"Path Lit By Lightning, The Life of Jim Thorpe"
David Maraniss, Author
Simon and Schuster
2022
659 pages
US $32.00 Canada $44.00
The title comes from Jim Thorpe's indigenous name Wa-tho-huk Path Lit by Lightning.
I rarely take a 600 page book home from the library, but when I saw that David Maraniss was the author, I could not resist. I had read his book Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics that Stirred the World and decided that I could not pass up this one about Jim Thorpe. Maraniss is an incredible sleuth and researcher and has come up with seldom heard, seen, or long forgotten material about the former nation's hero, the Sac and Fox athlete and survivor of the American Indian Residential School system that was self admittedly designed to 'kill the Indian and save the man'. In other words to make the indigenous children of the men and women who had fought the advance of the whites into thinking and acting like whites and integrating into the white society. This was accomplished by separating those children from their families, cutting their braids, forbidding them to speak their language, putting them in white men's and women's clothing, and taking up the white man's faith, about one step above General Billy Sherman's philosophy of 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian'. The former US army barracks at Carlisle, Pennsylvania was the place where the finished products would be turned back to white men's society. But this idea was not really coordinated with the laws being passed restricting citizenship, land ownership and other rights that the white men reserved for themselves. There were other schools as well around the western US doing much the same thing including Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas which Billy Mills attended. Many survived, but many perished, and many were left with lifetime trauma that they passed on to their own children. At Carlisle there were at last count 186 graves of children who died at that institution. Repatriation of those bodies back to their homelands is gradually going on. To this day thanks to Jim Thorpe's third wife Patsy, he is not resting on his homeland but in a place called Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania that was organized by her, hoping to make some money from her conniving. Fortunately she didn't get any.
But getting back to Jim Thorpe's early life and athletic career, David Maraniss does an incredible job of tying together his track and football career at Carlisle, his Olympic triumphs, and the removal of his medals and the striking of his name from the Olympic record books. The details that Maraniss has put together are deserving to be read by any track nut. One is how Jim Thorpe was first introduced to track and field at Carlisle while he was walking past the team working out. Still wearing a pair of coveralls, he had a go at the high jump bar that had been set at 6' 1". He made it and the rest is of course history. He re-creates a lot of stories and separates the fact from fiction, because like any American hero there can be a lot of exaggeration and fog about events fifty years after the fact. He also writes about the other athletes who competed at Stockholm in 1912 including Jim Thorpe's school mate Lewis Tewanima, the Hopi who came to Carlisle not knowing a word of English in 1910, but who thrived on distance running and won a silver medal in the 10,000 meter race. He tells us about future General George Patton who while competing in the Modern Pentathlon was doped up with opium by the US trainer, a not uncommon practice in those days. Patton did not win a medal. The author does not spare his disdain of Avery Brundage in this book and keeps pouring it on every time Brundage is mentioned right to the end. Brundage was a member of the US Olympic team and competed against Thorpe in the Decathlon, but failed to finish, dropping out before the 1500 meters.
I had not known that Jim Thorpe lost his medals on a technicality. He had played summer baseball in North Carolina while an undergrad for two summers. He played under his own name, which many other college athletes did not do. They played under assumed names and were never banned from amateur athletics. The technicality by which he should not have lost his awards was that the International Olympic Committee said that any disqualification for breaking amateur rules had to be made within 80 days of the Olympic event. The news of his 'professionalism' was reported three months or 90 days after the Olympics. It was beyond the limit for a disqualification. That was how the medals (facsimiles) were eventually returned post mortem to his family. The original medals were 'lost' and the trophies are still stashed in some vault in Lausanne. The story came out when the High Point, North Carolina baseball club manager who coached Jim spent the off season at his sister's house in Connecticut and casually mentioned coaching Thorpe to an acquaintance, and that drew a sports writer to the house and the story was broken.
In the aftermath, both the president of Carlisle and the 'immortal' coach Pop Warner both claimed ignorance of the affair in order to preserve their own careers. It is something Warner could not possibly known about. Maraniss is not very sympathetic to Warner in the book.
Once DQ'd Jim Thorpe soon signed with the New York Giants baseball team and embarked on a world tour with the Philadelphia Athletics and the Giants. At the time his baseball skills were not up to major league standards. Problems with hitting the curveball. His signing was to help sell tickets. He was more popular on the world tour than the regular players which included stops in Japan, China, Australia, Egypt, Italy, and England where he played baseball before King George. Who knew anything about baseball in those countries, but they did know about Jim Thorpe, the greatest athlete in the world.
He went on to play for a number of major league teams and in 1919 his last year in the majors he was in Boston with the Braves at the same time Babe Ruth was in his last year with the Red Sox. One little known fact I learned was that the spitball was outlawed in 1918 or 1919 not because it gave the pitcher some advantage. It was outlawed, because the Spanish flu epidemic was in full force at that time and it was thought that the spitter might be a means of transmitting the disease.
Jim Thorpe's interactions with a myriad of celebrities all his life, his travels back and forth across the US trying to eke out a living with personal appearances and barnstorming teams rarely paid off in any way he had hoped are told in great detail. His career in the NFL is told including that he was the league president (a figurehead) for one year. The making of the movie about his life Jim Thorpe, All American starring Burt Lancaster is told in the book. He made very little off the movie, which was very popular at the box office, although he was hired as a technical consultant for the film. He also appeared in over 60 films mostly without lines and was paid very little.
I cannot even begin to tell the whole story or even begin to mention all the events that David Maraniss has written about. I can only recommend that if you walk past the book at your favorite store or the library, take it home and hope you haven't got anything else on your agenda that needs to be done before you finish the book. George Brose
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