 Good evening everybody. What a great turnout. Thanks for coming out tonight. We have a great crowd and a great venue to talk about a great book and so It should be a lot of fun. I'm Paul Fanland of the Capital Times and The Cap Times and Mystery to Me bookstore on Monroe Street are co-sponsoring tonight's Conversation I'd like to take just a minute to thank First Unitarian Society of Madison for making this wonderful space available to us So thanks to FUS Our book tonight is Pathlet by Lightning the life of Jim Thorpe by by David Marinus It's for sale in the lobby and David will sign copies after if if you'd like I'm gonna do a shameless name drop. I'll just announce in advance I was visiting with David backstage at Cap Times idea fest last week with the legendary Carl Bernstein and Carl was asking David about this book and how he came to it and how he decided to Write about Jim Thorpe and so forth and David told Carl He saw the book as part of a trilogy the third on sports figures whose legacies Transcend sports the first two were David's previous Incredibly successful books on Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi another inspiration for David was tonight's moderator Patty Lowe his friend Patty Patty is a professor at the Medeal School of Journalism in Northwestern as well as director of Northwestern Center for Native American and Indigenous research. She's also a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe close close You probably remember Patty as an award-winning television journalist here in town in public and commercial television for many years and I You can break this but I'm gonna steal it from you. She's retiring soon and going to return to Madison So that'll be our great good David of course I was joking with some folks earlier I'm sorry to have a second career introducing David Marinus because I've been doing it so much at idea fest He's a Madison West grad He's mad he's Madison's most famous contemporary author Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post Journalist and his father Elliot was editor of the Cap Times and it was 18 years ago across the parking lot in the Frank Lloyd Wright design landmark Auditorium that is a memorial service was held and David can tell you more but he grew up at the first Unitarian Society In the other space so it really feels like David's at home I'm gonna read one reviewer comment one only get out of your way and get the guests up here It's from Howard Bryant and author and one of the nation's most prominent sports journalists in Different hands I might be dubious But David Marinus revised the Titanic Jim Thorpe for a new generation with a surgeon's care The diligence of a great researcher and the poignance and humanity that is the signature of his writing Path bit lit by lightning is a masterful look at this country's first Super-athlete unflinching from what con what conquest did to his people From the rousing and bittersweet journey of fame and identity and from an American century often far less heroic Than the books protagonist. It's simply brilliant. I'm sure you'll agree. Please welcome Patty and David I think I have my microphone on can you hear me? Okay? How about me? Can you hear me? Alright, I have notes. Oh I'm a journalist I came for you're sending photos to you. No, thank you so much I've been taking selfies There's so many good reasons to come back to Madison and many of them are in this room tonight So this is really wonderful Plus I get to talk to my favorite author So, thank you. I'm I'm really I'm honored that you're here the one doing it So you've done some memorable biographies Obama Clinton Lombardi Clemente What made you think that Jim Thorpe was a suitable biography? Patty low This is a true story I was thinking about it and I wrote Patty an email and said do you think in a book a biography of Jim Thorpe is worth Doing and am I the one to do it and she wrote back? Yes, and in capital letters. Yes And that made all the difference So that's sort of a flippant answer, but it's partly true But beyond that I mean the reason I was thinking about it Was As I write in the in the preface It was actually a seed was planted 20 years ago by your friend Norbert Hill from the United Nation in Green Bay Who came up to me at a Denver event for another book? I had written they marched in the sunlight and he had a sheaf of papers and he said here's your next book David and I said somewhat politely I never take advice from other people. I have to you know has to be a book that obsesses me Thank you very much. I'm writing a book on Clemente and I forgot about it, basically but it did start to grow in me and I realized that I was looking for a trilogy of books about sports figures who transcend sports and What I need in those books is both a heck of a story You know the the action and drama of sports and to use that as a way to illuminate American history and sociology So with Lombardi, it was not just the great Packer coach But the mythology of competition and success in American life what it takes and what it costs Along with leadership with Clemente. It was not just a beautiful ballplayer but a way to write about the Latino experience in the mainland and About that really rare athlete who could actually legitimately caught be called a hero He lived a heroic life His motto was if you have a chance to help others and fail to do so you're wasting your time on this earth And he died living out that motto trying to deliver Humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after earthquake so then comes thought and yeah, I mean His athletic talents were unparalleled And we can get into that later, but I mean everything he did no one else has done before since But that's not why I wrote about him I saw it as an opportunity to use his life as a way for me to explore the native American experience and try to Present that to people who might not otherwise read about it Can you talk about that sports landscape in the early part of the 20th century? Because sports really is a window into race and class and all sorts of things Oh, absolutely. So Jim Tharp was born in 1887, but he went into his brilliant years were about 1907 and 8 to 1915 and it was in many ways a quote-unquote golden age of sports in that It was mythologized by sports writers There was no television then and and it was sports writers writing Heroically about these figures that really you know created the characters Native Americans and African Americans Were you know, they'd both been faced genocide and discrimination and horrible treatment by white society And yet they were they were dealt with differently very differently You know, I mean My you know from what I can see Native Americans were Romanticized and diminished at the same time Whereas African Americans were just diminished. I mean they native native athletes like Jim Thorpe and and you know All of the great athletes that went through Carlisle and in Haskell Played against the white colleges at a time when when African Americans couldn't we're not playing in white colleges Jim Thorpe could play Major League Baseball at a time when there was discrimination against black players he could go to the south and To a certain degree be recognized By the establishments in southern cities at a time when the