There are so many ways we can memorialize the greats.
Welcome to the Jim Twlly Tour.
Certainly a special tour today.
All right, we're gonna roll over the Lehigh now beautiful.
There are murals, TV specials, parades, even podcasts.
Of that incline is where they would drag the empty coal cars and then leaves.
But naming a town after someone, that's next level.
Well, there's a Jim Thorpe neighborhood bank, there's Jim Thorpe trolley.
There's a Jim Thorpe inn And we're standing in front of the field for which high school?
Jim Thorpe Perry High School.
And the name of the team is the Jim Thorpe Olympians. That's Michael J. Sofranco. He's the mayor of jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Yes, the town is named for the legendary Native American athlete and hero of the nineteen twelve Stockholm, Sweden Olympics, Jim Thorpe. And yes, I know that Pennsylvanians call their towns burrows, and that their state is not a state, it's a commonwealth.
In nineteen seventy we go somewhere and they'd say where you're from, and I'd say Jim Thorpe. They'd say, I don't want your name, I want to know where you live.
It's a beautiful town, nestled in a valley of the Pocono Mountains and nicknamed the Switzerland of America, and it's graced with more than just Jim Thorpe's name.
I think that there's one thing you can say having Jim Thorpe's body here, it has brought a community together.
That's right on the east side of town. Thorpe is buried in a red granite mausoleum emblazoned with images of his spectacular triumph at the Olympics. It was a high point for Thorpe, as he'd later.
Recall Mann, the greatest athlete of the world, but a kiss Layton, I think is one of my great moments in my life.
The Hillside memorial draws fans still in awe of Thorpe's achievements, not just in track and field, but also in baseball and football.
I'm an old football fan, and my dad loved Jim Thorpe.
He was the world's best athlete as far as I'm concerned.
He still is nothing. He couldn't do anything he could do. Don't you wish you had? Those powers?
Are just some of them?
Now, if you're wondering what relationship Jim Thorpe, the man has to the town named for him, you're not alone.
How many of you guys know how long Jim lived in this town?
Never?
That's correct, Jim?
Yeah?
Really, he had never set foot in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
Did you know that he never actually set foot in here before he was buried here?
Really?
You know, I thought that this was where he was from, to be honest with you, went that's the history of it. Huh.
That Jim Thorpe ended up in a town he never lived in is only the final twist in a roller coaster life.
To me, he as a young person, he was like a Hercules or even like a superman.
From becoming the world's first sports superstar.
No one has had that triad of being an All American football player, a winner of the gold medal in the decathlon and the pentathlon, and a Major League baseball player. And he was great at ballroom dancing, lacrosse ross. People said he was good at marbles.
Is it true?
Yes?
Just surviving modern sports. First scandal Jim thort an American Indian, the only winner of both Pentathlon and the Katla.
Later for playing semi pro baseball before the games. His name is erased from the role of the victories.
To his surprise third act in Hollywood.
Jim Poor, All American, the main of Bronze who became the greatest athlete of all time. It's Burt Lancaster as Jim Port.
From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Morocca. This is mobituaries this moment Jim Thorpe, March twenty eighth, nineteen fifty three, death of an All American.
While the rocks are from visitors, probably most of them from Native people's totems and sort of symbols of respect for Thorpe, the great one.
I'm standing in front of Jim Thorpe's mausoleum with historian David Marinus. David wrote a biography of Jim Thorpe called Path lit by Lightning, which is one English translation of Jim's birth name Wathaux Hawk. That name was given to him because when he was born it was said that lightning struck the ground outside. What do you think of this? Site.
I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, I think it's a beautiful little place. It's a nice granite tombstone, really beautiful sculptures.
Does his being here make some sort of sad sense?
Sure, I mean, dislocation is part of the story of Native Americans, so it has a certain sick logic to it, I guess. But the most spiritual sense would be that he's buried where he started, along the North Canadian River in Oklahoma.
