In this third episode of the season, David and Sarah continue the conversation about David's research into his new book, "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" which is available at bookstores or online at: https://davidmaraniss.com/library/path-lit-by-lightning-the-life-of-jim-thorpe/
0:07
In our first episode this season, we talked about how my dad wrote this book half lit by lightning the life of Jim Thorpe. In Episode Two, we talked about Jim Thorpe's life and some of the details in the book. And today, we're going to continue that conversation. I think it's important to touch on what happened around this time with Jim Thorpe, and you talked about amateurism. And in a sense, getting paid to play sports would be what would become so controversial. In a system that, you know, was was quite rigged in some ways. Talk about when Jim Thorpe went to the Eastern Carolina League, why he went and what would happen because of that.
1:01
Jim Thorpe went to the Eastern Carolina League and Nike after the 1908 season in 1909, after the spring, to play baseball. And he basically was recruited by friends of pipe winners. But literally hundreds of college athletes were going to play in the lowest rungs of the minor leagues, the Bush leagues of baseball, for a minimal amounts of money, but as a way to keep busy in the summer. They're all doing it and the vast majority of them are playing under pseudonyms. Jim Thorpe didn't he played under the name Gemstar, for first the Rocky Mount railroaders. And then the Fayetteville Highlanders a year later. Now, there's some questions that I can't totally answer, which have to do with his motivations. Did he think that that was the ticket to a major league career? And did he ever intend to go back to Carlisle? But there's no question about the fact that Pop Warner, the coach had Carlyle, Moses Friedman, the superintendent at Carlisle, and James v. Sullivan, the head of the American, of the Amateur Athletic Union, and the head of the American Olympic Committee, at every reason in the world to know what Jim was doing. For a lot of different reasons, which I prove in the book, and which I encourage people to read for that chapter alone. But in any case, so he played there for two seasons, he hurt his arm a little bit, that he was, you know, you could say you as an average baseball player, but that doesn't quite capture it. He was occasionally brilliant, and occasionally, not really part of the game, he had trouble hitting the curveball. He had trouble starting then with his drinking with what would evolve into alcoholism. And he played for two years and then went off to play a little bit in Oklahoma after that. So he was gone from the Carlyle from the spring of 1909 until 1911, when he came back and was recruited back by Pop Warner, and you know, for Pop Warner and he claimed, as he would shortly thereafter, that he had no idea what Jim was doing is stretches only.
3:45
And then it comes back to Carlisle the 1912 Olympics success. How long after that before someone I decided to make him the, you know, the, the example. Yeah,
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we came back from the Olympics was a brilliant star in the fall, football season and all American again, the greatest player in America. And then, in early January of 1913, the story broke that he had played ball in Eastern Carolina. A lot of people knew that beforehand, but there was some kind of a willing suspension of disbelief. And so historian sort of took on this enormous weight at that moment. And the people who had every reason to nobody's doing claimed that they didn't know and the Olympic actually the, the AAU and American Olympic people decided that he would have to give back his medal all the medals and trophies you won at Stockholm. As it turned out, there was a rule in the Olympics. for that year, that for someone to be deprived of their metals after the fact, because of professionalism of any sort, it had to be reported within 60 days afterwards. And this was well over 60 days afterwards, so really didn't even follow the rules for them to take away his metal. And, of course, there was so many other hypocrisy is involved the fact that halfword was in fact paying his players before that, as were most colleges to some degree or another. As, as Leif Peterson know, a great Olympian historian in Stockholm pointed out to me, this, the Swedish performers at the Olympics, were allowed to leave their jobs many months earlier to train and paid for the training. So they were, in a sense professionals in a more direct way, than someone who was getting a little bit of money to play a sport that's not even in the Olympics baseball. So there are so many contradictions and hypocrisy has evolved. But I'm in you know, shortly into the new year of Nike 13, Jim Thorpe lost all of his Olympic medals and trophies.
6:21
And you go into great detail about how complicated sort of the stories were from the men, as you said, Who Who knew even before, and you quote, a passage from Jim zone, is it an autobiography that that he wrote? In which you quoted once I had made up my mind to face the world with truth, I was no longer nervous or worried about the matter. I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and consider the episode just another event in the red man's life of ups and downs.
