Another World Thorpe, Pennsylvania Town Are Symbols Of A Simpler Time

In this Olympic summer, the idle old men who congregate on the benches at the foot of Broadway Street find themselves musing about the sad fate of Jim Thorpe, and about the curious way their town came to bear the name of the great Indian athlete.

If booming Atlanta is a symbol of the new money-driven Olympics, then this musty old Pennsylvania railroad town, a charming but spiritually sagging community, remains in a way a reflection of its simpler past.

At a time when multimillionaire athletes enrich themselves with Olympic glory, here is a town named for a man who lost two gold medals because he’d been paid $5 a game to play semipro baseball.

“You know, my father’s whole story is unbelievable when you consider the millions these athletes are getting today and all the things they get away with,” said Thorpe’s daughter, Grace, 74, from her home in Tahlequah, Okla.

Long after Thorpe’s day, the International Olympic Committee continued to rule with a combination of arrogant snobbery and idealism. The idealism, at least, disappeared in 1986, when the IOC altered its rules on amateurism and began its headlong race for revenue.

Between 1993 and 1996, the nonprofit IOC which helped take away the medals Thorpe won at Stockholm in 1912 and did not reinstate them for 70 years - collected $4 billion for the world’s Olympic organizations.

“I’m very worried that the Olympic Committee is so preoccupied with making money that it has lost sight of its original purpose,” said John Lucas, a retired Penn State professor who is one of the world’s foremost Olympic authorities.

“And when you consider the case of Jim Thorpe, it really is an anomaly, one of the strangest phenomenons in the long history of sports.

“If Jim Thorpe were alive today, he would be making himself a considerable amount of money this summer in Atlanta.”

Residents here didn’t think it unreasonable to dream that the Torch Relay might pass through on its journey to Atlanta.

“Woulda been nice if it had,” said Donald Heckman, 61, a lifelong resident. “Coulda gone right past his grave site. But this place has been promised a lot over the years. … Nothing ever seems to happen.”

The torch didn’t get within 100 miles of Jim Thorpe. No one was shocked. Until he’d been dead for more than a year, Jim Thorpe himself never got within 100 miles of this place.

It was 41 years ago that the Lehigh River boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk united and, with a 1950s optimism, took the name of a dead athlete who had never been here. His body was brought from Oklahoma and placed in a marble crypt along Route 903, on the eastern edge of town.

“It don’t make much sense on the surface, does it?” said Heckman, a short, round man with a toothless smile and several days worth of stubble.

The story of how that happened is an odd one, and it seems especially appropriate as the extravagantly commercialized XXVI Olympiad unfolds this month.

It is a story laced with greed and hope, with tender moments and tragedy, and, at its heart, with the desperation of a widow and of a dying town.

A single wilted flower lies at the base of Jim Thorpe’s rose-colored crypt. A few feet away, two auto batteries sit discarded in the long grass.

Thorpe’s body was entombed at this out-of-the-way spot in 1955, an event that created a brief burst of civic pride but also triggered a nasty dispute involving Thorpe’s widowed third wife, Oklahoma’s governor, the Sac and Fox Indian tribe, the athlete’s children and some local residents.

On this day, only a few miles away, Jim Thorpe’s well-preserved downtown is crowded for the Laurel Arts Festival. Yet at the simple roadside memorial, where the flags of the United States, Pennsylvania and the Olympics barely stir above the athlete’s tomb, there are no visitors. There seldom are.

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Lucas, a man who has made the study of the Games and its heroes a life’s work and lives not far away in State College, “I never realized his body was in Pennsylvania. I just assumed the town appropriated the name.”

“You get some people who are curious, but by and large there usually aren’t too many people who stop out there, unless they happen to be passing by and see it,” said Raymond Albert, 71, of Jim Thorpe. “The downtown’s got a little life to it lately, but not so much out there.”

The post-World War II changes in American life depressed the coal and railroad industries and ravaged this strip of Pennsylvania that depended on both. That was the catalyst for the name change. Mauch Chunk needed jobs. Patricia Thorpe needed a place that would memorialize her dead husband in the manner she demanded.

Dissipated by drink and hard luck, Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack at 64 on March 28, 1953, in a Lomita, Calif., trailer park. Increasingly desperate in his last years, he had sold the movie rights to his life for $1,500 and developed a nightclub act in which he told a few jokes, read a poem or two and, by all accounts, quickly headed to the bar.