That's where Jim was born in May of eighteen eighty seven on the Sack and Fox Reservation in what was then Oklahoma Indian Territory. Jim was Sack and Fox Indian on his father's side, Potawatammee and French and Irish on his mother's side. As a boy, his mother told him he was the reincarnation of the great Sack and Fox warrior Blackhawk. His father was known as an Indian cowboy. He had five wives and eighteen kids. What is his outdoor life like growing up?
Well, that really is Jim Thorpe enjoying life the most. He wasn't playing football or baseball yet. He was just hunting and fishing, mostly with his father and his father was kind of a oh never do ill might be too strong, but you know, he sold bootleg liquor from the back of a wagon. But he was also, Jim
would say, the strongest person he ever knew. And Jim would tell a story about going hunting with his dad when Jim was maybe nine or ten years old, walking twenty miles, his father shot a couple of deer, put one on each shoulder, and walked them back all the way back home. That was his dad.
I'm exhausted hearing that.
I can imagine my grandfather wanting to be something like his father, maybe having a farm or even handling horses, fishing and running and jumping, and mostly spending time outdoors and not inside.
That's Jim Thorpe's granddaughter, Anita Thorpe. Anita grew up in the same part of Oklahoma. She believes that her grandfather's connection to the land he was raised in was key to his success.
He was able to visualize something, and he got that at an early age from watching horses and watching animals and hunting. Visualization is key to his story.
But while Jim's boyhood may have been happy, loss was a part of his story from the beginning, starting with his twin brother, Charlie.
Most people don't know Jim had a twin who died when they were nine years old when a disease swept through the Second Fox School.
When Jim was fourteen, his mother died after burying her eleventh child. When he was sixteen, his father died, most likely from poison from a snake bite. By that time, Jim had been sent east to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. And if you're thinking that this is why he was buried in Pennsylvania, Nope, Carlisle is over one hundred miles from Jim's final resting place. Now, Carlisle was the flagship of what were a series of
US government run Indian boarding schools. This Indian boarding school system, what was that?
I mean, it was partly a scam, partly matter of forced assimilation. Once the students got there, many of them were not kept there, but sent to farms in the area to work as basically indentured servants.
The students came from eighty eight different tribes, but you wouldn't know it once they were enrolled at Carlisle.
If they had long hair, their locks were shorn. They were not allowed to speak their native languages or practice their native religions.
The school's motto killed the Indian, save the man. In fact, at least one hundred and eighty six of the students sent to Carlisle died there, buried in a cemetery behind the athletic grandstands. And how were these kids dying?
They were dying from all kinds of diseases, some that were alien to their homelands. Of all the places I went for this book, the most visually haunting was to go to that cemetery and see row after row of gravestones of young Native Americans who went there and never got home.
But while these schools were abhorrent in many ways, the effects on students' lives were more complex. Some graduates went on to become prominent doctors, lawyers, writers, and activists. Now, when Jim showed up at Carlisle, he wasn't exactly imposing at age sixteen, just five feet five inches tall and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds. Three years later he'd grown to five nine one sixty. It was then, while walking across campus one day, that he was discovered.
It sounds like a myth, but everything I can determine is that has really happened. He's working at the school in his overalls, a woolen shirt, and he walks through the athletic field. See some guys at the high joke pit trying to clear the bar. They're failing. In his work clothes. He easily clears the bar, you know, and the word gets to the coach and he's on the track team, and pretty soon he's on the football team, and his rise to athletic brilliance starts there.
Here's Jim Thorpe himself describing that.
Day I entered, cry why Poplomer having the horse me jumping over the high boy at five to seven or eight inches where the members couldn't do it now?
In that sound by Jim mentions a name that looms large in his story, Pop Warner. Glenn pop Warner coached track and field at Carlyle. He was also the head football coach, and this is no exaggeration. In innovator of the sport itself.
He was involved in everything about modern football.
He introduced the three point stance, you know, that crouch thing they do at the start of a play with one hand touching the ground, and Pop Warner was one of the first coaches to experiment with the spiral pass, something I am determined to achieve before I leave this earth.