only blacks in it like in a touchdown club were the waiters So all of that was was different But Jim and all of his teammates and and the wonderful Native American athletes of that era there were you know, he was just the best of a great group You know in baseball going back to to Albert Bender who also went to Carlisle and was at a Hall of Fame Pitcher for the Philadelphia A's many great football players came through Carlisle and Haskell He was the best of those but they all sort of learned how to negotiate That culture in those times, you know, they were all in every story you read And I probably looked at 50 or 60 newspapers of that era Every time they wrote about the Carlisle Indians, they were on the warpath and they were scalping scalping And they were all called chief. I mean starting with chief Bender Albert Bender He wasn't a chief, you know, they weren't chiefs But that's the way that white society dealt with him and the interesting thing to me Patty was that a Lot of these Sports writers who wrote about them thought they were being sympathetic, you know It was just so ingrained into the system that they used that terminology But they thought they were championing the native cause and they always talked about their bronze skin and the high cheekbones and Strange descriptors fun fact about chief Bender He was the only baseball pitcher. Well, and he also invented the slider Yes, but he was the only pitcher who faced and retired 27 batters in a row without pitching a perfect game Think about that. I'll tell you how how that ever ever answers that question gets a free Well, you said by the way Patty is an expert on the whole subject of Native American athletes and especially Bender and so That's another reason. I'm delighted to be up here with you and and Jim Denke's in the audience He was in at the State Historical Society and an expert on native newspapers He's one of only seven people probably whoever read my dissertation, but I have a chapter on baseball, which is why I know Well, but you said that you felt you you always needed to obsess about a Subject before you wrote about it. So when did you start and you said you had these papers? From Norbert Hill. Yeah, and they sat for a while. When did you start to obsess and what did that look like? I guess I started to assess as I was finishing my last book about my father in the McCarthy era and I was looking for that third sports figure I was a little concerned to be honest with you Patty Not just about whether I was the right person to do it, but also whether I could get inside of him You know, he's sort of a laconic figure I wasn't sure I could fully aside from The larger issues of being a Native American just understand him in his personality So once I started to crack that open a little bit, then I became obsessed Native American History isn't exactly in your wheelhouse, right? So it must have been a little challenging. Well, I don't know what's in my wheelhouse. Honestly, I mean everything really I try to start each book Saying I know nothing rather than having presuppositions And trying to soak in as much information as I can Which even though I was a really lousy student. I'm really good at that for some reason So You know, I mean I talked to you I talked to Suzanne Harjo I talked to Norbert Hill. I talked to Ned Blackhawk up at Yale And you know a lot of Native American scholars. I was trying to really sort of You know partly see whether I could I was the one to do it, but also just try to understand the sensibility Which is what I sort of consider my specialty I'm pretty good at empathy and really trying to get inside People who are different from me because I have a sort of a universal sensibility So after you talked to a number of Native people then where did you go from there? What kind of archival? I mean, there's a lot of footnotes in this book. Luckily. I Started it before COVID and that made a big difference about halfway through Actually, the first place I went Was to Yale to the Beinecke library archive there, which had the papers of of the founder of Carlisle Richard Henry Pratt And also of the great native novelist in and Scott Momaday Who be who also was obsessed with Thorpe and with Carlisle? And so I thought I I thought from the beginning that Carlisle was the center of the book that the Indian boarding school experience told so much About the way that that those students and that the native societies had to deal with the Pressures from from the dominant white society So I wanted to understand why he did it what he did how the students reacted and all of that was it a lot of That was in his papers and Scott Momaday offered me the opportunity to see a great perspective From from from someone who studied it as a native American so that was my first foray into the archives and then Went all over I mean the Avery Brundage archive is at the University of Illinois and pop Warner to Pop Warner's arc, you know and the Cumberland County Historical Society, which is in Carlisle Was very very helpful And just going there and seeing you know a lot of the buildings from the Indian school there Existed from 1879 to 1918 it was finally closed During World War one and turned into a military hospital again, and it already sort of lost its favor by that But I wanted to but all the buildings are still there So you could go there and see where Jim Thorpe played on the track where he played in the gymnasium Where pop Warner lived where the superintendent lived where there was a little sort of jail where they put Indian students who misbehaved or were said to Or tried to run away tried to mostly tried to run away, which literally hundreds did Over the probably thousands over the course of of those years and Yeah, there was a whole system of of payoffs to local sheriffs and cops to try to catch these kids and bring them back You know it was all forced assimilation in any case I'm going there and the most poignant moment there my wife was with me was going to the student cemetery And we can get to all of the issues about that And I want to come back to Carlisle because that was such a pivotal time in his life, but Can we go back to Blackhawk because that was really enlightening for me I had no idea that there was this connection between Blackhawk and Jim Thorpe, and I thought it was brilliant the way you you took Blackhawks Journey through eastern cities as a prisoner of war after the Blackhawk uprising and Jim Thorpe's journey through those same eastern cities being celebrated with ticker tape parades. Yeah, thank you So Jim Thorpe was from the second Fox nation. He was born in Indian territory in what became Oklahoma and He was in the same band of the second Fox as Blackhawk the Thunder clan and so When Jim was born his parents his mother especially told him that he was the reincarnation of Blackhawk and He sort of lived that out to some degree But Blackhawk, you know, I mean his name is everywhere here in Madison and you know You know Steve Holtzman who's in the crowd took me on a tour of Lake Mendoza and showed me where the cave was the Blackhawk hid When he was being hounded by the military Anyway, he was just trying to retain go back to the land that was theirs across the Mississippi River and He led about a group of about a thousand of his people