 Welcome, everyone, to the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nakhach Tank peoples. And welcome also to everyone watching on YouTube. I'm Alice Camps, curator at the National Archives Museum, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's program, Path Lit by Lightning, The Life of Jim Thorpe. With our special guests, author David Moranis and Anita Thorpe, Jim Thorpe's granddaughter. Before we begin, I'd like to make one announcement about an upcoming virtual program. On Wednesday, December 14th, at 1 p.m., author Sean P. Murray will discuss his book, If Gold is Our Destiny, How a Team of Mavericks Came Together for Olympic Glory, which tells the incredible story of how a group of free-spirited volleyball players and their demanding coach captured the heart of a nation and became one of the greatest indoor volleyball teams of all time. To learn more about our programs and exhibits, please visit our website at www.archives.gov. Tonight's program is one of a series that complements our new exhibition, All American, The Power of Sports. The exhibition uses National Archives records to demonstrate the power of sports to unite people, teach values, and inspire hope and pride. And there is perhaps no American athlete more inspiring than Jim Thorpe. Two highlights of the show are the replica Olympic gold medals that were awarded posthumously to Jim Thorpe's family. And the family has graciously, along with the Oklahoma History Center, lent them to us for our exhibition. I highly encourage you to visit either online at museum.archives.gov.all-american or in person here at the National Archives Museum. It's open in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery through January 7th, 2024. I'd like to introduce our honored guests. Anita Thorpe, granddaughter of Jim Thorpe and daughter of Richard Thorpe, was born in Oklahoma and is a member of the Sac and Fox tribe. She began her work career by enlisting in the U.S. Army as a satellite slash microwave repair technician. She met her husband in Darmstadt, Germany, and together they had two children, Dakota and Alec. She has worked for the State of Oklahoma for the last 20 years and is currently a contract procurement officer for the Oklahoma Military Department. She also serves on the Sac and Fox Gaming Commission and is a board member of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame. David Moranis is an associate editor at the Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his best-selling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s, Rome, 1960, once in a great city, which was the winner of the RFK Prize. And they marched into sunlight. Winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer finalist in history. Please join me in welcoming them. Welcome everybody. I'm Anita Thorpe. I'm Jim Thorpe's granddaughter. My father was Richard Thorpe. He passed away in 2020. He was the second to the last child. And I had another grandfather. His name was John Grass. He was a Methodist preacher and Methodist preachers love to tell stories. So I'm going to tell a little story about my trip to Washington, D.C. This is my second time here. I was here, my first trip was here in September. And everybody kept saying, well, take the metro. That's how you get around this place. But in September, I was scared to death to get on the metro. I have a first sergeant, where I work at, I have a first sergeant, and he assured me that it was an easy thing to do. And he encouraged me to go to the Arlington Cemetery. And so this morning, I planned my trip, I did the app, and so I leave the Hilton and I go downstairs and I was afraid to death. I was afraid that I was going to get on the wrong train and never make it back. So I tell you what, the first thing I did is there was a series of gates. And you have to get through the gates. And I had this app. And it's the first time I used an Apple wallet. So I'm walking and I know I have to go through here. So I read in my app that all I have to do is use my phone. And sure enough, I used my tap the phone and the gates opened. So I proceed to get on my first metro train. And it reminded me of my granddad. So I stepped aboard the train. I sat 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. And you heard the term, doors open and close. One door open, one door closes. And I was reading David's book and sitting on the train today, it reminded me of reading the chapters. One door open, one door closes. And while I was sitting on the train today, I thought the courage it took my grandfather for each and each and one of the things that he accomplished in his life, the Olympics being an all-star college player for Carlisle. Being the first president of what is today the NFL, I love to watch sports. I'm from Oklahoma and I tell you what, we have a lot of fans, college football fans in Oklahoma, OU, University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. 