7:02
Yeah, that was, that was the red set of Carlisle, which he wrote with a ghostwriter as well involved in that, and the screenwriter, actually, oh, somebody wanted to turn him into a screenplay. But I found no indications that Jim Thorpe was ever himself being duplicitous about it. And that it was other people, more people who had higher levels of responsibility, who to save their own medications were duplicitous,
7:35
you know, in some one else's life that might be sort of the, the arc of the story. And then, you know, either they go into obscurity or, you know, whatever it may be, but in fact, this is just like the first part. This is like really early in his life. He's a young man, and his professional career is still young, and he's already the greatest athlete in the world, who's had one of the biggest publicized, you know, controversies, also. But then he persists. And that's kind of a theme that you talked about, just you know, when we started talking that he is nothing if not persistent, and keeps moving forward. Next up, it seems is baseball. Is that fair to say that he leaves Carlisle and goes with the Giants
8:34
side by John McGraw, the little Napoleon Mugsy, the the manager and boss of the New York baseball giants in 1913, and you played Jim had played baseball at Carlisle. He had pitched and played first base in the spring of, of making spring of maple, what are they making? 11 and 12. And he was quite, you know, he was a good ballplayer, but he wasn't playing baseball, in some ways is it's not the hardest sport, but it requires a lot of practice that in skills that some of the other sports don't require. And he hadn't played that much baseball. And he had not been you know, he played in the push leagues in Eastern Carolina, but he most players go through four or five years of literally baseball before they reached the majors. McGraw wanted to talk right away because he was a he was a salesman too, and he understood that they had already decided that the giants of the Chicago White Sox would go on a world tour after that season after the Nike 13 season. And people in Japan and the Philippines and England I'm in Australia, in Egypt. They hadn't heard of Christian Mathewson and the great left, you know, the big six of the giants. But they they're Jim Thorpe. And he was really the number one draw for that entire world tour. And that's why the grass sign. So in the Nike 13 season, and several seasons thereafter, Jim didn't really get much of an opportunity to play from a garage giants. He sat on the bench most of the time and struggled and was sent to the minor leagues. And you'll see that it was only in his later career that he really started to learn baseball. And he had a brilliant season for the Boston Braves. And then several great seasons in the minor leagues, the top minor leagues after that. But he was already in his mid 30s. Fine. So McGraw, I think, misuse Jim for most of his baseball career. That's not to say that he didn't have some holes in his game. He did have struggled with the curveball, at least for the first few years. But you had a lot of baseball raw talent as well, that regret I really didn't take advantage of.
11:18
And you indicate I think that he was almost the fact that he was so famous already almost was a hindrance to him growing the way a typical baseball player might grow in anonymity at first and then, you know, through the minors and so forth. There's a lot
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of those great expectations. You know, the greatest athlete in the world must be a great baseball player as well.
11:44
Right? If, you know so many episodes of Jim Thorpe's life could or cinematic the way you describe them, but the world tour, you know, with his new wife, and you call it the train departed Grand Central Station that Friday morning was called the honeymoon special. This is the the baseball team that's about to tour the country and then tour the world. And just you How did you get the diary of Jim's first wife, or her entries and descriptions of everything that
12:21
was through a another library librarian at he was then at Lehigh University named James elfers, who became decided to become an expert on that world tour. I wrote him and he invited me up to his house and in Pennsylvania and gave me a box full of material. And he had been able to get that diary from Grace Thorpe when she was still alive, Jim's daughter. By the time I started, research, Grace was gone. So I couldn't have gotten it through that. But James had a copy of it, and let me copy his copy. And that's how I got it. along with several other not primary documents, but close to it. In other words, one of the one of the people went along with Charles Kaminski, the owner of the White Sox, kept his own diary and then use that printed that diary in a magazine. So I got that as well and several other accounts including one by the great Ring Lardner who didn't actually go on the second part of the trip and wrote about it in one of his great short stories from you know, me owl, which is just hilarious. And where he is main character. The whole short story is about this rube pitcher character being sweet talked by McGraw and the White Sox manager into going across the ocean with them. And it's anybody who hasn't read when learners should read you know, me, I'll just for that chapter alone. But any case, um, there were so many rich places that I could go to, to describe that world tour. Damon Runyon covered parts of it, the great Guys and Dolls. Guy, you know, he went back to the tour in France, he, he did the cushy part of the tour, like from France to England with them. And there were probably 12 or 15 reporters, scribes along the trip and all of their accounts were available to me online, you know, I could find them in the newspapers. So it was pretty rich material.
15:01
It's it's an amazing time of travel and then the world stage, you know, your writing thing. It's just before World War One. You know, it's like the it's just this moment last now forever, you know, the world is going to change and the modern world is like on on the horizon, and they even sail on the SS Lusitania.
