Wa-tho-Huck, in Chicago and Elsewhere

by

Barry Kritzberg

Chicago Literary Club

January 4. 2010

It is a hangover, I suppose, from too many days spent in front of a classroom full of students, but I can’t resist the impulse, so I am going to begin with a little quiz.

Rest easy, however, for no grades will be given.

Are you ready sports fans?—for these questions will delve into that arcane world of Chicago sports trivia.

For question number one, we go back to Wrigley Field, May 2, 1917. The cognoscenti among us may already think they know the answer, but wait a minute, for the crafty teacher seldom asks for the obvious.

The date, of course, is famous, for it was the only time in major league baseball history that two pitchers—Fred Toney for the Cincinnati Reds and Jim ”Hippo” Vaughn for the Chicago Cubs—pitched no-hitters against each other for nine innings.

The score was 0-0, and it went into extra innings. Gus Getz, leading off for the Reds in the top of tenth, fouled out to catcher Archie Wilson. Larry Kopf, who had a batting average that hovered around .250, hit a line drive to right for the first hit of the game.

Alfred “Greasy” Neale flied out to Cy Williams in center. Hal Chase also flied to Williams, for what should have been the third out, but Cy dropped it, and there were men on first and third with two outs. Chase then stole second.

The next batter hit a little chopper in front of the plate, which Vaughn fielded. It was too late to make the throw to first, Vaughn decided, so he tossed it home, hoping to get Kopf coming in from third. Catcher Archie Wilson bobbled the ball and the run scored.

Now, here comes the question. If you know the answer, however, please don’t spoil the fun by shouting it out. We’ll have a reckoning when the quiz is over.

Who hit that little chopper that resulted in the only run of the game?

The rest is history, as they say, for the Cubs went down in order in the bottom of tenth, giving Toney a 10-inning no-hitter and the Reds a 1-0 victory.

The scene for question two is also Wrigley Field, six years later, but the sport is now football. The Canton Bulldogs were driving towards the Chicago Bears goal line. The field was muddy and the ball was slippery and, at the two yard line, the Canton runner fumbled. A defensive end for the Bears, a fellow named George Halas, scooped up the ball, and zigzagging his way down the field, scampered 98-yards for the touchdown. It was the longest run with a recovered fumble in professional football history, a record that stood for 49 years.

Perhaps you’re thinking I’m going to ask who broke the record. No; what I want to know is who was that Canton Bulldog who fumbled on the two-yard-line back in 1923?

The third question, just to provide some symmetry, also involves Wrigley Field. The time: August, 1948. Urban “Red” Faber, the White Sox Hall of Fame pitcher, was on the hill in an old timer’s game. One of the old codgers—that’s codger, not Dodger—on the other side tagged Faber for a homerun that traveled an estimated 384 feet.

Who hit that homerun?

Now, before the reckoning, there is that overachiever’s delight, the extra-credit question: that old codger who hit that 384-foot homerun was working in Chicago in 1947and 1948. What was he doing when he was not hitting homeruns off of a Hall of Fame pitcher?

The answer to question one: Wa-tho-Huck; Question two: Wa-tho-Huck; Question three: Wa-tho-Huck, age 61.

The answer to the extra-credit question: Wa-tho-Huck, as a full-time employee of the Chicago Park District, appeared in every field house in the city to promote the Junior Olympics.

Wa-tho-Huck was born in Oklahoma Indian Territory on May 28, 1888. His Indian name, which in English means “Bright Path,” was given to him by his mother, who saw the rising sun as he and his twin, Charles, were being born.

Charles died early, of typhoid, at age nine, while Wa-tho-Huck achieved some considerable success off the reservation under the Americanized name of Jim Thorpe.

Jim first came into national prominence as a football player at Carlisle, but before that he was considered by his teachers at Haskell Institute “an incorrigible youngster,” who frequently ran away from the strict military discipline of the Kansas Indian School. He also ran away at age 12 and worked for several years as a ranch hand in Texas. He was also AWOL from Carlisle on more than one occasion.

Jim was sent to Carlisle, apparently, because it was far enough away to make it difficult for him to even think of trying to get back to Oklahoma.

It was not football, but track that first attracted the attention of Glenn S. “Pop” Warner, the Carlisle athletic director, football and track & field coach.

Jim, so the story goes, wearing his Carlisle military uniform and street shoes, was watching high jumpers, wearing track outfits and cleats, inch the bar higher and higher, until it reached the school-record height. After several high jumpers missed at the five feet, nine inch record height, Jim asked if he could try it. He sailed over the cross bar easily on his first attempt.