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 aspiration, inspiration for young and old is 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. Good evening, everybody. Just listening and looking at Anita is thrilling for me because, of course, I never got to meet her grandfather, but I feel like I'm doing that with her tonight. Thank you, Alice, for the wonderful exhibit that you're putting on. And thank you, most of all, to the National Archives. In this era, I can't stress enough how important archives are for searching the truth of history. In this book, in all my books, I've used the National Archives for first in this class, my biography of Bill Clinton. They marched into sunlight, the book about the Vietnam War, Clemente, about the great baseball player, Rome 1960, about the Rome Olympics, Barack Obama, my biography of the president, and A Good American Family, the story about my father and the Red Scare, and then Jim Thorpe. All of those books, I relied on this institution for much of my information, as well as archives all over the country. People have asked me why I decided to write a book about Jim Thorpe, and the answer is that 20 years ago, when it was first broached to me, I didn't think I was going to. I was on a book tour in Denver, Colorado, and a writer from the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, my home state, came up to me afterwards, and he said, David, I have your next book, and he handed me a sheaf of papers that said Jim Thorpe, and I politely said, thank you, Norbert. Jim Thorpe is a fascinating figure, but I've already got three books that I'm planning to write, and I don't take suggestions from anybody. It has to be something that I'm obsessed with myself organically, but Norbert Hill planted a seed that took a long time to grow, but it did, and about four years ago, I started thinking that this was a natural book for me, and I started to think of it as the third book of a trilogy of sports biographies that transcend sports. The first was Vince Lombardi, who was not just a winning football coach in Green Bay, but an opportunity for me to write about the mythology of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs. The second was Roberto Clemente, not just a beautiful ballplayer, but also that rare athlete, so many athletes are called heroes, very few really are, and he was. His motto in life was, if you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you're wasting your time on this earth, you lived out that motto and died with that motto, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake in 1972, when he heard that the strongman dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Samosa, was diverting aid, and Clemente said, if I go, it will get to the people, and he boarded a plane that was overloaded and died in the plane crash. And then Thorpe, I consider the third part of that trilogy. Of course he was an athlete of unparalleled skill. It's really hard to compare athletes from different generations because of so many differences in training and diet and equipment, but Jim Thorpe did things that no athlete has done before since, a trifecta of athletic accomplishment. Not just an all-American football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, but a gold medalist in the Decathlon and Pentathlon, and a major league baseball player. No one has done those three things before since. He was also, as Anita has been told by her family, a great ballroom dancer, a good ice skater. He was even good at marble, so he could do anything. That was Jim Thorpe. And that's part of the reason that I wanted to write this book, but not the real reason. I'm always looking for some way to illuminate American sociology and history through the drama of sports, and through the life of Jim Thorpe, I saw the opportunity to write about the Native American experience from the years of his life, from 1887 to 1953. It's just a remarkable coincidence that those two years are marked two seminal points in the American government's treatment of Native Americans. 1887 was the year of the passage of the Dawes Act, which took away a lot of communal tribal property and gave the indigenous people private land holdings that were sort of halfway given to them and often taken away. Part of the effort of forced acculturation to turn them into white farmers, essentially. Even though I needed brags about Oklahoma University, the motto boomer sooner, the sooners were the white settlers who got there too early, and the boomers were the ones who were supporting them and got there. So it's basically a celebration of land thieves, of Native American land. That's 1887. 