Just in time for the season. I have been rifling through my video collection and pulling out the usual suspects of movies I try to watch every year at this time. Below are my top 10 favorites, starting at the bottom, along with clips from each. Some are standards but hopefully some are ones you never saw or heard about and runs from pure slapstick to corn pone cliché to downright tear jerkers.
I’ll show you mine if you tell me yours. After you’re done reading and viewing(just click on the arrow in each youtube image for those technophobes out there), leave a comment on what your favorite Christmas movie is. Goodnight to all and to all a goodnight. Seriously, for anyone who reads this that I don’t get a chance to talk to, I hope you have a good, safe holiday with whoever it is you choose or have the opportunity to spend time with. And to remember those we love who are no longer here.
10) Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
Nothing says Christmas like an elf who has lost his way and wants to be a dentist, a giant Yeti chasing small boys and misfit toys around the frozen Tundra and a gold miner named Cornelius!!! Oh, the voice of Burl Ives, fellow EIU alumn….Silver and gold….silver and gold.
9) Saturday Night Live Christmas
From old school Eddie Murphy, back when he was funny, doing Mr. Robinsons Christmas in which he demonstrates how to sell black market Cabbage Patch Dolls by putting a head of lettuce on a bay doll body, to Dana Carvey doing a dead on Jimmy Stewart impersonation as he and Dennis Miller beat the crap out of Mr. Potter in “The Lost Ending” of It’s a Wonderful Life to original players Belushi, Akroyd, Chase, Curtain, Newman and Garrett Morrison singing Winter Wonderland. But who could ever forget the Terry Gross and Fresh Air send up in the Schweddyy Balls episode.
8) Home Alone
Yes it is a crazy stretch to think that an 8-year-old could be left at home by his parents while they fly to Paris, but crazier things have happened and at least they didn’t strap their dog to the roof of their car on during a family road trip. Yes, Macaulay Culkin slapping his face with aftershave and screaming like Munch’s Scream is funny, but the best part of the movie is the 15 minute segment of pure juvenilistic, slapstick humor when Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern’s characters try to get into a booby trapped house. “What happened to your head? Why’d you take your boots off?”
7) It’s A Wonderful Life
I can hear some of you hitting the gong like Chuck Barris telling me to get off the stage. I know , I know…..but there is a reason movies like this always make the best of whatever lists….it’s a classic for good reason. Fine acting from a good cast, well written and well-directed. Poor put upon George Bailey in Bedford Falls never got to live the life he wanted because he was too responsible. Besides that, who amongst us doesn’t think about how different the lives of those we have touched would be if we hadn’t been born. Go ahead, you can admit it.
Viewer alert….for anyone who hasn’t seen this one, bring a box of tissue. I saw this in the theater when it was first released in 2005 and shed a few tears and probably would have wept myself dry if my wife wasn’t sitting next to me and I didn’t have to be a typical male who is allergic to showing emotion in public. Starring Diane Keaton, Claire Danes, Rachel McAdams, Craig Nelson and Luke Wilson, the story of the zany Stone Family and navigating life and the holidays after the death of mother Stone. One of the first scenes shows Diane Keaton’s character staring at the family Christmas tree in their living room and we later find out she is dying of breast cancer and this will be the last Christmas she will have with her family. The movie closes with the final scene of the family decorating the tree a year later with only a photo hanging on the wall to remind them of their losses. Who wouldn’t cry seeing Diane Keaton die? I would rank it higher if it weren’t for the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker gets a lot of screen time and a little of her goes a long way.
What is your favorite color? Don’t be a cottonheaded ninnymuggins. The credits states based on David Sedaris’ now classic Santa Land Diaries, wickedly funny by the way, but other than the fact some of the movie is spent inside a department store Christmas land, not sure about that. Starring Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf with excellent supporting role for the deadpan master Bob Newhart. If you can’t laugh when the overgrown man-child Buddy uses a couch as a trampoline to put the star on top of a giant Christmas tree, check your pulse.
Based on a short story written by Jean Shepherd entitled In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. Shot on a bare bones budget of $4 million and released by the studio with little publicity in November of 1983. Now a holiday classic and played on a continuous loop by TBS over Christmas. Who can forget little Randy stuffed into 20 layers of winter outerwear yelling, “I can’t put my arms down”, Ralphie being pushed down a giant department store slide by the heavy black boot of a wretched Santa Clause, or the bullying tactics of Scott Farkas, the kid with the yellow eyes, and his little toadie Grover Dill.
