Oklahoma, Here I Come!

 
Prague, Oklahoma, about 1903

Oklahoma was never on my list of places to see before I die. Which goes to show how prejudices we don't even know we have limit our view of the world. 

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma in 1887 (not 1888, as most sources claim) near where this rough western town of Prague would be created about twelve years later by immigrants from Bohemia. His Sac & Fox and Potawatomi people had been "removed" (forcibly relocated) to Oklahoma after the Civil War from Kansas (to which they had been removed from Iowa, to which they had been removed from Illinois). Towns like this were laid out overnight on Indian lands that opened up for white settlement with the famous Oklahoma land runs, like the one pictured below, that began in 1889.



When I first arrived in Oklahoma City (OKC to locals) in 2002 to start research on Thorpe the city and surrounding country looked flat, dry, and plain. There didn't seem to be much for the eye to linger on. The wind blew constantly because there was nothing to stop it. 

Then I noticed the sense of humor -- flat, dry ("dusty!" laughed one Oklahoman), plain, and very funny. Will Rogers wit. The punch line came at you like a cowboy seen far away on the horizon: Wait for it. "Why is Oklahoma so windy? It's all that hot air blowing up from Texas." It's an intimate state, a  monk told me, a man so handsome he was referred to, affectionately, as "Brother What A Waste" and "Father Hunk-a-Monk." When the state finally got around, 80-some years later, to adding a dome to the capitol building, there was a constituency that argued it was more distinctive to be the only state in the union without a dome. 



Any biography worth its name should expand the sympathies and understanding of the biographer. Now I love the state I had to learn so much about in order to write NATIVE AMERICAN SON. One new friend recently dubbed me "an honorary Okie." It's a title I'm delighted to accept.

Frank Deford and me in Jim Thorpe, PA

Native American Son is not out yet but, thanks to the controversy surrounding the burial of Jim Thorpe in the town named for him in Pennsylvania (see previous blogpost, "No Rest for the Dead," the book tour has effectively begun.

Jim Thorpe, PA

Which is how I found myself sitting across from the great sportswriter and author Frank Deford, in a room above the stage at the Jim Thorpe Opera House. HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, thanks to a pitch from the Knopf publicist Lena Khidritskaya, had decided to do a 12-minute segment on the lawsuit filed by Jim's son, Jack Thorpe, against the town of Jim Thorpe. As Thorpe's most recent biographer, I was chosen as the "expert."

It's always a bit daunting to come out of the dark cave of writing a book -- and the grueling editing and proof stage before the book goes to press -- into the bright light of media scrutiny. Deford's questions were, not surprisingly, both acute and broad. Is Jim Thorpe remembered today? he asked. I remember the 1950 Associated Press sportswriter and radio announcer poll (no TV yet) that voted him the greatest athlete of the half century, way ahead of Babe Ruth, he said. Today, everybody lauds only the most recent star, he lamented. What surprises did you discover? he asked (the passion with which he was and is remembered as the outsider robbed of his due, I answered, his unexamined "iron man" sports career in the 1920s after he exited the "greatest athlete in the world" limelight, and his equally unexamined career in Hollywood in the 1930s).

What did I think Jim Thorpe would say about the current burial controversy and a town he never saw named for him? was Deford's last question. I answered that he might say: Remember what I did when I was alive. I earned the name.

It was a terrific way to start the book tour, with the best in the business. Catch the show on September 21 on HBO.

No Rest for the Dead

Jim Thorpe Grave Site: Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Who has the final say where a human body will be buried? From the day Jim Thorpe died, March 28, 1953, in Lomita, California, until 1957, when he was interred in the red marble mausoleum above in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, his body had "rested" in six different mortuaries or cemeteries. 

The story of how and why his body ended up in a place he had never been is hardly credible (and you can read all about it in NATIVE AMERICAN SON after Oct. 19). At the suggestion of Thorpe's widow Patsy, two tiny, struggling towns that had faced each other across the Lehigh River since the heyday of the anthracite coal boom consolidated and took the one name: Jim Thorpe. In exchange, they got the body of the greatest all-around athlete this country has ever seen. 

The hoped-for tourist boom didn't happen. But, like an off-beat fairy tale, while the town remained doggedly faithful to the memory of Thorpe, the source of its revival was right there all along, in the hearts, minds, and energy of its own citizens. By the 1990s Jim Thorpe, PA had resurrected itself as a charming, Victorian gateway to the Poconos. The isolated, dignified grave site had little or nothing to do with it.

In February 2010 Thorpe's surviving sons filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania federal court under the 1990 Native American Graves Protections and Repatriation Act to have their father's remains returned to Oklahoma, where he was born. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10177/1068434-139.stm. They want him to be buried in the Garden Grove cemetery, east of Oklahoma City, next to his father, Hiram. According to Jack Thorpe, the youngest son, the town of Jim Thorpe can keep the name. The family is grateful to it for taking such good care of their father for so long. But, he argues, the family never agreed with Patsy about Thorpe's burial place. The widow's right trumped theirs.

But now Patsy is dead. Times have changed, as have attitudes toward minority rights and traditions. One body, two claimants. As New York Times reporter John Branch said to me, "It's the strangest story I ever heard."  And one of  the saddest.

New York Times: A Legal Battle Over Jim Thorpe's Remains

Sports Illustrated: Who Owns a Legend? 