1953 was the central year of detribalization, an effort by the government to eliminate Native American tribes, which lasted for over a decade, but luckily it was redone, but that's the year that Jim Thorpe died. When I approach any of my books, I try to use what I call the four legs of the table. The first leg is go there wherever there is. For my Lombardi book it meant turning to my wife Linda and uttering the immortal loving words, how would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter? To which she responded, burr, but we did and it made a huge difference. And I've been sort of making it up to her ever since, taking her to Puerto Rico for Clemente and Rome of 1960 and Vietnam for my Vietnam book and Kenya and Hawaii for Obama. But for this book, the first leg of the table was difficult because this was my COVID book. I would have spent weeks and weeks in Oklahoma if I could have, but when I got to that part of the research, COVID was raging through the nation and particularly Oklahoma, so that wasn't possible. I also never got to Stockholm, where Jim Thorpe won his gold medals for the same reason. But in both cases, by using some of the other legs of the table, I was able to get what I needed. The second leg is the archives, and those were incredibly important for me for this book, not just the National Archives, which has all of the government records of the Indian boarding schools. And luckily, in this case, because of COVID, those were also digitized. So I was able to do a lot of that work without having to go to the archive itself. The Cumberland County Historical Society has many of the letters that Anita's grandfather wrote to his second wife. And those were invaluable for me as well. So many different archives that I went to were key to this book, partly because the third leg of the table was also difficult, which was interviewing people for the Clinton Obama books. In each case, I interviewed more than 400 people. This was different. Jim Thorpe was born in 1887. None of his children were alive when I was writing the book at the end. Even many of his grandchildren were gone, and none of his contemporaries were around. So interviews were less essential for this book than any I've done. The fourth leg of the table, I consider kind of metaphysical. It's looking for what's not there, to try to break through the mythology, the accepted conventional wisdom of a story, and try to find the real story. In that case, Jim Thorpe was full of mythology, meant much of it wonderful and some of it not. And I considered it my responsibility to try to find out the real story. At the center of the book is the Indian boarding school. Carl Isle was the third Indian boarding school that Jim went to. His first school was the Second Fox boarding school in Oklahoma, where he went with his twin brother, Charlie. Charlie's kind of the forgotten figure of the Thorpe story. Most people don't know that Jim had a twin brother. And the reason they don't know is because Charlie died at that boarding school when a disease swept through the school when they were nine years old. Jim Thorpe didn't like that school. He ran away several times. His dad then sent him to the Haskell Institute in Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas. That's where he gained his first inkling of his future, watching the Haskell Institute football team. And an Oneida Indian from Wisconsin named Chauncey Archiquette became Jim's first hero, the star of that team. Chauncey Archiquette gave Jim a makeshift football made of leather straps with some stuffing inside. And from there, at age 15, almost 16, Jim Thorpe's father, who really didn't want him around, Jim Thorpe's dad, Hiram, was a really fascinating character, kind of a difficult personality. He had five wives and 18 children. And by the time Jim was 15, his fifth wife didn't want Jim around. So they sent him up further away to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It's amazing to me to see a document that says when Jim Thorpe arrived, he weighed 115 pounds. And stood five foot five, age 16. And then only a few years later is that dynamic, electric, magnetic presence that you can see on the cover of the book. So we had an incredible growth spurt. But the boarding school, it's a fascinating contradiction. None of us would, except Anita, would know of Jim Thorpe if not for that boarding school because that's where he gained his fame. And yet that school also did tremendous traumatic damage to thousands of young indigenous people over the years. The motto of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was, kill the Indian, save the man. That meant take away their language, their religion, their culture, shear their beautiful braids and cut their hair and dressed them in the uniforms of the US cavalry enforced assimilation. It was thought to be a good thing. It was thought that they were saving the Indians after the middle part of the 19th century when they were just being killed by the US cavalry. Now it would be that they would be saved by becoming white, essentially. And that was the process that all of the young Native Americans went through at Carlisle. Jim included. For his first few years there, he wasn't really even at the school much. Another part of the school's process was something called the outing system where young Native students were sent off to work in local farms in the region in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland. And that was considered to be part of the acculturation process. It was also a bit of a scam because the school was getting paid by the government for each of those students at the same time they were getting a modest amount of pay from the farmers who took in those students. None of that money was really going to the students themselves. Jim Thorpe went through that for the first few years. He was at Carlisle. He liked one of the host families, did not like the other two, ran away, went