across the river and they were Chased by the Illinois militia the US Army and I always find it fascinating that there were three presidents involved in that Abraham Lincoln was in the Illinois militia Zachary Taylor was an officer based in priority sheen and Jefferson Davis worked was an officer under Taylor and was literally the officer who after Blackhawk was captured was in charge of taking him down to a prison in and near St. Louis So after Blackhawk was captured They were gonna take him to Virginia to another prison and all along the route, you know going up the Ohio River and across the Cumberland Trail Huge crowds would come out to see him. I was called Blackhawk. Yanna There was this fervor form like the tulip craze in Holland or something, you know He was a rock star in a sense, but it was that same thing of a romanticized Indian in chains, right? So, you know the the southern press that would never write about a an African-American slave like that was was following Blackhawk all the press was there and That tour When I studied it and I already knew that that Thorpe was told he was the reincarnation of Blackhawk. It just struck me. Wow 80 years later Here's Jim Thorpe after the Olympics 1912 Being paraded through the streets of the East Coast a tic-tac parade in New York And in Philadelphia and it back at Carlisle and the president of the United States issuing, you know Blackhawk met President Jackson the Indian killer Thorpe was honored by President Taft Who sent a telegram saying that I'm paraphrasing it basically, you know, he was a model citizen I'm not even realizing that Right that he wasn't allowed to be a citizen or you know in any case So the parallels of these two Indians being romanticized and diminished at the same time and then I Then I saw the final capstone to that was that Both of them were studied by pseudo scientists in a way to determine why they were different and why Why Blackhawk was inferior and Thorpe might be physically superior, you know, so in both cases You know the the the studies were We're part of that process of it wasn't it certainly wasn't eugenics But it was part of that whole process of phony science to determine why different races are different So What what was another thing that was really interesting to me is Thorpe had a pretty ordinary Childhood, you know a typical kind of reservation Childhood he he he wasn't a trained athlete. He just must have had natural ability Which surfaced later on in yeah? He was sent off to boarding schools at age seven or eight to the second Fox school in Oklahoma With his twin brother who died at that school, you know among the hundreds and hundreds of students at all of the boarding schools Who ended up dying of diseases that swept through and other other problems? and You know normal. I mean his father was kind of a ruffian, right? I mean Five wives and 18 kids And sold bootleg whiskey from the back of a wagon But was the strongest and most energetic person that Thorpe said he ever met in his life That his dad Hiram Thorpe would take him hunting and fishing and when they went hunting The way Jim told the story his dad it go off 20 miles away searching for deer And his dad after shooting one who put it on his shoulder and carry it all the way back 20 miles incredible strength So Jim got some of that, but You know if we went from that school in Oklahoma to the Haskell Institute In Lawrence, Kansas where he was 11 to 13 years old and wasn't really playing football But he loved he grew to love football there and his hero was a, Wisconsin on Ida named Chauncey Archicat who sort of took little Jim under his wing and gave him his first football made of Leather straps and some stuffing So then Jim goes to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania at age 16 Said there because his father and the father's fifth wife didn't want anything to do with Jim at that point Amazingly in 1904 at age 16 Jim Thorpe weighed 115 pounds and stood five foot five I couldn't believe that when I saw it in the ledger, but it's right there So he had a big growth spurt after that in about three years apparently yeah And you know so within three years he The mythological story which is actually I shouldn't call it mythological because it's some variation of it is true For the first three years of Jim's life at Carlisle, he wasn't even really there It was part of what I call a scam run by the US government where they would send the young students out on what were called outings Where they're basically indentured service working in the local farms And farmhouses for minimal pay the pay was going back to Carlisle at the same time The school was getting money from the government free from each of those students So Jim was out there doing that running away a few times Getting caught coming back to Carlisle and then in 1907 in the spring He was working on the farm at the school walked by the track Saw some high jumpers Trying to clear the bar at six feet and he was in his overalls and he easily cleared the bar and the next Day he was on the track team and that's the beginning There was a lot of Skullduggery when it came to collegiate athletes during this time There's a Wisconsin Lactoflambo native man by the name of Thomas St. Germain who played collegiate football for 11 years And that was not that uncommon But You were talking about Indian boarding schools and we've all probably been reading about all the Cemetery the graves that are showing up and for those of you who maybe need more context one of the things that happened during this period of time is School superintendents often were paid on a per pupil basis So these schools were terribly overcrowded and kids were sleeping two and three to a bed and when Diphtheria or tuberculosis or smallpox or you know any number of of diseases swept through You know the mortality rates in these schools Just astronomical And it wasn't you know, it wasn't just in Canada where the you know all those graves and Kamloops were discovered it Where the pope would apologize, right? Yeah, and so I would imagine that walking through that cemetery at Carlisle must have been a You know, it was heartbreaking for a lot of reasons One is that I had studied many of the names that were in that cemetery You know one one Lakota Sue who they called a blinkin when he got to to The Carlisle and so many others that I knew But so many of their names were misspelled It was the military was really shoddy in the way they treat the out first of all They all had crosses whether they were Christian or not right and The names were misspelled but there were these long rows of of the grave of the gravestones or the crosses under a cherry tree in the middle and You know just looking at all those names and thinking about all these kids who were said you know the first the first wave of Students in 1879 were mostly Lakota Sue And this was only a few years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the notion was that they were wild Indians and we had to to train them to tame them and so one of the One of those young students who later became pretty well known Luther Standing Bear Said that he thought he was going there to show his bravery and to die. That's the way they thought they were going there so they get shipped off to to Carlisle