BRINGING JIM THORPE HOME:


THE LONG CAMPAIGN NEARS THE FINISH LINE


BY JOHN E. ECHOHAWK AND SUZAN SHOWN HARJO S


ac and Fox elder Henrietta Massey was 16 when she par- ticipated in the traditional burial ceremony for the great athlete Jim Thorpe. “I knew something was wrong,” she says, “because I saw two white men come through the wrong door – the door that stands for death, the one that


only the dead pass through.” “Everyone was in shock, because nothing like that ever happened


before,” Massey recalls. “The Old Men who were in charge of the cer- emony were so shocked they couldn’t do anything.” The sun was going down as she watched the strangers “pick up Jim Thorpe’s body and take him outside. I thought they would come back inside with him, but then I saw the hearse drive away.” That day, April 12, 1953, is vivid for Bill Thorpe, too. He is 86, the


second eldest of Jim Thorpe’s four sons, and one of only two surviv- ing children. He is a Sac and Fox citizen, as was his famous father. Bill Thorpe was on the front lines in the Kumar Valley in Korea when his father died of a heart attack on March 23, 1953 in Lomita, Calif. He flew to California and met with family. “We all agreed – my sisters and brothers and Patsy [Jim Thorpe’s


third wife, Patricia] – to put Dad to rest in Oklahoma on Indian land, just as he wanted,” says Bill Thorpe. “He told us all – at the dinner table, on the pier when we were fishing, riding in his big Packard and one to one – he wanted to be buried in our way on tribal land. I took Dad’s body by train from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, and the ceremonies started.” But Patricia Thorpe changed her mind. “We were having a dinner,


Dad’s sending-away ceremony,” says Bill Thorpe, “when Patsy came in with the highway patrolmen to take Dad. We said, ‘You can’t do that.’ She said, ‘Yes, I can.’ There wasn’t really a thing we could do.” Bill Thorpe thinks, “Patsy found out that the governor was not going to give her a paid commission, so she decided to find a place that would pay her for Dad’s body.” Thus began Jim Thorpe’s three-year journey to a place he had never been – the Borough of Jim Thorpe in Pennsylvania. 60 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER/FALL 2014


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