Of course, it helped that his team, the Carlyle Indians, were fast, fearless, and every bit as creative as their coach, as Pulitzer Prize winning sportswriter Sally Jenkins wrote in her own history of the team, before Carlyle, football was a dull and brutal game, wedges of men pushing one another around in the dirt. Under Warner, the Indians found new ways to win, and they transformed the game into the thrilling,
high speed chase it is now. But what about Pop Warner as a person, Well, that was a bit more complicated. He was kind of shady, betting on games, selling complimentary tickets in the lobby of hotels, and keeping the proceeds for himself. And he would ultimately abandon Jim Thorpe at his time of greatest need, but that was years away. In his first season with the team, Jim seized national attention, running, catching, throwing, and kicking. He did it all and with a kind
of ease. Sportswriter Grant blund Rice would later write that Jim moved like the breeze off the field. Jim was equally charismatic, with a wide open face that pulled you in. When he smiled, he grinned so hard his his eyes would close. You'd feel that warmth and magnetism. One of his relatives said, he didn't have to talk, you'd feel it.
Alas Jim starred him at Carlisle didn't translate into money, and so Jim left the school to play semi pro baseball in North Carolina, making about thirty dollars a month.
Scores, if not hundreds of college athletes were going to play baseball in the summer. Most of them were playing under aliases. There were so many aliases in the league Jim played in the Eastern Carolina League that they called it the Pocahonnest League because everybody was named John Smith.
Most collegiate athletes played under fake names since their schools prohibited them from playing pro sports, but Jim didn't play under an alias.
He played under the name Jim Before. He didn't know that he was doing anything wrong, so he wasn't trying to hide what he was doing.
Meanwhile, Pop warn and his Carlisle football team were hurting without Thorpe.
Warner wrote him a letter saying, if you come back, you can train for the nineteen twelve Olympics while you're here, and so all of that prompted Thorpe to come back. If he hadn't, we wouldn't even know who he was. He would not be a name today.
On the other side of the break, Jim Thorpe makes history.
I call nineteen twelve the greatest single year any athlete has ever had.
You folks want to Egypt bit of order.
That's the voice of Abel Kiveat. In nineteen eighty two, he took a CBS news crew to his favorite diner in his New Jersey community.
It's a fish sandwich. I've what kind, how, when and why? I don't know What's a little schmeer on it.
It's a.
Could they know you pretty well?
Here?
Huh? Don't ask the questions while I got the fisherman mouth might take a bite of me.
But CBS wasn't there just to get tips from Abel on where to eat. Seventy years before this interview, Abel was a celebrated middle distance runner, a medalist at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was the roommate of Jim Thorpe.
I roomed with him, the best natured guy in or where he was so nice, so pleasant, big overgrown country kid in a way. But Hutton's seventy five a hot and eighty script five foot eleven in a fraction, and they said he had a neck of nineteen quarter inches like a wrestler, and he walked that way just out. I think the Thorpe was the greatest athlete that ever lived.
There isn't anything he couldn't do. When he had to see someone do something, he'd hesitate, look and it almost duplicates almost instantly.
It's true. Jim could observe others doing something, then visualize himself doing it, and then do it, a psychological approach that athletes today practice, except Jim Thorpe was doing it over one hundred years ago. In June of nineteen twelve, Jim and the rest of the US Olympic team, including Pop Warner, who was coaching Jim, boarded the USS Finland
in New York City for Sweden. The ship, which also served as their Olympic village, was reconfigured with a cork track so that the athletes could train on the way. Over Weight throwers would throw the discus off the ship. It was tied to a rope and pulled back each time. It was Jim's first time on an ocean liner. We don't know if he was nervous, but it's worth noting this was only two months after the Titanic went down. We know what the Olympics mean today, they're the Olympic.
What did they mean in nineteen twelve.
I would say that the nineteen twelve Olympics in Stockholm were the first sort of world Olympics.
That's biographer David Marinis. Again.
It was called the Sunshine Games. Everything just sort of clicked in those Olympics.