3) The Family Man
Despite the usual over the top overacting of Nicholas Cage, great writing and cast make this a modern classic that I watch every year. Basically, an updated rewrite of It’s A Wonderful Life but this time, the lead character is an uber wealthy Wall Street merger specialist who left the love of his life in the dust to chase billions. But he is a given a glimpse of what it could have been like if he had gotten married and had kids. This time around, the role of Clarence the guardian is played by Don Cheadle. Yes it is hokey and incredibly cheesy at times but, holidays are built for sentimental gluttons like myself. Plus it helped convince me that getting married and having kids might not be as terrible as I thought at the time….boy was I wrong:).
“We would have called but Clark wanted it to be a surprise. You surprised Clark? If I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet I couldn’t be any more surprised.”
“Can I refill your eggnog? Get you something to eat? Take you out in the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead? No, I’m just fine Clark.”
1) Love Actually
Released in November 2003, the film features a cast of what appears to be any actor still living at the time of production. Starring Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Laura Linney and Alan Rickman and showing about 10 different stories that begin and end with the characters arriving or departing from an airport in search of love. Given the security measures put in place after 9/11, it is nostalgic to watch the final scene which is a montage of film with the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows in the background. The final act features film taken at airports all around the world with families greeting their loved ones who have arrived off an airplane, greeted with hugs, kisses and smiles all around. Oh, the memories of waiting at Lambert Field waiting for Uncle Ron to get off the plane last or saying goodbye to everyone in Phoenix on my way back home. In the end, we see that Love…Actually…is all around. With an excellent turn by Bill Nighy as Billy Mack, a depraved, lewd and washed out middle-aged rocker (appears to be loosely based on Mick Jagger). Well worth the viewing time. Plus it has an excellent soundtrack including the showstopper himself, Otis Redding, backed by the incredible Booker T and the MGs, with a powerful, touching version of White Christmas.
Ok, now I want to hear from you. Please leave comments in the section below. Mele kelikimaka is Hawaii’s way of saying merry christmas to you.
(We are all Newtown.This piece is dedicated to all those affected by recent events. My thoughts are with those families directly impacted including the children and their parents and the educators. For that could just have easily have been my kids or your kids, or that could have been us when we were in school. This is a story of parents and the hopes and dreams they hold for their children.)
The kid from Spavinaw
Oh, but love is fleeting/ It’s sad but true
When your heart is beating/ You don’t want to hear the news
In August of 1995, baseball and New York Yankee great Mickey Mantle died after battling through first, a liver transplant, and then liver cancer. During the eulogy at his funeral, broadcaster Bob Costas spoke for many when he stated, “I guess I’m here, not so much to speak for myself as to simply represent the millions of baseball-loving kids who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and for whom Mickey Mantle was baseball. And more than that, he was a presence in our lives — a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic. Maybe Mick was uncomfortable with it, not just because of his basic shyness, but because he was always too honest to regard himself as some kind of deity. But that was never really the point. In a very different time than today, the first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said every boy builds a shrine to some baseball hero, and before that shrine, a candle always burns. ”
Robert Hilligoss at Mickey Mantle Field, Commerce, Oklahoma 2012
Just as I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s loving the St.Louis Cardinals and players like Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee, my dad was one of those who grew up in the 50’s looking up at Mickey Mantle as a role model. So it was with great emotional impact and meaning when my dad I went on a road trip this year through Oklahoma and stopped in the towns Mantle was born in and raised in……but I’ll get to that later.
Mickey Mantle was born October 20, 1931 in the town of Spavinaw, Oklahoma to Mutt and Lovell Mantle. He was named in honor of Hall of Fame catcher Mickey Cochrane, Mutt Mantle’s favorite player. Later in his life, Mantle expressed relief that his father had not known Cochrane’s true first name, as he would have hated to be named Gordon. The picture above is of the area in Spavinaw where the house Mantle first lived in used to be but is now just an empty field with a small house and garage in the neighboring lot. In 1935, the family moved to Commerce, Ok so Mutt could work in the zinc mines that used to populate the area in the northeast part of the state. Mutt Mantle lived a hard,difficult life as a miner and didn’t want his kids to follow in his footsteps and wanted his kids to have a better life, as most parents do. Father also had a deep love of baseball and chose to pass it on at an early age to his first-born.