back to Carlisle, got put in the jail on the school campus for a bit. And then survived that and began his rise, the courage that Anita was talking about. The story of his sort of the origin story of Jim Thorpe the athlete sounds like a myth, but it's actually true. He was 1907. He was working on the farm at the school and one day walked by the track, saw some athletes at the high jump pit who were trying to clear six feet and Jim Thorpe in his overalls did it himself and easily cleared it. And the next day he was on the track team. And pretty soon he was on the football team. And pretty soon after that he was the greatest football player in America. His coach for both of those sports, track and field and football, was Pop Warner, who is an iconic figure in college football and in youth football. The Pop Warner leagues are all over this country. And he was a brilliant coach that's undeniable and also very inventive. I loved writing about football in that period where in one year Pop Warner designed a uniform where you could actually hide the ball in a kangaroo pocket in the uniform. That was legal. Another in a game against the University of Chicago, he had one of the ends line up near the sideline run around the opposition bench and come out on the other side to catch a pass. That too was legal. I think my Green Bay Packers could use that this year. He also was very in the forefront of the forward pass, which was only legalized in 1905. He developed many of the formations that are used for decades after that. So he was a brilliant coach, but not a brilliant man, as we will see. After Jim Thorpe led them to great heights in 1911, he was ready to go to the Olympics. He was also the star of the track team. And he could do everything in track, just like he could do everything else. There was, in the competitions that he was facing, there were no decathlons. He had to have meets with the other schools, Penn and Syracuse and Lafayette and Lehigh. But he would compete in five or six events and win them all. There's another story that's partly mythological, that at one point he and Pop Warner, his coach, and a brilliant little long-distance runner named Louis Toanima arrive at the train station to compete against another team. The opposition coach meets them and says, where's your team? And Warner says, it's right here. It's these two guys. I wasn't sure. There were actually many more players on the Carlisle team, but all they needed were those two to win most matches. And that's what got both of them to the Olympics in Stockholm in 1912. And Jim Thorpe was the brilliant star of those Olympics. In two weeks, he competed in 17 events, two individual events, plus the Pentathlon, which is five, and the Decathlon, which is 10. And he won two gold medals doing that. And again, it's hard to compare athletes from different generations. And it's hard to compare Decathlon. Point systems always change. But Jim Thorpe won those events by a larger margin than anyone has before since. He also won the Decathlon with another sort of semi-myth before one of the events he couldn't find his shoes. The story is that they were stolen. I'm not sure that that's true. I couldn't find any documentation of that. But in any case, he couldn't find his track shoes. So he and Pop Warner scrounced around and found two shoes with cleats. There were different sizes. So he had to literally wear three socks on one shoe and one sock on the other to compete. And he still won the event. Then he came home, grand parades in New York and Philadelphia and Carlisle. The King of Sweden had called him the greatest athlete in the world. That became sort of the moniker for Jim Thorpe from then on, how he was identified. And he went on to have the final part of what I consider the greatest single year of any athlete in history. After winning those gold medals, he went back to Carlisle and had a brilliant final season of football. And the key game in that year, I consider the greatest act of athletic retribution in American history. It was at West Point. It was the Army against the Indians. And the Indians won, 27 to 6. And Jim Thorpe was the star of that game. Before the game, one of the Army players, a young halfback and linebacker from Kansas named Dwight David Eisenhower, conspired with a couple of his teammates that they knew Thorpe was so great that they had to figure out how to knock him out of the game. And they decided they would hit him high and low at the same time and knock him unconscious. In the second half, they were able to tackle him that way. And he was groggy and on the ground, but got up and kept playing. And soon enough, Dwight Eisenhower was knocked out of the game by Jim Thorpe and never played again. Not just because of that. He also fell off a horse a couple of weeks later. But that was the beginning of the end of Dwight Eisenhower's football career. So the Olympics, then this great final season at Carlisle, and Jim Thorpe was the best known sportsman in the world. And then a couple of months later, it all came crashing down. When a story appeared in a newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts that quoted a man who had been a manager