Footage of the opening ceremonies exists, and it just looks so grand.
It was really glorious. I mean, you had all these men in top hats and waistcoats, and women with fancy dresses and hats, and these boy scouts with their big old hats, and you just feel the excitement of that moment coming into the stadium.
I'm trying to see this through his eyes. I mean, was that like going to another planet?
Definitely going to another planet. The people in Europe sort of romanticized Native Americans. They'd never seen one. So there's this scene where Jim is out in the practice field and three Swedish girls come by, and you know, he doesn't quite look like their stereotype of an Indian, so he pretends he is one. You know, he does some war whoops and it scares the heck out of you know, just to play into that sort of stereotype.
A couple of fun facts. The Swedish smorgasborge was introduced to America by the nineteen twelve Games, and these same games were the last when the gold medals were solid gold. Jim won the first of his two golds in the Pentathlon. Then came the ten events of the Decathlon, which was held over three days. It was on day two, when it came time for the high jump that any doubts about Jim Thorpe's greatness were silenced.
He was going out to participate, started looking for a hue and couldn't find him.
That's Jim Thorpe's son, Bill Thorpe, in an interview from twenty fifteen.
So he started looking around and asking questions. People just said, oh, we don't know. We don't know.
Earlier that day his shoes went missing, kind of a crisis. So he and Pop Warner I think they found one shoe in a trash can and another shoe somewhere else. There were different sizes. He had to wear, you know, two pairs of socks on one foot, you know, to make them work. And he still won the high jump.
To be clear, Jim Thorpe won the high jump wearing two random mismatched shoes. There's a picture of him just standing there like, Yeah, what's the big deal, I'm wearing shoes I pulled out of a trash can five minutes before the competition. Big whoop. Now, while Jim and his teammates were playing to win, they were also young guys in a foreign country. They were going to have some fun. Apparently, Jim liked to wrestle when he drank. According to one account,
Jim was ordinarily a quiet guy. Once he had a few, couldn't get him to shut up. By the end of day three of the decathlon, Jim Thorpe hadn't just won gold. He done so by almost seven hundred points, an astonishing margin. Sweden's King Gustav the fifth awarded Jim his two gold medals, along with two magnificent trophies, a three foot tall bronze bust that took two attendants to carry, and a thirty
pound silver replica of a Viking ship. And can I just say, even if you don't like the idea of royalty, they definitely make a medal ceremony even more exciting. Here's a reporter John Erling speaking with Jim's son, Bill Thorpe.
Again.
He received his from the Swedish King Gustav. Several sources recount that when awarding the prize, King Gustav said, you, sir, are the greatest athletes in the world.
That's what I understand that he said.
To which your father said.
Thanks King.
What are you say?
Yeah, I mean an Indian that came from an Indian school, and that would just be his way of it and their way.
But that story, says David Marinus, was invented by the press.
Thanks King, which is a great lie. But he didn't say it. He said thank you. But you know that was supposed to be you know, the good old country boy who didn't care about anybody's royalty, and that was part of the press mythology about the sort of the ignorant Indian in a sense.
Throughout his life, the press depicted Jim Thorpe in a way that was simultaneously sympathetic and belittling.
It's the stereotype that starts with a noble savage and then continues into the notion of this person that we're going to romanticize, but he's not really one of us, so we're going to diminish him at the same time.
After the Olympics, Jim returned to the US a hero.
He becomes a globally famous figure, the most well known athlete from America around the world. I mean, the whole team was created in New York City. Everybody else there were tudo a car. Thorpe was the only one in his car and it was the first car, you know, going through the confetti of Fifth Avenue.
So he's indisputably the star, is the star of the Games. In Philadelphia, his trophies were on display at the famed Wannamaker's department store. And then Jim made a triumphant return to Carlisle. The kids must have gone nuts when he came back.
They did. There was a huge celebration and that's where President Taff sent a telegram congratulating him for being an honorable American citizen, not knowing that he wasn't even one.