15:32
Is that Lusitania? Yeah.
15:34
You know, it's just all these overlap. I mean, Jim Thorpe's life overlaps with so many moments, even the El Doctorow pension. What was that based on? Exactly? That. Right, it's
15:53
time when when a doctor will imagine what it would have been like for one of his characters to coder McGraw Hill, the Giants playing baseball, in the sands near the Sphinx outside of Cairo.
16:07
Yeah, it's just kind of magical. And another character that is really prominent in that, of course, this is Jim Thorpe's wife, who he met at the Carlyle school. And the story of her being there, I think, really shows that how complicated the relationship is in our country, in terms of, as you say, both, you know, the dominant society, white society, both taking from Native Americans, and also, in a sense, idolizing them at the same time. And in fact, can you talk a bit about Jim's wife?
16:58
Yeah, her name was Ivan Miller. She came from Oklahoma. She gone to the shoe, local Indian School in Oklahoma, and then to Carlisle. And she had gone to shoe loco when she was a little girl, along with her older siblings, after her mother died. And her father one had really nothing to do with them at that point. And she went to an Indian school, and she thought she was a Cherokee Indian. And it wasn't until much later that her older siblings told her, Well, not really, we were just sent there by our father, because there's a free place for him to get rid of us. And so there's some question about when she learned this when it was before she married Jim or a little bit after. But it wasn't until she was an adult, that she realized that we actually she wasn't a Native American. And although, you know, I mean, she had a she, she grew up with a Native American sensibility. She'd gone down the Indian school, she knows she knew Cherokee culture. She'd gone with this your local school to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where she was part of sort of a somewhat dehumanizing exhibit of, of Indians in America. And, you know, at Carlisle, she wrote about the Indian experience quite a bit in political this student newspaper. So, you know, when is an Indian Indian, I mean, what, what, why she it's the whole issue of a blood quantum in her case. Culturally, she was a Native American, at least in her childhood and young adulthood. After that she sort of was not but in terms of blood quantum as that's measured, she she did not have Indian heritage.
19:14
The honeymoon is over, quite literally and eventually. Jim, and I've been i Anyone listening, there's so much, six.
19:30
We could slip wherever you want.
19:33
But anyway, you know, next comes football, professional football and I love this line that you have here. You have a quote saying it's somebody a sports writer in 1920 says professional football may pay in places where there is not the lure of big college contests, but it will never rival the amateur brand.
19:55
Yeah, right. Words, prognosticators are no better than political ones.
20:05
You have the American Professional Football Association, September 17 1920. Jim Thorpe is president. So what did that mean? In 1920?
20:15
Well, he played football for the kid Bulldogs. Going back to 1915. And it was the face of the game. And football was not professional football was still kind of a roundabout sport. It wasn't like major league baseball, or boxing or tennis, or horse racing was one of the big sports of that era. And professional football was a little bit more outwash. But finally, in 1920, it started to really organize into what would become the National Football League. And because it was organized in Canton, Ohio, where Jim Thorpe played, and because he was the by far the best known figure in the game, they decided to make him the first president of that league, but didn't tell really any responsibilities. But it was a way of sort of saying we're serious. So he was the president for the first year only, and then they got someone in there who had more business skills and interest in Jim really had no interest in doing anything but playing football, or maybe coaching it, which he also did during that period. But he from 1915, into the early 1920s. As you know, one of the great football historians Bob Carroll says that, that with Jim Thorpe, you in pro football, it was really the most important that of early football. That really was the beginning of the rise of football, which would continue off and on through the 20s and 30s 40s 50s. And then completely mushroom in the 1960s. From then to today to the biggest event in American life in so many ways. You know, I'm now working on a story about Jerry Jones, the owner of the Cowboys. And he points out that more people that the number one draw on television by far of anything, Dallas Cowboys, more than any other show or anything else that when the Dallas Cowboys play. That's it. Of course, I'm a Packers fan, so I can dispute that a little bit. But in terms of statistics, it's indisputable.
22:44
Well, I'm in patriots country here. So I wonder, you know, if
22:56
it doesn't mean I can't still hate them. Yeah, survival of the Packers. Right.
23:03
All right. You know,
23:06
that Jim Thorpe was the beginning of all of that. And, you know, adding on to his elliptical metals in his baseball, professional football was another part of this.