of a team in North Carolina, in the Eastern Carolina League, who said that he had managed Jim Thorpe, which meant that Jim Thorpe had been a professional. The stories quickly spread. And within days, it was decided that Jim Thorpe would have to give back his medals. His records would be stricken from the books. It was completely unjust in at least four different ways. The first reason is that, yes, he did play Bush League baseball for the Rocky Mount Railroaders and Fayetteville Highlanders for two summers. But so did literally scores of college athletes in that era. It was what they did in the summer. And most of them played under aliases. There were so many aliases in the Eastern Carolina League that they called it the Pocahontas League, because everyone was named John Smith. Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe. He never tried to hide it. His name was in the papers in North Carolina, from Raleigh to Charlotte to all the small towns, for two summers as he played as a pitcher and first baseman and outfielder. So it was not something that he tried to hide at all. It was also incredibly hypocritical, because Pop Warner, his great brilliant coach, who as I said was not a brilliant man, knew exactly what Thorpe was doing and lied about it to save his own reputation. He had been sending his Indian athletes to play baseball for years. One of his best colleagues, closest friends in Pennsylvania, had been the scout that brought Jim Thorpe and two of his teammates down to rock him out to play baseball that year. And yet when the story broke, Pop Warner said he didn't know anything about it, denied it to save his own reputation. As did the superintendent of Carlisle, Moses Friedman, who I have documents of him writing letters to Jim Thorpe saying, I don't want you playing baseball, and then he said he didn't know about it. And finally, the head of the American Olympic Committee and the head of the Amateur Athletic Union, James E. Sullivan, who was also on the board of the Carlisle Athletic Association. He knew what Thorpe was doing. Those three men were the ones who decided to take away, to send back the trophies and medals, and they all knew exactly what Thorpe had been doing. That's another reason. Then there's the whole notion of who's an amateur and who's a professional. On that same Olympic team with Jim Thorpe was another future general, not Dwight D. Eisenhower, but George S. Patton. He competed in what was called the modern pentathlon, which was all military-style events. It was equestrian, fencing, target shooting. Patton was being paid by the U.S. Army to train for all of those events before he went to Stockholm. Was he a professional or as an amateur? Jim Thorpe was playing baseball, which had nothing to do with the events that he was performing in Stockholm. Nothing happened to Patton, who also, by the way, before one of the events took opium to try to enhance his performance. It was legal then. It was before the era of drug testing or doping. But that was George S. Patton, who was the good guy or who was the bad guy in that situation? So that's reason number three, the hypocrisy of who's a professional and who's an amateur. The entire Swedish national team was given a leave of absence from their jobs for six months before the Olympics at Folpe, where they amateurs are professionals. And then finally, the final reason has to do with the technicality, which is that in the Olympic rules of that era, for someone's amateurism to be challenged, the challenge had to be filed within 30 days of the end of the Olympics. And in this case, it wasn't done for six months. And at the time that was written about by the New York Times, many decades later, some important Thorpe chroniclers found that rule again and helped push for Thorpe's restoration, but it didn't happen at the time. So all for all those reasons, Jim Thorpe lost his medals. And starting with the death of his twin brother at age nine, then both of his parents died. He was an orphan by the time after his first few months at Carlisle, that loss. The loss of the second Fox land before that. All these losses were piling up. Not long after that, he would lose his first son, his namesake James Thorpe Jr. died of influenza during the great epidemic of 1918. All of these losses, the medals were just part of that, sort of a whole life of loss, but of keeping going no matter what, the courage that Anita talked about. In his life after that, he did play professional football brilliantly for the Canton Bulldogs and several other teams, including one all-Indian team, the Oorang Indians, based in a small town in Ohio, named after a dog kennel. The whole notion of the team was just to promote the aridale dogs that the owner had. That team wasn't actually very good. The Canton Bulldogs were the best team in the world. The Oorang Indians had Jim Thorpe and a couple of his teammates from Carlisle, but then a bunch of guys who really did not play football. So they'd win some games, but were not great. They were in the National Football League for two years. And there was one game that they played that of all of the events of Jim Thorpe's athletic career, including the