That's right, Jim Thorpe, the American hero of the nineteen twelve Olympics, wasn't an American citizen. It wasn't until nineteen twenty four all Native Americans were granted citizenship. This was a divisive issue. Many Native Americans were understandably concerned that they'd lose even more autonomy pledging allegiance to the United States. But Jim did want citizenship rights, and he'd finally be
granted them after the Games in nineteen sixteen. Now, for mere mortals, winning gold at the Olympics would be enough for one year, but Jim Thorpe was no mere mortal.
I call nineteen twelve the greatest single year any athlete has ever had. Not only does he win two gold medals in Stockholm, but then comes back and has a brilliant final year of football at Carlisle with one game that I call the greatest act of athletic retribution in American history, which is the game against Army at West Point.
Now, why this is so fraud this game.
Well, it's the me against the Indians on a level playing field at last. You know, most football games, it's just football. This one had a larger resonance to it.
The Carlisle players were well aware that only twenty two years had passed since the massacre at Wounded Knee, when three hundred Lakota men, women, and children were slaughtered by the US Army, effectively marking the end of Indian resistance. This season, both football teams were formidable. Carlisle had its most talented team in the school's history with Jim at running back.
Army had a good team. They had a sophomore running back, linebacker Dwight Eisenhower.
Yes, that Dwight Eisenhower, the future Supreme Allied Commander and thirty fourth President of the United States. Omar Bradley, another future World War Two hero, sat on the bench. Eisenhower would later back in awe at Jim and we.
Buying just without the side of his bawn.
It the football on, you take it out sixty yards to punt.
That's from an interview Eisenhower did years later. And it's true Jim could punt more than sixty yards in normal weather conditions. Ninety five yards if the winds were right, we where's.
By this man?
Feed and they which you got.
Last Ike understood that if Army didn't take down Thorpe, they might as well wave the white flag.
They said, we're gonna knock Thorpe out of the game, hit him high and low at the same time, and knock him out. In the third quarter, they eventually were able to make that kind of tackle, and he was on the ground groggy for a minute or so, but he got up and soon thereafter knocked Eisenhower out of the game. The Carlisle Indians clabbered Army twenty seven to six. It was an unforgettable movement.
They could defeat the Axis Powers, but they couldn't defeat Jim Thorpe, fan Carlyle.
It's a good way to put it. Book.
As if that weren't enough, Jim won the Intercollegiate Ballroom Dancing Championship that year. He would have crushed Dancing with the Stars. Nineteen twelve had been a year of victories for Jim Thorpe. Nineteen thirteen began very differently. In late January, the Worcester Telegram newspaper reported that Jim Thorpe had played minor league baseball in North Carolina back in nineteen oh nine and nineteen ten. Now, remember how we said hundreds
of other college athletes had done the same. Incidentally, they included Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the disclosure that Olympic hero Jim Thorpe had played semi pro Bowl quickly blew up into a major story. Back then, Olympic athletes were required to be amateurs.
Amateurism was basically an idea foisted upon athletes by wealthy aristocrats in Europe who developed this noble sense of the purity of sports, and then it became part of the Olympic spirit and system that this would prevail.
But says David Maronis, it was an unrealistic ideal.
Most athletes come out of the working class and money, you know, That's how they've survives through their athletic talents. So it was a conflict between those two.
Things and it was unevenly enforced.
The entire Swedish team was given a leave of absence from their jobs for six months before the Olympics at fau pay. Were they professionals or amateur Jim Thorpe played baseball for about a dollar a day in a sport that had nothing to do with any of his events, and yet he was the one who suffered because of this. There were so many hpocrisies involved in this.
Now, the press and the public were largely on Jim's side, after all, he brought home gold for Team USA, the second place finishers in the pentathlon and to Catalon. Both Scandinavians were on his side too, But the US and International Olympic committees were less forgiving, and so Jim turned to his coach Pop Warner, who knew full well that Jim had played semi pro ball.