23:18
You know, football is a physical sport. And he's, as you follow the story of his life, he gets into his 30s, you know, and later 30s, and so forth. And eventually, some of his, and you know, it was, it's so funny, because he, you talk about how it's not just natural talent. He's a hard worker, he's a persistent person, but his body ages and you do mention that he has an addiction to alcohol that takes its toll as well. And so somehow, you know, we start to see this, this shift in his athletic consistency and career. And it goes on four chapters. were rooting for him, and, and we hope he'll get his break. We want him to land on his feet and have a consistent team or or career. And there's one point, I just made a tally of the number of, well, first of all, you said how many states did he play a sport in? Was it
24:37
it was 20 states 20 states and played a sport in or lived in during that period? Yeah. Yeah.
24:47
I made a good. I made a list of odd jobs that he took when he wasn't with a team or survival after his athletic crime. Bunyan Derby dropped kicking lessons at Rancho Country Club, Pebble Beach, bodyguard for President of the California golf Writers Association goes to LA to play the roles of of Native Americans and films. He's a painter's assistant, he tries to sell oil leases near Venice, he has an entry level job for the county loading dirt onto trucks or a day laborer. He landed a job at a Ford Motor Company, plant and joins the Merchant Marines as a ship's carpenter during World War Two. To name
25:41
just a partial list I know Yeah. You know, it's interesting, Sarah, just yesterday, I got an email from, from someone who's read the book, and it's going to interview me in Dallas when I go there. And we got an interesting disagreement. I mean, he sort of was looking at the Thorpe's life, for as a failure. And that kid was a disappointing human being. And I'm really, you know, I guess you can read, you know, one of the things about the way I read books is people can make up their own minds about, about how they view a character, I'm not going to beat them over the head, but I do in this book, Make it pretty clear that I don't feel that way that I had for all of his trouble. I think he was that a generous human spirit and was a troubled man, as are many people, and especially athletes after their skills are gone. And so I viewed all of his efforts in the sense of perseverance against the odds, and not as a what a, you know, what a loser of a human being. I'm not saying that he said that, but, but I think that I came out of it with more sympathy for Jim Thorpe than just as an athlete. Because of all that he endured, they went through their struggles. And, you know, I mean, millions of people struggle with their own phobias and flaws and work their whole lives to try to overcome them and deal with them and persist anyway. So Jim Thorpe had both that incredible, athletic career unmatched, and also as a human being who is dealing with his own troubles and trying to overcome them in different ways. As well as the structural problems that you have overcome, or try to overcome as a Native American.
27:54
And we don't, you don't use presentism to explain sort of the world of the past. But if you were to look at it through trauma and displacement, and what he, how alone he was, as a young person, and you know, I don't know if most people could come through that. With two feet on the ground.
28:22
He had a difficult father to say the least. Who was also an alcoholic and really didn't watch him or what his mother died when he was young. Is his twin brother died when they were kids, the closest person to him in the world. His first son, Jr. died at age three of the great influenza. So along with everything else he had just as internal personal life there was a lot of trauma.
28:59
Yeah. But the other thing that is interesting is he he wasn't too proud to take jobs that you know, that were labor jobs are not glamorous. And when he joined the merchant marines during World War Two, again, you know, these stories of him traveling the world and the sort of the cameos of famous people entering his life at various times. You describe something during World War Two where he's on the ship, and it docks in Calcutta. And Word reached port commander at army base station that Jim Thorpe was a board commander Brigadier General Kneeland, who was an Army plebe in 1912, and sat in the stands during that big army, Carlisle game. Summoned not the captain but the lowly carpenter of the Liberty ship to be his special guest on shore.
30:00
I mean, I know it is that happened so many times in his life. And anyway, there's a you know, for people no college football. Leland is a well known figure, university Tennessee stadiums Nealon stadium. He was the great football coach at University of Tennessee for decades. And, yeah, the one person that he wanted to see when that ship that merchant ship, victory ship arrived in Calcutta was the carpenter.