Olympics and the game against Army, there was one game he played in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1922 that I wish I had been there to witness. It was the Oorang Indians against the Milwaukee Badgers. And on one team, the star was Jim Thorpe. On the other team, the star was Paul Robeson, the great all-American football player, opera singer, activist, who was taking a few months away from NYU where he was getting his law degree to play football in Wisconsin, with another great African-American athlete, Fritz Pollard, who was the coach of that team. But to think about the great Native American Colossus Thorpe and the great African-American Colossus, Paul Robeson, playing one game of football, I would have loved to have been on the sidelines watching that event. Jim Thorpe's life is afterlife, I call it. After his playing days were over, was difficult. It was a lot of struggles. He was divorced twice from his first two wives because of he wasn't around that much, and he struggled with alcohol. His seven children, three from the first wife and four from the second, including Anita's father, Richard, didn't see him that much when they were kids. Grace Thorpe, one of his daughters, tells the story of she was at the Haskell Institute as a little girl. And Jim Thorpe was invited there to perform at halftime after his playing career was over. And as he told the story, he had to introduce himself to Grace. She didn't recognize it, because she hadn't seen him in a few years. He lived in 20 different states during that period. He tried all kinds of jobs from being a greeter at Taverns to working for the Chicago Athletic Department. Probably the most important job that he had in that whole period was out in Hollywood, where he acted in more than 70 movies, acting in quotes. He was an extra in many of them. Sometimes they would bill with Jim Thorpe, and you could barely find him in the movie. But it was very important for another reason. It's where Thorpe was able to really emphasize his Native American heritage and sort of find his identity again after so many losses. There were about 200 or 300 Native Americans who wanted to be in the studio industry. There were many Westerns being made. So many times the Westerns would have white people with war paint on, pretending they were Indians. And Jim Thorpe was the leader and spokesperson for those Native Americans saying, you should hire us. We're the real thing. And also fighting against the negative stereotypes that were in so many of those movies and were something that Thorpe had to deal with throughout his life. During his playing career, all of the stereotypes were there. Whenever the Carlisle Indians played, it was said that they were going on the war path and they were taking scalps. And they were all called chief. They weren't chiefs. All of that they had to deal with first in athletics and then again with the stereotypes in Hollywood. But it was very important for Jim to sort of become the spokesperson for those people and push for better treatment. He was in Los Angeles age 65 when he died of a heart attack in a trailer park. And as I was writing those final chapters of the afterlife to his death, even though I knew the story, I kept sort of hoping that there would be some better ending to it, some happier ending. And I said, well, is this life a tragedy? And then after I sort of struggled with that for a few weeks, I came to the realization that was completely the wrong way to look at it. His life wasn't a tragedy. It was an act of courage and persistence and resilience. And there's so many ways to look at that. One is through his family with Anita here tonight. His seven children were all successful. Many of them served in the military, became officers. Many of the grandchildren got college degrees. And that family has flourished and survived against the odds for all this time, as have the entire native population. I thought about 1915, I wrote in the book about the most popular statue in America then, was called the End of the Trail. And it depicted a Native American on horseback, a slumped man, a slumped horse. And the notion was it was all over. It was the end for the native peoples at the turn of the century, there were fewer than 200,000 Native Americans left in this country. Most historians think that before 1492, before white men ever came to the Americas, there were eight, perhaps seven or eight or more million that they'd almost been annihilated. End of the trail, but it didn't happen. The Native Americans figured out how to survive in a system against the odds, save their culture despite all of the efforts to a forced assimilation. Now there are several million Native Americans in this country again, still facing horrible obstacles and mistreatment. But surviving and persisting. And I think that Jim Thorpe came to emblemize that in so many ways. And that's sort of the way I came to think of Jim Thorpe in the end of this book. Sort of redemption at the end of the road. There's another story, unfortunately, about Jim Thorpe being restless even after his death in terms of where he's buried and how that all happened. But I'll save that for the