The most damning thing about Pop Warner was that at the moment of Jim Thorpe's crisis, after he'd won his gold medals, when because it was revealed that he'd played minor league baseball in North Carolina for two years, Pop Warner lied and said he knew nothing about it to save his own reputation.
Instead, Pop Warner ghost wrote the letter that Jim Thorpe sent to the Amateur Athletic Union, portraying Thorpe as an ignorant Indian who didn't know better and accepting blame. Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals. His name raced from the record books the medals and trophies sent back. But if Jim was bitter about it, it didn't show. As he would throughout his life, he would just keep moving forward,
pushing against gale force headwinds. It helped that he had just married his Carlyle sweetheart, Iva Margaret Miller, and they would soon welcome their first child, Jim Junior. Jim would later write about this period quote, while my castle fell around me, the American people, the student body of Carlyle, and my girl Iva remained loyal. I adopted a fantastic viewpoint and considered the episode just another event in the Red Man's life of ups and downs.
In the NNY All the President the United States.
In July nineteen thirty two, over one hundred thousand people packed LA's Memorial Colisseum to watch one of the nation's most highly regarded Native Americans preside over the opening of that city's first Olympic Games.
I have to play open.
The Olympic Games of Los Angeles, celebrating that tenth Olympian on the monern area.
No, that's not the voice of Jim Thorpe. That was Herbert Hoover's vice president, Charles Curtis, a member of the kaw Nation and the first person of color to serve as vice president. Jim Thorpe, the hero of the nineteen twelve Games, wasn't even invited to attend these Games. In fact, Jim was living in Los Angeles. When Vice President Curtis, who had worshiped Thorpe, read in the Los Angeles Times that Jim had been shut out, he arranged for passes
to be sent to him. When Jim got those passes, he remarked, it had to be another Indian who finally got me the invitation. The last twenty years had been turbulent for Jim Thorpe. In nineteen eighteen, at the age of three, Jim Thorpe Junior had died during the influenza pandemic. The most precious trophy I had ever been awarded in my life had been taken from me, Jim later said. In nineteen twenty five, Jim's wife, Iva, filed for divorce,
claiming desertion. It was hard to blame her. Jim was almost constantly on the road, and he was drinking heavily. He would marry two more times and have eight children total, but he was mostly an absentee father.
Over the course of the final thirty years of his life, he just kept moving. He lived in twenty different states, most of the time out in California.
When asked why he kept moving, he explained, a man has to keep hustling when he has a family and hustle he did. Within two years of his medals being stripped from him, Jim Thorpe was playing both pro baseball and pro football. He was named president of the organization that would become the NFL. For a time, he even played pro basketball. And here's something that surprised me even more. For two seasons, Jim coached and played for an all
Native American football team called the Ourang Indians. Urang was the name of the Ohio dog kennel that sponsored the team. To draw in the crowds, the team would perform between halves, showing off the kennel's airedales, performing ward dances, Jim would wow spectators with his still spectacular dropkick. Now get this, That show is generally considered the origin of today's NFL halftime show. By the late nineteen twenties, age was taking its toll on Jim he played his last football game
at forty one. When he was forty six, he played his last baseball game. To make ends meet, Jim had taken jobs as a security guard and bouncer, and by nineteen thirty one he was digging ditches for the Los Angeles Public Works Department, working for four dollars a day. But Los Angeles was also a new beginning for Jim Thorpe. He'd gone there to pursue a career in Hollywood, but he visualized a better future in the industry for all Native Americans.
And there's another period out there where I sort of see him finding himself and his meaning.
That's biographer David Marinis.
Again.
He became the leader of the two hundred or so Native Americans who were on the fringes of the studio industry in Hollywood.
Jim co founded the Native American Actors Guild. Native Americans were barred from joining the Screen Actors Guild.
You know, all of these Native Americans out there. Basically, he was saying, you've got all these Westerns going on, and you're hiring white guys and putting the war paint on them higher us. You know, we're the real thing.
Those Indian actors began calling Jim Akapamata caregiver in his sack and fox language. The big surprise is how many movies Jim himself ended up in.
