year-old! To his last days, he was always uncomfortable speaking at dinner or at the table.”
Harjo also recalled her father telling her about the time as a boy in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, when he was standing near the Newtown United Methodist Church and saw a big black car pull to the curb. When he asked who it was, he was told it was “the great man”—Jim Thorpe, there to visit one of his sisters, Fannie. “He shook my hand and talked to me,” Douglas told his daughter “I remember he talked to me real good, real good, and I was happy to meet him.”
Researching a book can be a methodical process, but there is always a certain serendipity to it. Harjo told me that an associate of hers had once interviewed her father about meeting Thorpe. Who was that? I asked. She said it was David Hurst Thomas, curator of North American Archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who had also served with her as a founding trustee at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall. When I contacted Thomas, he invited me to meet with him at his office on the fifth floor of the grand neo-Romanesque building on the Upper West Side. Thomas sat casually in a room stuffed with old books, maps, and artifacts, his western boots occasionally propped on his desk—an artifact in and of itself, having once belonged to his late colleague at the museum, the legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead. He talked about Thorpe and the museum and his support of the repatriation of bones and cultural artifacts taken from indigenous sites over the centuries, and near the end of our conversation, he told me that he had been obsessed with the Thorpe story and spent years conducting research for a biography that for various reasons he never wrote. As a football fan who had once worked for Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders, he had read my book on Vince Lombardi, he said, and was thrilled that I was now as obsessed with Thorpe as he was. And that is how I inherited what I now call the David Hurst Thomas Archive, eight boxes of invaluable material that my friend Chip Brown later helped me pile into a station wagon for the drive back to my home office in Washington. I remain everlastingly grateful to David for his generosity.
Biographers are miners panning for gold in old rivers, and when dealing with a well-known subject there are always people who had worked the waters earlier. Thomas was one among many who in various ways contributed to my understanding of Jim Thorpe. Soon after I started, I wrote to Kate Buford, a fellow biographer who had written a finely documented book about Thorpe a decade earlier. When I told her what I was doing, she responded with characteristic grace, welcoming me to the story and inviting me to explore the personal archive she had accumulated, which led to a rewarding day rummaging through several well-kept boxes in her Charlottesville, Virginia, basement. My Washington Post colleague Sally Jenkins, who had written a book about the Carlisle football team, was also generous and helpful, as was Texas writer Bill Crawford. Scott and Tod Newcombe, the sons of the late Life magazine writer Jack Newcombe, sent me a box of typed and handwritten notes their father had taken in the 1970s to write his book about the Carlisle athletic boys. Robert W. Wheeler was the first Thorpe biographer, providing valuable research at a time when many of Thorpe’s contemporaries were still alive. James E. Elfers was generous with documents and information about baseball and the 1913 world tour.
Archivists and librarians around the country helped me find my way through documents. They included Linda Stahnke and William J. Maher at the University of Illinois Library’s Avery Brundage Collection; David S. Sager at the Recorded Sound Research Center at the Library of Congress; Sara Powell at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale; Nathan Sowry at the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resource Center; Mallory Covington at the Oklahoma Historical Society; Bill Francis at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum; Tom Haas at the McKinley Presidential Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio; Elizabeth E. Fuller at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia; researcher Tanya Parlet at the University of Oregon; and Richard Tritt at the Cumberland County Historical Society. Also thanks to Jim Kossakowski, Leigh Montville, Gene Kilroy, Jeff Benjamin, Bill Mallon, Alec Albee, Vicky Armstrong, Brian Wright O’Connor, Tom Salva, Tonya Hamilton, Ned Blackhawk, Louis Clark, Trace L. Hentz, and Aaron Bird Bear for bits of information and inspiration. The internet is a neutral force that can be used for bad or good, but writers of history appreciate the ways the digitization of primary documents has made their lives easier. I still love to comb through musty folders, but finding newspapers online through Newspapers.com and digitized documents through the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center saved me from months of labor at microfilm machines.
The pandemic made this book unavoidably different from my previous twelve. My motto had always been Go there, wherever there is, but partway through my research I had to stop traveling to protect myself and my family from Covid-19. This meant I never got to Stockholm, the site of Thorpe’s great triumph at the 1912 Olympics, among other places, but through the miracle of hours of old film compiled and modernized by documentarian Adrian Wood I felt I was there. One adventure I did take, which informed the book though it did not find its way directly into the manuscript, was a boat tour of Lake Mendota in Madison with Steve Holtzman and Don Sanford, who wrote a social history of the wondrous glacial lake and expertly showed me the many Indian mounds that rise on its banks and the cave on the south shore where Black Hawk hid when he and his party were being chased by troops in 1833 during what became known as the Black Hawk War.
For much of the project I was lucky to have the assistance of Erin Paulson, a brilliant young graduate of James Madison University who showed remarkable ingenuity and diligence handling the tasks I assigned her. She’s a Purdue Boilermaker now, a graduate student in creative writing, and I can’t wait to see what she creates. Teddy Brokaw first filled that role briefly and effectively before heading off for law school. Margot Williams, my longtime friend and former colleague at the Washington Post, was miraculous as usual in helping me locate people and documents. Barbara Landis, the former archivist at the Cumberland County Historical Society, is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. I’ll never forget the time my wife and I spent walking the grounds of Carlisle with her and I’m grateful for all of her wisdom on the history of the school.
This book is dedicated to Alice Mayhew, the inimitable force of nature who edited all of my earlier books with Simon & Schuster and along the way became a wonderful friend. Like most of her writers, I never knew how old Alice was until she died on February 4, 2020. It turned out she was eighty-seven. I started this project with her around, and in our many conversations about it she was vibrant and supportive to the end. If Alice was irreplaceable, it was my great good fortune to find Bob Bender, another excellent editor who seamlessly picked up where Alice left off, adding his own seasoned perspective and keen eyes to the manuscript, along with the efficient help of Johanna Li. I am also grateful for support from Jonathan Karp, the S&S chairman; Dana Canedy, the publisher; and especially my A-team of Julia Prosser, Cat Boyd, Stephen Bedford, and Jackie Seow. I bow in thanks to the book’s copy editor, the poet Joal Hetherington, and to production editor Kayley Hoffman.
