Battle over athlete Jim Thorpe’s burial site continues

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Patsy went ahead with the Catholic service the following morning, then stored the body in a mausoleum, awaiting the state’s memorial. But later that summer, Gov. Murray vetoed the measure, citing budgetary straits.

Patsy was, by all accounts, furious. She was adamant her husband would get a fitting memorial (and equally adamant in private that she would be paid in return, many involved in the affair have said).

Five months after Thorpe died, Patsy showed up at the mausoleum one night and had Thorpe’s coffin trucked to Tulsa, hoping that city would build a memorial. It turned her down. The children were now so angry that Bill asked the governor to stop her from moving the body again. Murray declined, calling it a family argument.

By summer’s end, Patsy was looking for (and alienating) other bidders. Carlisle, Thorpe’s college town, turned her down, because “Pat just wanted too much money,” a city official told Sports Illustrated in 1982.

With her options running out, she visited Philadelphia in September. She saw a television report about the Chunks, two tiny boroughs in eastern Pennsylvania trying to shore up finances by getting residents to chip in a “nickel a week.”

The boroughs were splintered by ethnic tensions — mostly Irish settlers on one bank of the Lehigh, mostly Germans on the other — and they were economically hamstrung by dual city services.

When Patsy showed up a few days after the television report, making her unorthodox pitch, civic boosters thought unification under the Thorpe banner might attract the proposed NFL Hall of Fame, a 500-bed hospital center, a sports stadium and a sporting goods factory.

Townspeople went for it 10 to 1.

It flopped, badly.

Few tourists came. Neither did the Hall of Fame. There was no research hospital, no stadium, no factory. (Patsy, who ended her days caring for elderly invalids, apparently got nothing more than a check for her expenses.)

Two angry referendums to repeal the name change in the early 1960s drew about 40 percent of the vote. Vandals once attacked Thorpe’s mausoleum with a hammer. Johnny Otto, a local contractor and county official, was notorious for telling visiting reporters: “All we got was a dead Indian.”

But as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the town of 5,000 began a slow resurgence as a regional tourist destination.

“It’s all heritage tourism, mountain biking, white-water rafting,” says John Drury, former head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “It’s certainly not due to the mausoleum.”

Thorpe’s three daughters, meanwhile, grew to love the little town, though Charlotte went back and forth on whether her father should be buried there. Grace even helped sanctify the burial spot in a religious rite — putting his long-wandering soul to rest, she said.

The mausoleum sits in a tiny park a hundred feet off State Road 903, which winds downhill and into town. The view is of hills in the distance, a vocational school in the background and a neighborhood across the street. The park features two statues of Thorpe, a sculpture garden and landscaped azaleas. The house next door has a handmade sign out front that reads: “Baby Gerbils for Sale.”

Sofranko, the mayor, thinks Thorpe is just fine right where he is.

A hometown kid in his 40s, Sofranko has a day job on the Mack Truck assembly line at a nearby factory. He settles in for a companionable beer after work at The Inn at Jim Thorpe, the town’s nicest hotel.

He politely points out that his borough has done far more than required in the three-page legal contract with Patsy. That some of Thorpe’s children are disgruntled by their stepmother’s burial plans, he says, is probably not unusual in terms of family disputes. It certainly shouldn’t compel a town to give up its namesake.

“Bringing Thorpe here, changing our name, all that we’ve invested over the years, that’s part of who we are now,” he says. “He brought a divided town together.”

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The sons, meanwhile, made pilgrimages es to the memorial after it was built. If the town wanted to call itself Jim Thorpe, they were flattered. But to use his body to do it, they thought, was using his corpse like some sort of mascot.

“Dad had never been there in his life,” Richard says.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jack, who would become chief of the Sac and Fox Nation, began asking the town to return the body, Bill remembers. “The answer was an emphatic no,” he says.

Wheeler, the biographer, says he has interview notes and a letter from Jack Thorpe in July 1982, documenting a trip Jack made to the borough, asking once again for the body.

“It went nowhere,” Wheeler says. “He met with numerous people in a conciliatory fashion, not threatening lawsuits.”

The borough’s reaction, as quoted in that Sports Illustrated piece: “No way,” said then-mayor Michael Hichok, also one of the town’s barbers. “They can’t take it back.”

There was a far darker source of the sons’ outrage than a family spat, however.

By the latter half of the 1800s, as the frontier moved west and Native American tribes were relocated and massacred and resettled, whites began to regard them as two-legged curios, a breed about to vanish.

As early as 1867, the Army Medical Museum began using native corpses for infectious disease studies. A few years later, the museum was advertising for skulls to enhance its “scientific” study — as if the Choctaws and Apaches and the Cheyenne were prehistoric mastodons.

In the following decades, tens of thousands of graves were looted, the bones and relics often shipped off to museums, if not traded on the collectibles market.

In 1936, the ancient skeletons of 146 men, women and children were discovered in an Indian burial mound in Salina, Kan. The landowner shellacked the skeletons and displayed them as a roadside attraction for nearly 60 years. In 1989, relic hunters dug up a burial mound on the Slack farm in Kentucky, looting graves that were 500 years old, tossing skeletons to the side.

“We’ve been treated as curiosities and specimens rather than as people,” says Joe Watkins, a Choctaw Indian and director of the Native American studies program at the University of Oklahoma.

In 1990, Congress enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a sweeping bid to redress more than 150 years of abuse. It is designed to force museums to return human remains and sacred artifacts to their tribes of origin.