30:32
Right, Jim Thorpe. Everyone will ask you about Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and they're gonna have to read the book to know the full story. And I you had a great interview with Jim Thorpe's is a great grandson who had some cars Yes. Just a very, I thought, wide perspective on the meaning of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania and how the family looks at the the sort of the duality of that situation there. But I think it's best described in the book, as well as Jim's third wife, who is an interesting character as well, again, another slice of what would be an interesting movie, but there's a real movie that I wanted to end with because you I think the image that you leave us with at least the one that sticks in my mind towards the end, it reminds me of the famous painting, you know, or not painting photograph of. I'm not sure which photographer took it but you know, the billboard of America, white family in the UK. And then there's a line of people who, who need assistance, just the dichotomy between the American dream and how our lives actually are. And so, you know, obviously, the big movie that finally got made about Jim Thorpe with Burt Lancaster. But then you leave us, of course, with what Jim Thorpe the human real man is contending with. But how did the movie finally get made? Do you think? And should there be another movie now?
32:29
So the answer to the second one is yes, of course. As I've said many times, all my books are at various stages of not being made into movies. It doesn't have to be from my book, but I think there's so much great material there that, that the first movie missed, you know, in its time and place, that movie was considered a success and had Burt Lancaster playing Jim Thorpe. And he's a good actor and a star quality accurate, he was a good athlete, and so on. But I think as I said that in the last interview, I think that it totally missed the boat in terms of how it presented the story through the role, you know, the savior of the movie is Pop Warner and Jim Thorpe in doesn't really makes it look as though if only Jim had followed Papa orders, advice, he would have had a more successful life. When in fact, Pop Warner was the one who, at the moment of Jim's biggest crisis wasn't there for them. But in any case, I watched that movie probably 12 times. And I found it lacking in that sense that it wasn't presented from a Native American perspective, but from a white perspective, but this is the 1950s and Jim, by that had spent 33 decades in Los Angeles in Hollywood, pushing for Hollywood to first hire real indigenous people to play Native Americans. And secondly, to give them some dignity and the roles that they had. So in that sense, you know, I know a lot of people my age are a little younger, who've watched that movie and said, That's how they came to love Jim Thorpe, which is fine. I mean, if it that's the effect, it has fine, but it's not the real story. And there should be a story that's closer to the reality of what do you do it?
34:38
And Jim's time in Hollywood, that phase of his life in a sense, he seems to come into his own in a different way, even though sports is not sort of the predominant part of him but his sense of being a leader in his community in a way the word that you you are On the SAC Sac and Fox word for caregiver is
35:06
yes, I didn't come up with that word. Another person who has researched or figured that out and I attributed to him in the notes, but But yes, I mean, that was one of the period of Jim's life where he was developing leadership skills beyond the playing fields. There are a few 100 Native Americans in the Hollywood area, all of them are scrounging around for big parts, in movies, playing Indians or whatever they could. Then often, they were fighting for those jobs against the system that was often using white. Walk on actors and just giving them greasepaint make them look like they're Indians. So Jim, Jim was a very activist, participant in that era of trying to get Indian rights in Hollywood.
36:13
One of the things you say as well, in terms of Jim's legacy is the family and the sort of the reach of his family, his legacy, essentially. And I know you've gotten to talk with his great grandson but what do you think? You know, the the reader who reads this or anyone listening to this podcast, like talk a little bit about just how that scope of Jim Thorpe has continued to grow.
36:55
I mean, I think it's a it's a beautiful thing, it, it surprised me a little bit, but in the best possible way that he had seven children, three daughters and four sons by different wives. And during the periods of their childhoods, he was often not there or traveling is, you know, trying to find work in other places and, and separated from his family in different ways. And yet, all seven of those children, as they reached early adulthood, sort of came back to him without too much psychological damage in their relationships with him, and came to appreciate him for what he was, and can't understand their own errand until a little more. And then they were all successful. And, you know, grace and Charlotte and Gail, were all in various ways, activists in terms of Indian rights or rights further father, as were the sons who are many of the sons went into the military and fought for the United States in World War Two in Korea, and they had successful lives. One became the chairman of the second Fox nation. One worked in the airline industry. Grace became the the spokesman for the American Indian Movement when it took over Alcatraz in the 1960s 1960s. So, and then their children and their great grandchildren, all of you know there are a lot of really successful, well adjusted people in that Thorpe family tree on stemming from his somewhat troubled life.
38:58
"Path lit by lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" is available online and bookstores on August 9. Visit DavidMaraniss.com To order your copy. This has been an episode of the David Maraniss "Ink in Our Blood" podcast. We hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll subscribe to the Ink in Our Blood podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or whichever podcast service you prefer. If you loved it, we'd love it if you left a rating and review Ink in Our Blood is produced by Metamorphosis Agency, LLC. Music has been written and provided by Monika Ryan. Ink in Our Blood is hosted by Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff. Thank you for listening.