their hair is shorn, you know, everything, you know, they're Everything is completely alien to them to their culture And then many of them did die Luther Standing Bear did not but but many of that first wave all the way through into the early 20th century As you say the percentages of students who went there and never came back as Disastronomical but let's stay there at Carlisle for a little while because One of the ironies that I think you described so well in the book is here are these You know the the lives of native people are so heavily regulated the government is deciding where children are going to be Educated they're just you know, they're privatizing reservations and allotting the land chopping down the trees Trying to turn the hunter-fisher-gatherers into day laborers and The only place really metaphorical and physical that native people could Be themselves Is on the football? Yep, the football field and they're playing against some of the children of the very Army You know army generals that their forefathers played against and I just found that really fascinating Can you talk a little bit more about sure? I mean You're absolutely right that that was the place of freedom for for these young athletes and You know in that era The Carlisle in football team was terrific. Oh And it started before Thorpe Several years before that and then he sort of rose it to even a higher level But the great football teams in that era were not Alabama and Oklahoma and LSU and so on it was Yale and Princeton and Penn and Harvard and Syracuse and West Point and Wherever these the Carlisle the Carlisle team really didn't play home games maybe one or two a year But they were an attraction And they made money for the school. They made money. Yeah, they made money for Carlisle and for the other schools So one of the things I find found interesting about that Exoticism was that here there were being You know people came out to see them and to To watch them and were enthralled by them because they were native Americans And yet they were playing for a school was trying to pound that out of them at the same time But to get to the to the the different Games that the the centerpiece game of Thorpe's career as a football player was when Carlisle went to West Point and they played a game on the plane at West Point in 1912 November 9th and It was the Indians against the army on a level playing field for the first time and The Indians crushed them 27 to 6 And one of the players said it was like the rattling of the bones, you know, there was so much I mean most of the time football players aren't thinking about stuff like anything bigger than the game But in that case they really were there was something more at stake and I call it the greatest act of athletic retribution in American history and on the On the West Point team on the army team was a young linebacker halfback named white David Eisenhower on The bench was Omar Bradley and Eisenhower before the game had conspired with one of his teammates That they were gonna figure out how to knock the great Jim Thorpe out of the game By hitting him high and low at the same time football has always been a brutal violent sport It was even more so in that era. However But what happened is they did knock Thorpe down to the ground He was woozy. He got up kept playing and Not played Eisenhower out of the game with a broken ankle. Was it did he break his ankle? Well, he broke his ankle later falling off a horse, but he never played football again And that was the start of it meeting Jim Thorpe and Eisenhower You know for the rest of his life and career would talk about That game in honor Jim Thorpe by saying yeah, I tackle Jim Thorpe once meaning once an entire game and Boy football was a dirty sport back then and Harvard Oh, I mean their line they did flying wedges and the you know the players had brass knuckles They I mean it was it was really brutal. That was a little before Jim's time Actually was President Theodore Roosevelt who tried to sort of tame it a little bit But you're right and the fascinating part about that Patty is that That one of the reasons that Carla wanted these young men to play football was that it would it would introduce them to the Niceties of the Ivy League, right? And these were the dirtiest players in the world All right What about pop Warner? talk about him because he was a complex figure that Who played a? Pivotal role in Thorpe's life for good and and for bad. Yeah, I mean pop Warner was the coach at Carlisle He went on to be a Hall of Fame coach at pit one national championships and it's Danford and Temple You know considered one of the iconic football coaches of all time the youth football is named the pop Warner league He was a very inventive coach. I'll be developed. He was an early proponent of a forward pass He developed several formations the double-wing formation And in that era he also was really sort of a trickster, which I love, you know One one year he had a kangaroo pocket sewn into one of the Jerseys and they'd hide the football in there hidden ball trick. Yeah In ball trick really hiding the ball another time he'd send an end to the opposition sideline And have him go around the opposition bench come out on the other side and catch a pass those were legal in that era You know it would be sort of fun to watch that now But so he was a he was a fascinating coach and a horrible human being In so many ways that are documented throughout the book he And the key one is at the moment of Jim's crisis When the metals were taken away from him pop Warner tried to save his own reputation and not Jim's but there was so much more to it He he he the players there eventually was a congressional investigation of Carlisle And it came out that pop had been you know selling tickets illegally. He had been betting on games He had been mentally and physically abusing his players So they finally turned on the on him You know he would he would use them during the football season Then they want nothing to do with them after that except for a few exceptions of which Jim was one Although as I said at the key moment, he wasn't there for for Jim Thorpe. So Great coach he and Thorpe had sort of a co-dependency I would say, you know, even after he Lied to save his own reputation and let Jim suffer. He still continued to interact with Thorpe throughout the years Complicated but in the end I found it to be one of the villains of the book The metals, okay, you you talked about the metals Let's go back to the 1912 Olympics and Jim's Extraordinary showing there. Yeah, this was in Stockholm Jim had been on the track team at Carlisle for several years before that in 1912 He was so good at so many events that There's a mythological story that a one event a one match when they're playing Lafayette War pop Warner the coach showed up with two guys Thorpe and Lewis to on a mother distance runner and the opposition coach said Where's your team and he said right here They actually were more players than that but but Thorpe and to one of them would win win everything, you know So that's all they needed to win most matches So Thorpe was good at the shot put the hammer throw the discus the hurdles, especially the long jump the high jump and So he you know the Olympics are based on running throwing