Wall Street Journal: Is There a Life After Jim Thorpe for Jim Thorpe, PA?

Angie Debo: Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire

Angie Debo, Oklahoma Historian Extraordinaire 1890 - 1988.

Jim Thorpe was born in Oklahoma Indian Territory in 1887. More than a hundred years later I started researching his life in the old, dusty Oklahoma Historical Society in the Wiley Post building across from the (then-domeless) state capitol in Oklahoma City. The creaky central wooden staircase and the warren-like rooms looked, felt, and smelled as if they hadn't changed a bit since the structure was built in 1930. At desks guarding the stacks of books and files were devoted archivists with an Oklahoma humor so dry one of them called it "dusty." ("Why do we need a capitol dome, anyway? It's better being maybe the only state without one.")

My first day at the Society one of the archivists sat me down for an introductory chat. It was important to understand from the start of my work, he said, that the early history of Oklahoma was, as he put it, corrupt and venal. It was not Oklahoma! And the person we had to thank for having the courage to write the true history of her state, against concerted opposition from major political figures who wished to preserve the Boomer/Sooner myths, was Angie Debo. 

Read this brief summary of her life -- http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/resource/debo.shtml. Imagine what it must have been like for this remarkable woman, working tirelessly for years in the same dusty archive, piecing together the heartbreaking story of the Indian nations and individuals of Oklahoma and beyond.

The scrupulous and disciplined passion of her self-imposed calling animates every word she wrote in such books as And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, A History of the Indians of the United States, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, and more. Her work is accurately called the cornerstone of American Indian scholarship.

p.s. The Oklahoma State Capitol got its dome in 2002. A portrait of Debo hangs in the rotunda area. The Historical Society moved to brand-new quarters in the Oklahoma History Center in 2005.

Who Was Jim Thorpe?

OK. I'm deep into the last day of the so-called first pass of the Thorpe manuscript (it's actually the next-to-last proof). So, here's a really quickie summary of why Thorpe was so great in sports: 

An American Indian (Potawatomi; Sac and Fox) from Oklahoma who was arguably the greatest American athlete of modern times. 

He played sports in the early decades of the twentieth century, just as they were emerging as the activities that would become passions for millions. Thorpe was so good at so many games and athletic activities, he became the  the gold standard of athletic achievement.

In those early days, there was no emphasis on specializing in one sport, which freed Thorpe to excel in several.

• A remarkable All-America running back for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team who -- playing before official statistics and against teams such as Harvard, Penn, and Army -- may have been the game's first 2,000-yard rusher. Sports Illustrated said he would have won the Heisman in 1911 and 1912, if the award had existed back then.

• The first international celebrity athlete: the winner, by huge margins, of gold medals for both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm -- the only athlete to ever win both events.

• A major and minor league baseball player for twelve seasons who, by 1919 for the Boston Braves, hit as well (.327) as Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson. 

• The professional football icon who put the pro sport on the map -- and whose statue is the first thing you see today when you enter the Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. 

Old Pieces of Paper

Just after 9/11 I was sitting on a dusty ladder deep in the stacks of the National Archives in Washington. Sirens wailed outside, non-stop. Anthrax dust was floating everywhere, it seemed. I had just started the research for Native American Son.

Surrounded by boxes of documents filling shelves from floor to ceiling, I had a chilling thought. If the terrorists had slammed a plane into this building, they would have wiped out the primary sources of our recorded history. Destroyed the records of millions of the already dead.

Like this one: the U.S. Army Enlistments of 1837. The name Hiram G. Thorp (Jim added the "e" later) is fourth from the bottom, indicated by the arrow in the left margin. He was Jim's paternal grandfather, white, born in Connecticut of English descent going back to the founding of New Haven. He enlisted in the Eighth Infantry, Company A at the age of 24. He had blue eyes, brown hair, fair skin, and was five feet, eight inches tall.

We only know all that information about his physical person because of this old piece of  paper preserved on microfilm. For me, starting work on this biography way back in those dark scary days, to find such concrete, evocative details from the past was oddly reassuring. Hiram's record had survived, so far. Maybe mine would too.

Inspiration

"How did you come to write a book about ________? It's the question a biographer is asked more than any other.

So why Thorpe? The answer begins on a hot day in 1996 in the cool archives of the University of Southern California's Cinema/Television Library in Los Angeles. I was working through the extensive Warner Brothers production file for their 1951 bio-pic.(In the 1950 photo above you see, left to right, Lancaster, Thorpe, and director Michael Curtiz on the set.)

Lancaster had played Thorpe, and Lancaster was the subject of the Lancaster biography I was researching and writing.

Though I come from a family of California athletes, I didn't know much if anything about Thorpe. But I did know that for many people sports were more than games, athletes sometimes more than human. So I was struck, hard, by the tone and passion of the letters and postcards in the production file that had come in from all over the country to studio head Jack Warner as shooting started in 1950. The most passionate letter came from a very young Bobby Kennedy. Their gist: Don't mess up the story of our hero. Get it exactly right.

A writer of biographies looks or waits for such messages from the past. At least I do. Maybe it's a romantic notion, but it feels as if the ghosts are transmitting a plea: Remember what was important to us. Thorpe turned sixty-three in 1950. He hadn't played any sport since a disastrous football game in 1928. Why was he so vividly remembered?