Sherry Hutt, national program manager for the act, says museums are not required to file annual reports of returns, so there is no comprehensive number of how many bodies have been transferred. What is known are the cases voluntarily reported: In the 22 years since the law was passed, the remains of 41,000 Native Americans have either been returned to their tribes or have been identified as eligible to be returned.

About 119,000 more are either unclaimed or unidentified.

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The Thorpe sons were intrigued with the sweeping power of the graves protection act. It had been 37 years since their father’s funeral. The law offered them their first legal tool to reclaim the body.

The act essentially asks only three questions: Is the entity a museum? Does it have control over the remains? Can those remains be identified as members of a tribe?

If so, then federal law mandates they be returned.

The statute’s definition of “museum” is extremely broad: any state, city, municipality, school or institution that receives any federal funds, for any purpose, even indirectly.

The sons thought they could sue under the act with a slam-dunk case. There was just one problem: their half-sisters.

Grace and Gail by now wanted their father to stay put. (Charlotte died in 1998.) Grace was an activist for Native American causes and often came to the town for events related to her father. The sons did not want to file a lawsuit only to have it blow up in public when the sisters disagreed.

So, for more than a decade the issue simmered, with neither side able to persuade the other. Then Gail Thorpe died in 2005, and Grace died in 2008.

Jack thought the end was in sight at last.

“I’ll see it in my lifetime,” he jauntily told AOL FanHouse in 2009, referring to a court victory even before he filed the paperwork. The next summer, in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania, he filed the suit to bring his father home.

He didn’t live to see anything else happen in the case he had worked on for so long. Eight months later, he was dead, too, eaten up by cancer.

He now lies beneath the red dirt rectangle of grass and weeds in the family plot where, for 58 years, he had wanted his father to be buried.

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There were two brothers left alive to continue the fight, Richard and Bill (Carl had died in 1986). The 3,000-member Sac and Fox Nation joined the suit as well, with Principal Chief George Thurman and the tribe’s historic preservation officer, Sandra Massey, at the forefront.

They were not surprised that the borough council voted 6 to 0 to fight them.

In court papers, William G. Schwab, the borough’s attorney in the case, has argued that the borough is not a museum, that the graves protection act was not intended to cover cases of “modern” people, and, most recently, that Thorpe was a Catholic and Catholicism forbids disinterment.

U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo has agreed with some of Schwab’s arguments. Caputo has pruned punitive damages from the suit and has knocked out claims that the borough should pay the fees of the sons’ attorneys.

But more important, Caputo has ruled that the borough is a museum — the key victory for the plaintiffs. The other two prongs of the act are not in question.

His latest ruling, handed down in November, said several of the borough’s objections to returning the remains were “erroneous.” There is a clause in the act, however, stipulating that if the holder of the artifacts has a “right of possession,” the holder may keep them; if the judge holds that Patsy’s contract gave the borough such a right, it will not have to return Thorpe’s body.

There is no timetable for a final ruling.

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A lifetime of struggle. It all comes down to people talking.

“This is not a game, it’s not a legal technicality, it’s not something bothering a couple of people,” says Stephen Ward, the Tulsa-based attorney for the sons and the tribe. “It’s viewed as a widespread injustice by a large number of people in the Sac and Fox Nation. ... I don’t think the larger community really understands what it’s like to be a Native American.”

Michael Koehler, Charlotte’s son, is 73 and the oldest of the grandchildren. He supports the town.

“Aunt Grace has already conducted a Native American burial ritual [at the site], and on that basis we’re convinced he lies in sanctified ground,” he says from his home in Bonita Springs, Fla. “I’m disappointed [the sons] want to do this, to get a crane and destroy a 15-ton mausoleum to pry him out of there.”

Rob Wheeler, the son of Thorpe’s biographer, has started a Web site to build support for Thorpe’s body to be returned to Indian Country. He says the site has drawn 3,000 testimonials in five months.

Schwab says the borough is dug in. If it loses at the District Court level, he says it will appeal.

Sofranko, the mayor, considers all this over his barroom beer. It’s getting on in the evening and it’s snowing, the flakes dusting the village with a hushed, white blanket. The street out front is deserted, dark, the pavement icing up.

“You want an issue like this to be put to rest,” he’s saying. “But sometimes there’s really no way to do that. Sometimes in life, there just isn’t.”

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Nothing remains of the Thorpe family homestead. It’s a pasture at the dead end of a county road.

Cows outnumber people here by a significant margin. Coyotes are such a problem that on a recent evening two rotting corpses are strung up by their heels on a fence by the roadside, mouths open and teeth bared. The stench is thought to ward off their chicken-rousting brethren.

A mile or two farther out, a stone marker by the side of the road notes that the Thorpes’ log cabin stood nearby.

At dusk, the sun fades over a small rise that gives onto grasslands and the open expanse of the Great Plains. The sky goes from blue to black, a half-moon brilliant overhead. Lights from a few homes blink in the distance, a quarter-mile, a half-mile, a mile away. The land is that wide open.

It would have looked almost exactly this way — more wooded, more pastoral — in the 1890s, when the last of the Indian wars had not yet been fought, when Jim Thorpe was a boy in these fields, running after his father’s horses, playing with his brothers, sleeping in the loft of their cabin, the family together in the deep nighttime blackness.

All that remains of most of them lies a mile to the west, beneath the stars, beneath the stone markers that bear their names, buried beneath the plains of their ancestors.

Neely Tucker is a Washington Post staff writer. To comment on this story, send e-mail to wpletters@washpost.com.