and jumping and he could do all of that so he They never never actually had a tryout for all ten events, but he was put on the team because he'd won so many different events at a trials and He and to one of them with pop Warner went over to Stockholm there. There are five minority athletes on that squad Thorpe to one of them a Alex Sacalexus who was a Penobscot Went on to play baseball. Yeah a distance runner Do kahanamoku the the Hawaiian swimmer and Howard drew who was a great sprinter and probably would have been He was the fastest man in the world, but he he got injured in the heat So he didn't get to win a gold medal. Anyway, they went over there Thorpe competed Unbelievably in 17 different events in two weeks Five in the pitathalon the high jump in the in the long jump separately and then ten in the decathlon and He he trouts the field in both the pentathlon and the decathlon The scoring systems change over the years So it's impossible to compare in some ways and of course the equipment was so much different and everything else that the Numbers are not the same as they would be later But if you just look at Thorpe competing against his contemporaries, which is really all he should ever do when you're comparing athletes from different eras He beat his contemporaries by a larger margin than anybody before or since and in the decathlon At one point he woke up and he his shoes were missing the story was that they were stolen I don't think they were but he couldn't find them. So he actually competed in mismatched shoes in the high jump There were different sizes. He had to wear an extra pair of thick socks on one shoe And stuff some stuff into it and he still won the event So he was the dominant Went into the Olympics being renowned on the East Coast for his football and his track and field to some degree He came out of it as as the most best known athlete in the world Which is what the king of swing King Gustav the fifth Called him you sir are the most wonderful athlete in the world when he handed him his trophies and he said Well, here's part of the myth that the myth is he said thanks King Which I mean, I don't know how you feel about it, but Thorpe says he didn't say it. He says he said thank you and To my perspective I Laughed at first and then I thought well is that are they trying to make it sound like he doesn't know any better He's just that you know, or maybe he's trying to decal decolonize. Oh, that's a better way of looking at I hadn't thought of that Okay Anyway, he said either thank you or thanks King And he was the most The best athlete in the world at that point and who else was there the other villain in your book also there Was Avery Brundage Who who not only is a villain in that book? He's a villain in another one of my books. He's in a villain in the book one of my son wrote about the 1936 Olympics. He's just he's just a horrible human being No, really, how do you feel about him? Yeah? Well, all you have to say is that in 1936 he sided with the Nazi propaganda's claiming that the Jews are being treated Well in Germany so that they would go over there But I mean there was much more awful to him than that even so in 1912 Stunningly to me because I had written about him when in 1960 You know 48 years later when he was the president of the IOC and he was this plutocrat fat cat you know living in the highest hotels in Europe and Propounding about amateurism in a phony way. I never thought of him as an athlete, but he was a decathlete in 1912 He was on the team with Jim Thorpe he went to the University of Illinois and all Olympic historians say he was really mediocre at best but he did compete and What I love the most is that after eight events he quit Because Thorpe was beating him so badly But the reason I love that is that it just another underscores his hypocrisy You know from then for all of his career. He would talk about how it's not the national point scores that count Or even how you do in the games. It's that you compete Well, he was getting beaten. He quit. What does that say about him? Yeah, right? And he went on to make sure that Thorpe was not gonna keep those medals He sure did I mean he wasn't the one who took the medals away but for all of his long career first is the head of the US Olympic Committee and then as the head of the International Olympic Committee he consistently over many decades made sure that Jim Thorpe would not get his justice Do you think it was jealousy? I think it was part jealousy Definitely, I think it was also he trying to uphold this sham notion of amateurism and Probably some racism thrown in as well Well, let's talk about how he lost his medals because he played Summer ball for very little money, but it came back to bite him Yeah in 1909 and 1910 Thorpe went down to First to Rocky Mount, North Carolina And played in the Eastern Carolina League. He went down there with two of his teammates Carlisle Indian baseball players have been doing that for years and not only that but Literally scores of college athletes were playing summer baseball for about two bucks a game or $30 a month and Many if not most of them were playing under aliases There were so many aliases in the Eastern Carolina League that they called it the Pocahontas League as everyone was named John Smith White Eisenhower comes back again. He played summer league baseball under the name Wilson in the Kansas State League It was just common Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe He never tried to hide it his name was in the newspapers in North Carolina For both of those summers every day that he was playing In the papers in Charlotte and Raleigh and Rocky mode and Fayetteville and all of the the cities of that league So as well well down and then after he won the gold Medals and came back to the US and starred in that 1912 football season with the game against West Point After that brilliant year in January of 1913 a Story came out in the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts Which said that the reporter had interviewed a guy who was visiting Worcester Who's who had managed Jim Thorpe in the Eastern Carolina League and therefore he was a professional? It became a big scandal at that point quote-unquote and you know, I I think there are Three levels to the injustice of him losing his medals one is Sort of what I talked about how everybody was doing that at that time the second is that What is amateurism? you know another member of that Olympic team was Another general George S. Patton future general Patton was was Competing in the modern pentathlon, which was a different event from the one Thorpe competed in it was all these military events it was fencing and equestrian and target shooting and Patent had been being paid by the US Army for years to practice all of those events. Was he an amateur or a professional? Jim Thorpe played baseball, which had nothing to do with what he competed in was amateur professional The Swedish the entire Swedish Olympic team was given a leave of absence with pay For six months before the Olympics to practice were they professionals or amateurs? This is even before the Soviet Union and all of the other ways that the nations were were claiming amateurs for professionals So that's another aspect of the hypocrisy of the of the injustice