He was in more than seventy movies. He acted with every famous actor you can imagine of that era.
He's an extra I think in King Kong he's extra Kink. He mostly played bit roles if he talked at all, and usually as an Indian warrior. But in some movies, like the nineteen thirty two comedic short Always Kicking, he played himself and he was a highlight.
I remember boys the art of draft kicking, to always keep your eye on the ball and never look up until the ball is in flag. All right, ken.
But the film Jim Thorpe is best remembered for was the one about him.
Jim Thorpe, All American, The Man of Bronze, who became the greatest athlete of all time, an Oklahoma Indian lad who was on tame spirit gave wings to his feet and carried him to immortality.
Jim Thorpe, All American, the movie with Bert Lancaster for its time, just to place it in its time. What do you think of the movie.
The movie is sympathetic to Jim Thorpe. It stars Burt Lancaster, who is a great actor and a big star.
There's one thing that really gets at sports. Do you think a man can make a future out of them?
You know, he was thirty seven when he played Thorpe, but he had a training as an athlete and even as an acrobat. In most respects the fact that he wasn't a Native American. Other than that, he was not a bad choice.
And the director was Michael Curtiz, who years before had directed Casablanca.
It was a big deal in the star actor and the director and the sympathy. But it's wrong in almost every respect. You know, it's wrong in little ways where the first scene you see Jim Thorpe running away from school going back home in the home has a tpe and the second fox didn't live in tpees. And then in the background you see the San Gabriel Monsa, California. You know, so that's are sort of little ways and
it's off. But what if I'm The most disturbing was that the narrator of the film, and in some respects, the hero is not Jim Thorpe. It's Pop Warner.
Here's the Pop Warner character defending Jim for playing semi pro baseball, something that certainly didn't happen in real life.
I just want to say, gentlemen, an ignorance sometimes is an excuse. All boys at colin I'll come to us from the reservation. The government pays their expenses at school. That doesn't make the professionals in the summer. When the government stops paying their expenses, they have to win. They keep somehow.
Yes, the man who had sold Jim out in his time of greatest need was presented on film as standing up for Jim. The movie was yet another disappointment to Jim. He'd turned over the rights to his life story and made less than fifteen hundred dollars the same year the film was released. In nineteen fifty one, Jim was diagnosed with cancer. He seemed to beat it, but that wasn't the end of his problems. Jim and his third wife, Patsy,
were broke living in a trailer in Lomita, California. On March twenty eighth, nineteen fifty three, Jim Thorpe suffered a heart attack while fishing at the Redondo Pier in California. He died later that day, destitute. He was sixty four. Only three years earlier, a poll of four hundred sports writers had voted Jim Thorpe the number one athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. Which brings us back to the beginning of our episode and how Jim Thorpe ended up where he is today.
He had told his sons that he wanted to be buried in his homeland in a woman in Second Fox.
Territory, and it looked like that would happen. But Jim's widow, Patsy, who was not Native American, had other ideas.
It was in the middle of a Second Fox ceremony on land not far from where he grew up that she came in with a couple of tufts and took him away because she was unhappy with how the Oklahoma government was treating him and whether there would be enough of a celebration, a mausoleum and a museum honoring him.
Looking for a resting place for Jim's body, Patsy went to Philadelphia to meet with a then NFL commissioner, and here's where things get really weird.
She's there in a hotel room watching television one night and sees this story about these two down on their luck coal towns up near the Poconos, mock Chunk and East mock Chunk, were trying to figure out a way to survive after the coal industry had died and tourism had vanished. And it's called the Switzerland of America, and it looks beautiful, and she comes up with this plan.
Patsy contacted the editor of the local mock Chunk Times and pitched him an idea to save the town.
You'll get Jim Thorpe's body if you merge these two little burrows into one town, renamed them Jim Thorpe. And maybe we'll get a Jim Thorpe hospital, and I'll even build a tepee hotel up here, and maybe the NFL they'll set up the Hall of Fame in Jim Thorpe.