There are many Thorpe legends, some bordering on the preposterous, created by the imagination of sports writers, who seemed to need to add hyperbole to the already fantastic reality.

The high jump story, however, seems to be authentic, for it was verified by Thorpe’s Carlisle teammates and Coach Warner. Jim was, if there ever was one, a natural athlete, who had the physical and intellectual capacity to simply observe another athlete in action and then outperform him, even if he had never attempted it before.

By the time he left Carlisle, he was an accomplished performer in football, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, tennis, swimming, gymnastics, handball, billiards, bowling, golf, rowing, figure skating, and track & field. He and his partner even won the Carlisle two-step dance contest.

In the hands of a sportswriter like Gene Schoor, however, Thorpe was turned into someone who was even the superior of the fictional Frank Merriwell and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Being great, apparently, was not good enough.

Schoor reports that when Jim played minor league baseball, he won twenty-three games and lost only two. The statistical records for that season tell a different story: Thorpe won nine and lost ten.

Schoor also describes a dual track meet, where a team of five Carlisle Indians defeated a Lafayette squad of forty-six by the score of 71-31. Thorpe, winning five of the six events he entered, had 28 points. The truth is that Carlisle took only seven athletes to that meet. Hollywood, however, improved on the story. In the film, Jim Thorpe: All American, Carlisle took only four cinder men to the Lafayette meet.

There was no need for the exaggerations. Thorpe was phenomenal. In the 1912 season, Thorpe was a first team football All- American, scoring 198 of his team’s 504 points, when touchdowns only counted for five points. His punts frequently exceeded fifty yards, one of which measured 83 yards on the fly; he was a persistent threat to kick field goals from near midfield; and once, from punt formation, he ran 110 yards for a touchdown. It is no wonder, then, that in Jim’s four football seasons, Carlisle won 43, lost only five, and tied two.

Leland Devore, one of greatest football linemen of all-time, said of Thorpe after Carlisle defeated his Army team 27-6: “That Indian is the greatest player I have ever stacked up against in my five years of experience. He is super-human, that’s all….there is nothing he can’t do. He kicks superbly, worms his way through a field like a combination greyhound, jack-rabbit, and eel. He is cunning and as strategic as a fox.”

At the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm, Jim won the pentathlon (which then consisted of the long jump, javelin, discuss, 200 and 1500 meter races). All events were held on the same day, and he won three events and finished second in two.

Thorpe was the only pentathlon competitor to also enter the decathlon, which began the day after the pentathlon. Thorpe won four of the events, finished second in another four, and third in two to outpoint his nearest competitor 8,412 to 7,724. Jim’s score set a new world decathlon record. His performance would have placed him in the top ten in each event over the next forty-four years. When Bob Mathias won the Olympic decathlon in 1948, for example, his time in the 110 meter high hurdles was 15.7; Thorpe, in 1912, ran the hurdles in 15.6.

Even more astonishing was Thorpe’s performance at the American Athletic Union all-around competition, held later that year in New York. There were ten events, all held on the same day, and Jim won seven events and finished second in three. At the risk of sounding like Gene Schoor, I will only add that the track conditions were miserable and wet and that Jim was recovering from ptomaine poisoning.

It is natural, perhaps, for a sportswriter turned biographer to concentrate on the playing field heroics of his subject, as I have done thus far. But there are two aspects of the Jim Thorpe story that can only be answered by stepping away from the stadium, and that is what I will do now.

First, I would like to explore the nature of Carlisle Indian School and the kind of education a student like Jim Thorpe received there; and, second, I would like to show what the latest research reveals about how and why Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals were returned to the International Olympic Committee.

The idea for Indian boarding schools came from a U.S. military officer, Richard Henry Pratt. The first, at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was opened in 1879 and the aim, as Pratt was fond of saying, was to “kill the Indian and save the man.”

That was modestly better, perhaps, than General Phil Sheridan’s notion that “the only good Indian is a dead one.”

The U.S. military was in favor of the boarding schools, for they saw that students in faraway schools could be held as hostages to guarantee the acquiescence of potentially hostile tribes.

Carlisle, like other Indian boarding schools, was run on a strict military system, with reveille at six a.m. Students marched everywhere and every waking moment was accounted for. When students arrived at Carlisle, native garb was confiscated and uniforms were issued. Male and female students had their long hair shorn and native languages were strictly forbidden. There were immediate punishments, often physical, for failing to speak English.

Students—often more than 1000 at Carlisle, ages 10 to 25—had academic classes in the morning and were taught various gender determined “useful” trades in the afternoon. The academic training was in no way comparable to that available in the colleges and universities Carlisle competed against in football. The uniform course of study, established in 1901 by Estelle Reed, Superintendent of Indian Schools, was based solidly on the presumed intellectual inferiority of all Indians.