and the third one goes back to Pop Warner and The superintendent at Carlisle Moses Friedman and the head of the American Olympic Committee James E. Sullivan for whom the Award for the best amateur athlete in the country is named every year the Sullivan Award All three of them knew precisely what Jim Thorpe was doing and all three of them pretended that they didn't faint ignorance Basically made Jim the fall guy for a completely hypocritical system just to save their own reputations How did his life change after the 1912 Olympics? What does it mean to come back to a country as a Native American and be the world's greatest athlete? Well again, he was romanticized and diminished, you know throughout his life. It was the same process He quickly went into major league baseball because that was the one place that he could survive and make money Pro football was really rag tag at that point three years later He went into pro football and became the greatest pro football player of his era Baseball was a little different. He he wasn't a great baseball player ever, but he was played for the New York Giants and They didn't play him much. They really used him as sort of a gate attraction starting with the fact that When John McGraw this famous Hall of Fame Baseball manager for the Giants signed Thorpe He partly did it just for that reason publicity publicity because he knew that at the end of that season the Giants in the Chicago White Sox were going on a World tour they traveled to Japan and China and the Philippines and Australia and Egypt and all of Europe and the rest of the world Perhaps with a minor exception of Japan Didn't know much about baseball and certainly didn't know even the most famous of the players on those teams But they knew Jim Thorpe. So they came out to see Jim Thorpe everywhere so that was part of you know the whole process of of you know of Native athletes throughout that period there was always another element to it was sort of that romantic attractions kind of like they were You know the the Wild West show aspect to all of that. Well, the wild you mentioned the Wild West show when Thorpe Thorpe was hired by the dog guy To manage and play for the Oorang Indians. That's hilarious. Yeah, this was he was you know Jim didn't even start playing professional football until he was almost 30. So and You know, he'd been playing football in an era when you played 60 minutes half. He was a halfback. He was a defensive back He was a punter or a kicker. He did everything But that's exactly most most running backs are over the hill by age 30. So Jim was still playing When he joined the Oorang Indians in 1922 when he was 30, you know nearing 40 is 30 is late 30s But it was a fascinating team it was it was all Native Americans including your guy, St. Germain was on that And a little twig and all these some former Carlisle players Most of the team was comprised of native athletes who were not really very good athletes So it wasn't a great team because the great players were old and the rest of the team was was inexperienced But they were in the National Football League. The National Football League had been formed in 1921 The precursor of that Jim Thorpe was the first president of in 1920 1922 when he was with the Oorang Indians the Green Bay Packers were there So the Oorang Indians would go around they'd never played at home They were based in this little town in Ohio the Ruoh, Ohio They were named the Oorang Indians because their owner owned the largest Aridale dog kennel in the world and they were called the Oorang it was called the Oorang kennel and he thought that these These Indian athletes who are good hunters and trackers could both play football for him and then to help train his dogs That's why he did it and during the The timeouts between quarters The dogs would come out and jump through who flaming hoops and do little tricks and spin around and then then this was you know Just cringe-worthy At halftime the football the native football players would go into the locker rooms Change into Wild West costumes and they would do a pageant And reenact You know they even reenacted the battle of little big horn as halftime entertainment And then at the end go back and locker room change back into their football uniforms and go out back That's the way they dealt with life in that era and and I always thought that that the athletes themselves Knew how to play that game I mean they knew that they were that they were being manipulated to a certain extent But they were also gaming the system as best they could and they were getting paid And it was difficult for a native person to get paid in that era Right, but there was one football game that the ring Indians played that I say I wish I had seen of all of the of all of the things that Thorpe did in his life and all the famous people he encountered and played games against in in that year 1922 The Uring Indians played the Milwaukee Badgers in Milwaukee and the star of the E-ring Indians was Jim Thorpe The star of the Milwaukee Badgers was Paul Robeson who was in Milwaukee Studying a little bit at Marquette Law School. He'd been at Columbia He he was persuaded to come out by another fabulous Figure of that era Fritz Pollard who was really the first great black professional football player and Pollard and Robeson could actually play pro football Then a few years later Football like baseball would have a color line and they were no longer playing but anyway Robeson against Thorpe on the same field I just wish I'd been there to see that and Thorpe was of course called the big engine and and Robeson was described as the giant Negro And Robeson actually dominated that game He scored two touchdowns and you know he didn't play much pro football But he could do anything of course like Thorpe could in a different sense and so he was a star end on that team another fun fact The first professional football player that played for the Green Bay Packers Acme Packers I think back then was an Oneida Indian and he had also been at Carlisle and Back then every little town, you know Bessemer and Green Bay They all had their own town teams and at that point it was still amateur but This Oneida player was so well known and was such a wonderful player that everyone started If you come play for us, we'll give you an apartment If you cut if you come play for us, we'll give you an apartment and Green Bay Offered a him a free apartment and $20 and that was the first time that that someone had been Fun facts another fact is that that in that era it was pro football was such a wild Operation that a lot of players would play for for different teams and different weeks Newt Rockney though the the famed newt Rockney, you know glorious newt Rockney One year in the Ohio League he played for six different teams and in one season because they were paying him more Thorps life after the 20s really Was complicated and sad in many ways But boy he had an indomitable spirit didn't he just he'd get punched Life would knock him down and he would just get back up again and again and again. Yeah, it's true I mean he did struggle with alcohol and he you know, he He had seven children from this first two wives and In the period when he was being an athlete and a little bit after that He didn't see much of his kids