questions period. Thank you very much. And I'm happy to take questions and you're supposed to go to the microphones on either side if you have one. And I think Anita would also, I'd rather hear from her, but watch the steps. Hello, just a couple of questions. First, can you tell us what baseball was like in like 1907? And for him to be going and playing pro or semi pro in Carolina, and how big did Jim Thorpe get from the time he went to school till he was a star? How big did he get physically? Physically, yeah. Well, he grew to, his best playing weight was about 187 pounds. He was six feet. He played as a pro at over 200 pounds. Baseball was the big sport of that era, along with boxing and tennis and golf and horse racing and college football. Pro football was a rag tag operation. Baseball was not, but the minor leagues, I mean, the Eastern Carolina league was the lowest of the low leagues. It was truly the Bush leagues. He was getting paid about $2 a game, 30 bucks. A month. Professional baseball was a big deal. And when he got to the New York Giants in 1913 to play Major League Baseball, I mean, they were champions. They had John McGraw as their manager. Christie Matheson was their star pitcher. And this is another, I mean, there's so many stories swirling around in the Jim Thorpe story, but he was mismanaged by John McGraw, the little Napoleon who didn't play him. And Thorpe thrived on action. And he'd never got a chance under McGraw, who would sit him on the bench, send him to the minors, bring him back, not play him. Finally, in 1919, he was traded to the Boston Braves. And he was great. He was leading the league and hitting most of the year up there with Ty Cobb, competing with his cross-down rival, Babe Ruth, you know, for the Boston Red Sox. That was his one great year. And not just myself, but several baseball historians thinking that he'd been, you know, baseball was new to him at that point. If he really had the chance to play more, he could have been a very good, not as good as he was in football or track and field, but a very good baseball player. Thank you. That was a fascinating talk. I can't wait to read the book. Tell us about the title. Yes, of course. Pathlet by Lightning. That when Jim and Charlie were born on the North Canadian River in Oklahoma, in May of 1887, there was a thunderstorm that night. And it's often translated as, it's Wathowhawk, it's often translated as Bright Path, but I saw a translation that said Pathlet by Lightning. And that's so much more illuminating than I just, as soon as I saw it, I said, that's the title of the book, is Jim Thorpe Followed a Pathlet by Lightning. Great title. Thank you. Yes, ma'am, I'm sorry again. Hi, David. Hi, Linda. Oh, hi. Question. With such a difficult beginning and with such tragedies along the way in school and so on, what drove him to the greatness that he achieved? What was internal in him that was opening doors? And as importantly, I just wondered what your next book is gonna be. You'll like the answer to the second part. Okay. What drove Jim Thorpe? Well, I think it was that desire to overcome. I think it was that courage. And feeling that, I mean, first of all, he had incredible natural skills. But that again is also a stereotype where people often, in part to minority athletes, that they're just natural and they don't have to work at it and train. That was said about Jim Thorpe that he didn't train before the Olympics. That's complete baloney. He did. He was also very advanced in his training. He was a visualizer. He could think about something, visualize how far he had to jump in the broad jump and then do it. Abel Kivvyot, one of his teammates said that he'd never seen anybody like Jim Thorpe. He could watch someone perform and then do it better than they did. But I think his drive was an effort to overcome the obstacles that were presented to him. He himself said that when he got back from his outings at the farms, the school didn't promote him to the class he thought he deserved to be in. And he said to himself, I'll show them. I'll become the greatest. And that was part of that motivation that so many people who rise in any walk of life have to show somebody and the rest of the world what they can do. And as to my next project, I've written books nonstop for 30 years and we're taking a gap year. Thank you. At least that's the idea. Linda said I can write one big story. Say it, which I'm planning to do. Linda's gonna write a story? No, she said I can. She's already a great story. Yes, sir. You implied you wanted this question, what happened to his body and also given that you couldn't talk to him or people who directly knew him, what's the one piece of documentation you were so desperate to get but you couldn't get? Well, the story of his body is that after he died, he was brought back to Oklahoma. There was a second Fox ceremony taking place. His third wife, Patsy, who was a character to put it mildly, interrupted the service, the ceremony, took his body away, and then essentially tried to sell him to the highest bidder. I mean, that's a little harsh but she was looking, she was unhappy with what Oklahoma was gonna do in terms of building