Students were also separated by gender and boys were allowed to go into town only on the weekends that the girls could not.

There was also a system called “outing,” whereby students could earn money by working on local farms. Pratt told students they “would become part of the family” on these outings (which often lasted for months). They would be paid five dollars per month, but half of that amount was required to be given to the school. Jim Thorpe’s first outing experience came just four months after he arrived at Carlisle and he was introduced to such high level skills as mopping floors, peeling potatoes, and boiling laundry. He ate by himself in the kitchen while the family ate in the dining room. Over a 35-month period, Jim spent only fourteen months at Carlisle; he was outing—working for the other twenty-one months, in what might be fairly described as indentured servitude without the indentures.

Captain Pratt thought the system of education in the boarding schools would lead to future assimilation for his Indian charges. In 1905, however, Francis Leupp, Theodore Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, set Indian schools on a course that might be described as a variation on the separate but equal doctrine.

Said Leupp: “By force of both ancestry and environment they [Indian students] are not in a condition to absorb and assimilate, much less utilize effectively, the higher learning of the books, and it is unwise to promote to an impractical at the expense of an obviously practical course of instruction. Give him simple nature books—the story of a wolf, a description of a family of prairie dogs, the wonderful adventure of Mr. Bear and Mrs. Bear and the three juvenile bears.”

The good-hearted Pratt couldn’t play the good soldier to this tune. He hollered and, in time-honored bureaucratic fashion, he was relieved of his duties at the school he had founded. His replacement, Captain William A. Mercer, seeing which way the wind blew, made additions to the vocational program at the expense of the academic program.

Leupp’s suggested readings might have been better than the insipid Dick and Jane readers of a later era, but imagine Thorpe, age 24 in 1912, sitting down for another class session of “the wonderful story of Mr. Bear and Mrs. Bear.”

To get a Carlisle diploma, a student had to complete two five-year terms. Of the 8,000 who attended Carlisle from 1879 until the institution closed in 1918, only 761 received diplomas—less than ten per cent. Jim never qualified for the diploma.

Thomas C. Moffett, in his 1914 book, The American Indian on the New Trail, celebrated the conversion of many Indians to Christianity. He gave Indian schools some of the credit for that missionary work and described the outing system as “one of the most valuable features” of the school. “Indian boys are in great demand in the East as farmers and mechanics,” Moffett added, “and the girls as housekeepers.” At five dollars a month, the price was right for the employers.

The book also contains lovely “before and after” photographs of Chauncey Yellowrobe. The “before entering Carlisle” photograph shows a dark-skinned Chauncey with long hair, draping over his ears and a feather, stuck perhaps in a braid at the back of his head. On leaving Carlisle, he is portrayed as an obviously more civilized being, wearing a black suit and tie and sporting hair cut quite short, and oh so neatly combed. The most remarkable transformation, however, is in the color of his skin: it is decidedly lighter, which one can attribute to the miraculous workings of civilization or to the clever hand of the photographer in the darkroom. Such “before and after” photographs were widely used to persuade skeptical whites of the virtues of Indian education and, more incredibly, as recruiting tools for Indian agents seeking new students.

Jim Thorpe had little to say about his Carlisle education, but a glimpse is possible by looking at what some Indians said about their Indian boarding school experience.

Gertrude Bonnin, a Yankton Sioux who wrote under the name of Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), described her experience, first on the reservation: “I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew in my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer.”

At age eight, however, she was invited to a Quaker-run boarding school in Indiana that adhered to the Bureau of Indian Affairs standards.

“Our mothers had taught us,” Zitkala-Sa writes, “that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!”

She was warned, in a no doubt clandestine use of her native tongue, that her hair would be cut. She hid under the bed to avoid being transformed into a coward, but was eventually discovered. She continues: “I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit….Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by the herder.”

Don Talayesa, in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, summed up his experience this way: “As I lay on my blanket I thought about my school days and all that I had learned. I could talk like a gentleman, read, write, and cipher. I could name all the states in the Union with their capitals, repeat the names of all the books of the Bible, quote a hundred verses of Scripture, sing more than two dozen Christian hymns and patriotic songs, debate, shout football yells, swing my partners in square dances, bake bread, sew well enough to make a pair of trousers, and tell ‘dirty’ Dutchman stories by the hour.”

Despite the wonderful skills he had acquired, Sun Chief inexplicably elected to return to the Hopi Reservation. “I wanted to become a real Hopi again,” he said, “to sing the good old Katcina songs, and to feel free to make love without fear of sin or a rawhide.”