There's one scene in my book where he's at the Haskell Institute where his daughter grace is going to school there And she's seven or eight and and Jim says he had to reintroduce himself to his own daughter I know that was you know, there was there's struggles and he you know, I document that he lived in 20 different states He had all kinds of of jobs many of them menial. He was he dug ditches for a while In Southern California. He was a greeter at various bars There's a period in the point in the book where I I have the letters that he wrote to hit who the woman who would become his second wife and then his second wife and When you read the second batch of those letters, I sort of felt sort of like death of a salesman type of really low-manesque to him Because he kept saying there's something that I'm about to be able to do the next best thing the next big thing Yeah, he was gonna sell real estate in Florida. He was gonna be a promoter in Cuba all these things that were about to happen and They never did and that was the start of a long period where things didn't happen that he hoped would happen But he'd never gave up And he you know for a while a long period he lived in South of Los Angeles But was active on the fringes of the of Hollywood And he acted he's listed as an actor in over 70 movies Sometimes I'll say with Jim Thorpe or starring Jim Thorpe, but he never starred or you know, you could barely find him You know didn't have any speaking lines. No, most of them. He had no lines You know one time he just interested, you know, he'd say a name or or grunt, you know that era but I found that period to be Really illuminating in that I think he sort of Was able to establish a powerful self identity in that period He became the spokesperson for those 200 or 300 native actors Who were scrambling to get jobs? There were so many westerns being performed are produced And they were hiring white guys and putting grease paint on them to play Indians in the cowboys against Indians movies and Thorpe said, you know hire us and he also spoke out against the negative stereotypes of Those movies and you know that he'd been seeing all his life as an athlete So that was a stronger period, but the when I was writing those last 10 or 12 chapters He kept saying to myself something good's got to happen. You know, what what is it and It really never does but as you say I I Started to think back on why I wrote the book in the first place and it was Because I wanted to illuminate a larger experience and I started to think of Thorpe's perseverance against the all of the obstacles Many that society threw in his way of some that were as you know that he had to overcome his own Person personal flaws, but he just kept going and I thought of that in a larger sense of the native experience that You know in 1915 the most popular statue in America was called the end of the trail Yeah, there's even a copy of it in wop on Wisconsin of all places Yeah It's the one with the native person on the horseback and they're both kind of slumped in the yeah feather in the back And yeah, and the notion is it's all over. Yeah manifest destiny is prevailed The you know the native race is rendered obsolete. It's dying. It will be dead There were fewer than 300,000 Native Americans at one point, but it didn't happen, right? Right, I mean, you know ate a deer in the audience and Patty low. I mean there's you know, there's so much manifestation of how it didn't happen Yeah, there's always been so much emphasis on generational trauma and that's not to say it didn't happen. It's it's true It's it's honest got to talk about those things but native people didn't survive because of generational trauma we survive because of generational joy and ingenuity and creativity and imagination and You know, I wish Thorpe's Story had ended better. The worst may have come after his death. That to me is just that's true I'll tell that story but but you know in a sense his story did end better Because his seven children all were successful, you know, three of his sons were military officers His daughters got college degrees and you know, grace was it was the spokesperson for the for the Indian movement That took over Alcatraz, right? I mean they were all became activists the the great got his medals back And he got it when he finally got his metals back, but the whole family sort of Overcame that tragedy and you know the great-grandchildren there some of them are back to the land activists in Oklahoma There's a lot of interesting folks who came out of Jim Thorpe's life in that sense But yes, he never even a death. He couldn't rest in peace. Oh that this is the saddest part of the story I think So when he died at age 65 of a heart attack in Lomita, California He wanted to be buried in Oklahoma and his coffin was taken back to the second Fox Land and there was a ceremony going on sort of to lift his spirit and you know all of the the ritual of someone passing in and Patty Patsy not bad Patsy low Patsy Thorpe his I'm sorry that's he thought his third wife Interrupted the ceremony took his coffin away. She was unhappy with what? Oklahoma was going to do to honor him with a mausoleum and so on and she essentially Looked for the highest bidder after that. She went to Tulsa. He is his body was there for several months Then she went to Pittsburgh in Philadelphia And she was in Philadelphia Watching television and saw on the news a story about these two down on their luck coal mining towns in the Pocono mountains Mock chunk and East Mock chunk and She concocted this scheme and Went up there and told them about how beautiful it was up there and how she loved it and If they would merge and change their name to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania They could get him they could get his body and she promised I I compared Harold Hill and the music man. She said, you know, not only that but we'll have a Jim Thorpe hospital for cancer and heart research We'll have a Jim Thorpe University I'll build a TP motel in town Jim Thorpe motel Maybe the pro football will start a Hall of Fame here. None of this happened But the town did change its name to Jim Thorpe Pennsylvania He is up there. There's a little mausoleum on the side of the road. I have nothing against the people of Jim Thorpe I mean they But he doesn't belong there. He belongs in in his home, you know in Oklahoma But sadly his sons who tried to fight it in court lost They won in the first federal court and then the appeals court said no the the I've always forget the name of the museum act. You but anyway, they said it didn't yeah Yeah, they said it American graves protection and repatriation. Thank you. I should memorize that Anyway, they said it didn't apply to him because his wife had control of his body and there and it wasn't a museum So they lost the Supreme Court lost it too. So now if it ever happens, it won't be because of any legal action will just be out of The moral righteousness of of the cause, you know, he belongs But we won't end there we want to talk about him getting his metals back that would be a good time and I don't know We're at an hour. I don't know how long we're supposed to go. I can do this really quickly And I think there's maybe time for some audience questions. Whatever anybody wants. I'm