a mausoleum and so on. So, first he stayed in Shawnee for a while then was taken to Tulsa, his body. And then finally, Philadelphia. And this story sounds impossible but it's true. Patsy was in Philadelphia, thinking maybe Carlisle or Philly or Pittsburgh would take him and do him right. And she was in her hotel room watching television, saw a news story about these two small towns in the Pocono Mountains in the coal mining area of the Poconos named Mockchunk and East Mockchunk and how they were struggling. They'd lost their tourism, they'd lost the coal, they were looking for a way to survive. They're having this Nikola Day program to try to raise money for economic development. And she had a brainstorm and she went up there and I sort of compared her Harold Hill and the Music Man. She went up there and said, if you build a proper mausoleum and park for Jim Thorpe, I'll also get a college up there named for Jim Thorpe, a hospital, maybe the pro football will build a Hall of Fame there. I'll even have a TP style hotel there for, if you merge and change your name to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. So they did. They didn't get anything except his body in the nice little park in the mausoleum and his bones, but that's where he is. And he's been there a place that he never stepped foot in his entire life. And many of his, it's an interesting dynamic in the family which is understandable. His daughters, who were two steps removed from Patsy, didn't have the same difficult feelings about her that her sons, including Anita's father did. The daughters were okay with this. As a matter of fact, one of them went to Mock Chunk and East Mock Chunk with Patsy, Charlotte. But the sons never liked it. They thought he belonged back in Oklahoma in his homeland. And there was a long fight over that. He went to court, the son sued, and they won the first federal court and then it was overturned by the court of appeals and the US Supreme Court basically let the appeals court stand. So legally, they can't get him back to Oklahoma. It would only be by force of moral suasion that he could go to where he wanted to be. His son said that he often told him that he wanted to be buried in Oklahoma. And that process was on the way when Patsy interrupted it. So there he is. I mean, I've been up there. It's an interesting little town. I hold nothing against the people there. But in my opinion, it's not where. But in my opinion, it isn't important. It's what the second Fox people think and they would like him back. You probably ran across this book as part of your research. I've had it in my collection for a long time. If you can't see, it's called Fabulous Red Men by John Steckbeck. It's the history of Carlisle. I was just curious how accurate this is. I don't like to talk about the accuracy of other books, but I will say that I do have that book. And Steckbeck was very committed to finding out everything he could and accumulating a lot of material, which was very important. It's good for the scores. Yes, which my book isn't really about that in the same way. Right, right, of course, of course. But Steckbeck, there's an oil painting of Thorpe in Oklahoma in the State House. And the painter went to visit Steckbeck and helped get all the dimensions of his body through the work that Steckbeck had done. Interesting. And then the other question is, you traveled to Kansas and Oklahoma and Carlisle. Is there anything left, any signs that the schools were there and are there any parallels between what they're finding in Canada? Oh, yes. Carlisle, well, Haskell still exists. It's still an Indian school. It's quite different. Its focus is not assimilation, but cultural understanding the native culture. And emphasizing that Carlisle does not exist. It was turned into a military hospital during the Great Influenza of 1918. That was its last year. But if you go there, you still see the ghosts and the buildings. The track is still there. It's now called Indian Field. Pop Warner's house is still there with a plaque outside of it. The little jail is still there. Many of the gymnasium where Thorpe and all of his teammates played is there. Every year there's a Jim Thorpe day where it's now the U.S. Army War College. They honor Jim Thorpe every year. Sounds worth a trip. It's definitely worth a trip. And yes, it's very interesting. Any more questions? Jim Thorpe All-American 1951 starring Bert Lancaster, directed by Michael Kurtiz, who directed Casablanca. A sympathetic movie, but wrong in almost every respect. Including the fact that the opening scene in Anita's Oklahoma shows the San Gabriel Mountains of California in the background. But more than that, Pop Warner is the narrator and hero of the movie, in a sense, and he shouldn't be. Angelina Jolie is not involved anymore. They're very well could be a movie. It'll be directed by a Native American. It will have an entire Native American cast and crew. And that's about all I'm gonna say right now. Well, my line is that all of my books are in various stages of not being made into movies. So I'm not gonna say anymore, but who knows? It could happen. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.