David Wallace Adams, in his study of the American Indian boarding school experience, aptly titled Education for Extinction, concludes with these words: “In the final analysis, the boarding school story constitutes yet another deplorable episode in the long and tragic history of Indian-white relations. For tribal elders who had witnessed the catastrophic developments of the nineteenth century—the bloody warfare, the near extinction of the bison, the scourge of disease and starvation, the shrinking of tribal land base, the indignities of reservation life, the invasion of missionaries and white settlers—there seemed to be no end to the cruelties perpetrated by the whites. And after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great war should be waged against children. They were coming for the children.”

In the 1951 film, Jim Thorpe: All-American, Glenn S. “Pop” Warner (played by Charles Bickford) is portrayed as a kindly father figure who only wants what is best for Jim. All of Jim’s troubles over the Olympic medals came about, therefore, because of temperament, that stubborn Indian nature that wouldn’t submit to the wiser ways of the white man. The Hollywood version reinforces what might be called the official story: Thorpe was asked to surrender his medals because, one summer, he had played professional baseball in the minor leagues and had therefore lost his status as an amateur athlete. It was a tragedy, to be sure, but it was Jim’s ignorance that led to the abuse, but as the Amateur Athletic Union and the International Olympic Committee insisted, “ignorance is no excuse.”

The exposure of Jim’s “professionalism” put Coach Warner and James E. Sullivan, perennial head of the AAU, in an embarrassing spot, but only momentarily. Both men, in their lily-pure amateurism, denied any knowledge of Jim’s having played baseball, insisting that they only knew what they read in the newspapers.

Joe Libby, one of Jim’s Carlisle teammates said that Coach Warner sent Jim and two other players to North Carolina to play baseball for money. His statement was not widely circulated. Warner, in 1908, had also proudly distributed a letter indicating that three of his athletes had played professionally in Maryland and three more in North Carolina. The Carlisle school records show that Jim “was granted summer leave to play baseball in the South.”

Sullivan, who persisted in denying any prior knowledge of Thorpe’s professionalism, had, in praising Thorpe’s Olympic triumphs, also called him “a great baseball player.”

So what was going on?

As early as 1904, Edward S. Jordan, in Colliers, contended that college football was no longer an amateur enterprise, but “a business, highly calculated to derive enormous profits through furnishing spectacular entertainment to the general public.”

And Carlisle, our fair Carlisle?

Recent research suggests that Jordan did not exaggerate. W.G. Thompson, Carlisle’s first coach, had written, in a 1907 letter, that corruption started with Warner. Thompson claimed that Warner, in addition to giving monetary awards to players for touchdowns, blocked kicks, etc., also paid players (often in the form of “loans”) at the end of the season. All players also were given expense accounts at Blumenthal Clothiers in Carlisle.

Carlisle’s share of gate receipts exceeded $50,000 in 1907, before Jim Thorpe began attracting national attention and, of course, even bigger gate receipts. Much of the money from that and subsequent seasons went into the Carlisle Indian School Athletic Association, a private business entity created by Warner, entirely separate from the school budget, and completely under his control.

Out of that money, Warner built a separate dormitory for athletes, where they received better food and better medical attention. (The mortality rates at Indian boarding schools, by the way, were appalling.) How enterprising, one might say. He also built a $3,400 house for himself out of athletic association funds and paid his utility bills from the same source. Warner also used association funds to buy railway bonds and to invest in the Springfield Canning Company, which supplied food for Carlisle athletes.

While Carlisle teachers were being paid $660 annually and the superintendent $2,650, Warner, as coach and athletic director, garnered $4,000 each year. (In 1913, when Jim signed to play baseball with McGraw’s Giants for $6,000 a season, Warner received $3,500 from the Giants for his role as “business advisor.”)

James E. Sullivan, the drum major for the purity of amateurism, sat on the board of the Carlisle Indian School Athletic Association. A mere coincidence, of course. Sullivan took a salary of $1,500 for promoting amateurism via the AAU, but he also had a salary as advertising and editorial director of the A.G. Spalding sporting goods company.

The AAU, to cite one example of how amateurism was kept by pure by the diligence of Sullivan, rejected a new discus mark by Johnnie Garrells, of the University of Michigan, because the discus used did not meet the standard set by the AAU. The standard discus, in case you were wondering, was the one manufactured by Spalding.

It was these two stellar proponents of amateurism who, to protect their own financial interests, sacrificed Jim Thorpe on the great Olympic altar of purity. Warner wrote the confession letter that Jim dutifully copied. It was sent to Sullivan, accompanied by a letter from Carlisle superintendent Moses Friedman, which declared that Warner knew nothing whatever about Jim’s foray into professional baseball.