fine with anyway Starting in about 1930. There was an effort to really get his metals restored back his records restored every Brundage fought it for his whole career into the 1970s in 1983 finally Before the Olympics were going to be held in Los Angeles Juan Antonio Samaranch the IOC president came to Los Angeles and gave his Thorpe's children replica metals But it was half-hearted. They didn't restore his records and the record books. He's still not he still wasn't there The second place winners from Norway and Sweden were declared the winners. They never wanted the metals wanted nothing to do with it Then there were more efforts over the years But finally this year two months 110 years too late all of his records are fully restored and Jim Thorpe is Got his justice, but 110 years too late Does anybody have any questions oh The question how did how did that first print? Okay, so He walked one man in the sixth inning and Before he faced the next batter before he threw the next pitch the runner tried to steal and And and Bender turned around and threw him out at second base 27 up 27 down No, she well she was a part of out of me mostly and She had come, you know the part of what we had come from Wisconsin To Iowa and Illinois and Indiana and she was part of the group There was on a fourth. Well, there was a forced march from Indiana Basically another trail of tears of death from Indiana down to Kansas and then they were relocated To oak to Indian territory in Oklahoma But there is a Wisconsin connection the view the view of family of French traders were were traveled along with the with the Pottawatomie and One of the views Intermarried into the the family that that Charlotte came from so in that sense there is a Wisconsin connection to all of that But she the Pottawatomie reservation was right next to the Sac and Fox in Indian Territory and on that forced march there were several several there were a number of Kickapoo and Pottawatomie warriors who were able to escape they went to Mexico and wound up fighting with Santa Anna at the Alamo with Mexicans and when I was the South West Bureau chief for the Washington Post I went down to To Del Rio, Texas and wrote about the kick up who who lived right on the river there and they were part of that group Yeah Any other questions? Well luckily pop Warner was not a pop he and his wife never had any kids, so there's no Warner Legacy that I have to deal with and Avery Brundage is just such a scoundrel that he has no defenders that I know of The Thorpe family I have dealt with you know To me the most rewarding part of of this book is the way it's been received in the Native American community You know Kevin Dover the the former the first head of the National Museum of the American Indian and a former Aida Deers successor, I think right at the Indian Bureau to some extent he interviewed me for the National Book Festival and You know what he said really? Sort of made me feel better about what I had done, you know in terms of his thanking me for it and so That's been the most gratifying part of it for me is the reception. It's received from people that I care about The reviews in Indian Country have been phenomenal people love this book Not like him, but one of his descendants who I spent time with is Jim Kosakowski from Elgin, Illinois and Jim and his brother Anton were great college wrestlers Jim Jim Thorpe also loved to wrestle as a matter of fact When he was on the New York Giants one of McGraw's excuses for not letting him player sending him to the minor leagues was he was afraid that he wrestled in the club I'll so much he'd injure one of the great players Yeah Sure, yeah, I've a Miller Went to the show local that I pronounced it School in Oklahoma as a young girl with her with her siblings after their mother died and Then she went on to actually That the students there went to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, which I found fascinating and there she got to know Geronimo who was like a cigar store Indian at that point who would dance for the people and You know a sad sort of ending to that But but eventually I've got to Carlisle and she was smart beautiful Described as a beautiful Cherokee princess Turned out she was I mean she was beautiful and smart But she but but her family had sent it said the kid her dad had sent the kids to that school because they'd get Paid for there and he wanted to get rid of them basically her siblings told her she was Cherokee, but she discovered as a young adult that she was not She married Jim Thorpe in 1913 before they went on the trip around the world. She kept a diary of that trip and you know, I got that diary from a Historian named Jim Elfer is a baseball historian who was writing about that world tour And you know Linda and I drove up to his house and spent an evening with him And I came home with a whole box of stuff and in there was the diary Which happens a lot, you know, you just keep going at places up One of the key moments in my archival research was I was interviewing Viewing Suzanne Harjo and she told me that her dad had been interviewed by or no, your dad had met Jim Thorpe and That someone had interviewed her dad about that So I said who was it turns out it was a guy named David Hearst Thomas who was with Suzanne on the the board of the National Museum of the American Indian He was then the chief anthropologist archaeologist at at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I wrote him. He invited me up there. I went to his office and It turns out he would he loved football and I read my Lombardi book and we talked for a couple hours about Different things and finally he said, okay, you're the guy He said I was obsessed with Thorpe. I spent eight ten years studying him But I didn't know how to write the book But you would and I loved your Lombardi book and I have eight boxes of archival materials so I Took a train home got to a station wagon drove back and loaded it up First you did a happy dance I mean things like that just happen, you know, if you keep pursuing stuff So I got I got material from all kinds of places There was a question over there Yes, no, but it's true that That they wanted him for publicity, but they just wanted him as an as a Native American it didn't He was not famous yet. This was 1909 and 1910 before before the Olympics before His all-American career at at at Carlisle He did played for Carlisle in 1907 to 1908, but he wasn't he wasn't a star yet So that wasn't the reason but it is definitely true that the Local newspaper the owner of the team Everybody was playing up these three Native Americans who were coming to play baseball there. Absolutely one more. Okay. Yes No, he he both I mean he loved hunting and fishing for I mean his dad would take him out when he was seven and eight years old He and his twin brother and and he loved nothing more than than walking in the woods or fishing on the North Canadian River And that continued throughout his life. He was always He said those were his favorite sports. He was always happiest when he was doing that one of the other sad things that he kept talking about how he wanted this to To start a hunting and fishing lodge. He never quite got there to do it, but that's what he loved Thank you very much, David. Thank you You're great