And to be clear, when his body is brought here, that is the very first time that Jim Thorpe comes to this town.
He had never set foot in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania before it became Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania.
The plan was put to a vote and it passed. Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania was born, and Jim Thorpe the man was buried there. That's for the Hall of Fame, hospital and TP hotel. None of that happened. Most of Jim's family was outraged that he was buried in a town he never lived in, and a suit to return his body to Oklahoma was filed. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately refused to hear the case. This really caused a rift in the family. I mean so much pain and estrangement.
Yeah, yes, I mean it's what divided us, and we've been two separate families ever since.
In nineteen ninety six, Jim's granddaughter, Anita Thorpe, took a road trip with her father, Jim's son Richard. Their first stop the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, where Jim Thorpe had been inducted its very first year.
I remember going into the Football Hall of Fame and my dad was he was really enjoying hisself.
And then they drove on to Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania. It was the first time either of them would see where Jim was buried.
And then we were at the mausoleum and my father's. His whole demeanor changed from I'm having a really good time, you know, I'm living this, having a time in my life visiting these places, to a depression. A dark cloud came over him, almost in an instant.
Today, Richard Thorpe and all the rest of Jim Thorpe's children are gone, and Anita Thorpe thinks it's time for the newer generations to move on. Are you now getting to know cousins that you were estranged from?
Yes, you know, I hate to say, but it really took all the children, you know, those that were fighting to pass for the grandchildren to come and say, well, let's do things together.
Jim Thorpe's remains may never be restored to sac and fox Land, but Jim Thorpe's Olympic leg has been restored. In twenty twenty two, one hundred and ten years after his humiliation, Jim Thorpe's name was officially reinstated as the sole winner of the gold medals in the nineteen twelve pentathlon and decathlon. That same year, Anita Thorpe delivered remarks at the National Archives in Washington, DC. She spoke about
how her grandfather's story wasn't a tragedy. Instead, she told this story illustrating how his extraordinary journey was an everyday source of inspiration.
Welcome everybody. I'm Anita Thorpe. I'm Jim Thorpe's granddaughter. I'm going to tell a little story about my trip to Washington, d C. This is my second time here. My first trip was here in September. Everybody kept saying, take the metro, That's how you get around this place. But I was scared to death to get on the metro. And so I leave the Hilton and I go downstairs, and I was afraid to death, you know. I was afraid that I was going to get on the wrong train and
never make it back. So I stepped aboard the train. I sit down, And as soon as I sat down, I thought about my granddad, and I thought about the courage it took for each and every endeavor that he took, going to the Olympics, being a star athlete at Carlisle, being the first president of what is today the NFL. And you heard the term doors open and close. One
door open, one door closes. And so while I was riding that train today, I thought of my grandfather's courage And if I could leave one bit of thing or inspiration for Jim Thorb for young and old, is you know, for everybody to have that courage in your life when you're stepping on the platform to someplace unknown.
That's what my grandfather had throughout his life, was the courage to step up on the platform for whatever event it was in the strength. Thank you.
I certainly hope you enjoyed this mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter at morocca. Here are all new episodes of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Where you get your podcasts and check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving the New York Times best selling book now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes plenty
of stories not in the podcast. This episode of Mobituaries was produced by Liz Sanchez. Our team of producers also includes Chloe Choball, Young Kim and Me Moroka, with engineering by Josh Han. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Our archivel producer is Jamie Benson. Fact checking from Amy Cronenberg. Mobituary's production company is Neon Hum Media. Indispensable support from
Alan Pang and everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks to Steve Razis, Rand Morrison, Michah Carlson, Alberto Robina and Francisco Robina. Also to the voices of Oklahoma and I'm a Sportsfile dot Com for archival tape. David Marinus's book Path Lit by Lightning the Life of Jim Thorpe is published by Simon and Schuster, which, like CBS, is part of Paramount Global. Executive producers for Mobituaries include Megan Marcus, Jonathan Hirsch, and Morocca. The series is created by Yours Truly