In many ways, his life had been in decline since 1913, when the Amateur Athletic Association, the American Olympic Committee and the IOC stripped him of his decathlon and pentathlon gold medals.

“When the modern Olympics were born, they incorporated this aristocratic English notion of social separation,” Lucas said. “To accept money for athletics, they believed, was to soil your hands. That was something for the lower classes.”

That described Thorpe, a dirt-poor football and track sensation at the Carlisle (Pa.) Indian School, even though he would share a luxury-liner cabin on his 1912 Atlantic crossing with upper-class pentathlon and decathlon teammates like Avery Brundage, the future IOC president, and George Patton, the future general. It was an era when American Indians were treated, at best, with a cloying paternalism.

“But I don’t think his race was a factor in the decision (to take away the medals),” Lucas said. “Over the years there were thousands of potential Olympians banished because they had taken money. Although other than Thorpe, I cannot think of another person who actually had to return a medal.”

After his death, some of Thorpe’s eight children wanted the body returned to the sacred Sac and Fox Indian grounds where their father was born. His third wife, Patricia, preferred a memorial near Thorpe’s boyhood home in Yale, Okla. As the parties argued, the body rested in a Tulsa mausoleum.

The Oklahoma legislature approved $25,000 for a Thorpe memorial, but Gov. William Murray vetoed the bill. Furious, the widow began shopping for a fitting resting place for the man who also had been the NFL’s first star and a New York Giants baseball player.

Meanwhile, Mauch Chunk, which took its name from an Indian phrase meaning “Bear Mountain,” was in an economic coma. Joseph L. Boyle, the publisher/editor of the Mauch Chunk Times-News and a man throbbing with civic energy, devised a plan.

“In the ‘50s he was running what we called the Nickel-a-Week fund,” said Bob Knappenberger, 70. “They were asking each family to donate a nickel a week to the fund to try to make up a fund that would bring industry in.”

In Philadelphia, television station Channel 3 learned of the story and dispatched a camera crew. On the night in 1954 when the town’s story was televised, Thorpe’s widow happened to be meeting with NFL commissioner Bert Bell in Philadelphia, then the league’s headquarters. In Mauch Chunk’s plight, Patricia Thorpe recognized opportunity. She contacted Boyle.

Eventually, and apparently with some degree of support from Bell, Thorpe’s widow promised that if the town were named for her husband and a memorial constructed, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and a $10 million Jim Thorpe Memorial Heart and Cancer Hospital would be located there.

“At that time, it looked pretty authentic,” said Knappenberger, who as a Mauch Chunk Bank employee turned over a check to Patricia Thorpe for an amount - Knappenberger won’t say how much, but it was believed to be between $1,000 and $1,500 - to cement the deal. “So we put it (the name change) on the ballot and it passed 10 to 1.”

On Jan. 1, 1955, the boroughs merged. Jim Thorpe, Pa., was born. And nothing happened.

“Well, Bert Bell was at a Philadelphia Eagles-Pittsburgh Steelers football game in 1958, and he dropped dead,” said Knappenberger. “After that, things went dormant.”

The Hall went to Canton, Ohio. The hospital was never built. The Thorpe crypt attracted very few visitors and it was so isolated that many of those who did stop never ventured downtown.

Some disgruntled residents spread the rumor that Thorpe wasn’t even inside the crypt - a rumor that died when Boyle pried it open and confirmed the decaying occupant’s identity. Some wanted the town’s name changed back and two referendums to do so were narrowly defeated.

On several occasions, Thorpe’s family has raised the issue of returning the body to Oklahoma. But as long as its name remains Jim Thorpe, as the now-deceased widow stipulated in the agreement, the town can keep the body.

“Things could have been a lot different around here if everything we were promised came about,” said Heckman, shifting slightly in his seat as an old Jersey Central Railroad engine, now hauling two cars of tourists, pulled away from the station.

“But what can you do? We’re named after Jim Thorpe and that’s fine with me. … It’s kind of funny, though. Now you’ve got guys making millions of dollars in the Olympics and here they took away Thorpe’s medals because he made a few lousy dollars in some hick town playing baseball.”