It was Sullivan’s idea that Jim should return his Olympic medals. That would obviously establish Sullivan and the AAU as the holiest of the holy defenders of amateurism. It worked, apparently, for the International Olympic Committee awarded Sullivan a medal for his promotion of the Olympics. Curiously, when Sullivan died in 1914, all of his business papers were burned, as he had requested.

Amateurism was the exclusive preserve of the upper class white gentlemen of leisure. At the 1904 Olympics, held in St. Louis, in conjunction with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, separate athletic contests for aborigines were held. That’s right, aborigines. These were organized and promoted by the AAU’s James E. Sullivan.

The eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica reported that “the sports of savages [at St. Louis in 1904] were disappointing….proving to be feeble compared with the white races.”

That kind of thinking explains, perhaps, the campaign to suggest that Jim wasn’t worthy of Olympic glory. His minor league baseball coach described Jim as a drunken half-breed who couldn’t hit a curve ball; even Coach Warner said Thorpe was lazy and never gave more than 40 per cent; and reports circulated that Thorpe’s idea of training for the Olympics was swinging in a hammock. These slurs seemed to reduce Jim to the common stereotype of the Indian, and they have been often repeated.

A different turn in the story came about in 1982, almost three decades after Jim’s death, when Robert K. Wheeler and his wife, Dr. Florence Ridlon, established the Jim Thorpe Foundation, dedicated to restoring Jim Thorpe’s Olympic awards to the man they called the “world’s greatest athlete.”

Wheeler and his wife did more than raise money. They did their homework.

Jim, they discovered, was legally a ward of the United States government in 1913, but no government lawyer was provided to defend Jim against the charge of professionalism brought by the AAU.

The IOC, in accepting the return of the medals and striking Jim’s name from the Olympic record, contended that Jim’s defense—ignorance—was no excuse. That was the IOC’s position, reiterated by its president, Avery Brundage, as late as 1976. (Brundage, incidentally, finished sixth [of seven competitors] in the 1912 pentathlon in Stockholm.)

Wheeler went back to the rules for the 1912 Olympics and found this: “Objections to the qualification of a competitor must be made in writing, and be forwarded without delay to the Swedish Olympic Committee. No such objection shall be entertained unless accompanied by a deposit of 20 Swedish kroner and received by the Swedish Olympic Committee before the lapse 30 days from the distribution of prizes.”

It must have given Robert Wheeler great pleasure to write to the IOC that “ignorance of the general regulations for the 1912 Olympics was no excuse for illegally divesting Jim Thorpe of his awards,” for Thorpe’s professionalism did not become public until seven months after the medals were awarded.

The notion of amateurism may seem rather quaint in today’s world of athletics, where professionals are encouraged to compete in the Olympics. But I agree with Tom Harmon, the Michigan football great, who scornfully dismissed the whole amateur question as “shamateurism.”

Jim Thorpe, in a 1950 Associated Press poll of sportswriters, was voted the greatest football player of the first half of the century. Thorpe received 170 votes; Red Grange was second with 138; a distant third was Bronko Nagurski, with 38.

A few weeks later, in another AP poll, Thorpe was named the greatest athlete of the first half of the century. Thorpe received 252 first place votes (of 393 ballots) and 875 points overall. Babe Ruth was second with 86 first place votes, and 539 overall. Jack Dempsey (11, 246) was third.

Jim played, as he told sportswriter Grantland Rice, “with the pure heart of an amateur—for the pure hell of it.”

The poet Marianne Moore, who taught Jim at Carlisle, seemed to have understood his magnificent abilities better than those who characterized Thorpe as the lazy guy who never gave more than forty per cent. Moore described Thorpe as “equilibrium with no strictures. The epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.”

Jim Thorpe was, in my view, as fellow playwright Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, “not for an age, but for all time.”

Sources

David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (University Press of Kansas, 1995).

Bill Crawford, All-American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005).

Thomas C. Moffett, The American Indian on the New Trail (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1914).

Gene Schoor, The Jim Thorpe Story: America’s Greatest Athlete (New York: Archway Paperback [1951] 1970.

Leo W. Sims (ed.), Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (Yale University Press [1942] 1976.

Jon S. Steckbeck, Fabulous Redmen: The Carlisle Indians and Their Famous Football Teams (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Horace McFarland Company, 1951).

Robert K. Wheeler, Jim Thorpe: World’s Greatest Athlete (Oklahoma University Press, [1975] 1983.

Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories (University of Nebraska Press, [1921], 1985).