Mutt and Mickey Mantle, Commerce, Oklahoma
Starting at the age of six, Mickey started practicing a swing that would take him to the heights of baseball stardom. According to his brother, Ray Mantle in the fine documentary, Mantle from HBO Sports, “Dad would get off work everyday at 3:45pm and it was Mickey’s job to be at home for practice by 4:00pm. He’d always be there as soon as dad got home. And it would be trouble, big trouble if he wasn’t there on time. They’d practice ’til you couldn’t see. Dad would pitch to Mickey right-handed, and then granddad would pitch to him left-handed. He was teaching him to switch hit. They would play for hours and hours. They were obsessed.”
Mickey Mantle boyhood home, Commerce, Oklahoma
A few months ago, after hitting some dead ends and after having to ask a Commerce police officer for directions, my dad and I visited the house Mantle lived in until he left for the lights of Broadway. There are no markers in town to notify tourists and the house is not any type of historical site and stands with heavy paint chips around it, but does have a well maintained yard. The house is as it was when the Mantles lived there along with a heavily rusted steel shed to the side that was used as the backstop during practice by father and son. You can still see dents on the side made from their batting practice sessions.
The Natural, Ryan Hilligoss stands in where the Mick stood, Commerce, Ok
They made up games to make the batting practices more enjoyable. The house and shed are set in a way that a batted ball would either hit the house or go over it. In the picture below, you can see the location of the windows on the side of the house. A ball hit below the window was a single, above the windows was a double, on the roof was a triple and over the roof was a home run. Mantle often said, “I was the only kid in town who didn’t get in trouble for breaking a window.”
Baseball was a shared bond between the two. Brother Ray Mantle again, “The biggest thing in his life was when dad took him to St.Louis to see the Cardinals play. It was 300 miles to St.Louis and dad wouldn’t drive more than 35 miles per hour. Took us more than a day to get there. Mickey would say ‘Dad, I can run faster than you’re goin’ and dad would say ‘Okay get out.'” As far as Mutt was concerned, the endless practices at home were only the beginning for young Mickey, and he pushed his son to excel as the years passed. According to Mickey Mantle’s wife Merlyn, “Mutt was pretty hard on him. Mickey told me, ‘I could do really good in a ballgame and dad would never say you did well, all he would ever say was “You could do better.’ And that really made Mickey try even harder to please him.”
After graduating from Commerce High School in 1948 where he had starred in baseball, football and basketball, Mantle signed a minor league contract with the Yankees by scout Tom Greenwade who just happened to be driving through the country on Route 66 and stopped to watch a game in which Mantle hit three home runs. He was called up to the Yankees team in 1951 and started the season on a hitting tear. But later in the year he struggled and was sent to play in the minors again in Kansas City where he struggled even more. His dad came to see him one night and Mickey, in a moment of weariness and low confidence, said, “I might as well quit and give up the game.” According to Merlyn, “His dad said, ‘Is that all the guts you have? Then get your things together and we’ll go home. I’ll put you to work in the mines and you can do that the rest of your life like I’m doing.’ He wanted his dad to sympathize with him and he did not. Mickey replied, ‘Well dad I want to stay and make a try of it.’ To which his dad said ‘Then quit acting like a baby and get out there and play ball like I know you can.'” Mickey always relied on his father as a friend, mentor and confidant and took his father’s rough edged advice to heart. Mantle took to the field again, went on a hot batting streak, and was called up in August of 1951 by the Yankees for good.
The Yankee Clipper and #7, Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle, 1951
I have often been reminded of this during the past two summers as my wife and I have coached our son Graham’s youth baseball teams. As coaches, we have tried to instill in our players an understanding of baseball fundamentals and skills while also teaching them the value of teamwork and discipline. Before each practice and game we ask the players to listen to your coaches, to try your best and to have some fun. We have been fortunate to have a lot of good kids; not good players necessarily but good, decent kids who listened, tried to the best of their abilities, and developed their skills as the season progressed. But part of being a coach is identifying areas that need improvement, communicating with the player and then implementing a plan to enhance their skills. If they did something well, we would heap praise on them accordingly, but if they made a mistake, we would pull them aside later and ask what they were thinking and then let them how they could have done it better and then worked with them on it at the next practice.
However, some players and parents did not agree with this philosophy, and the parents would tell their children that they were fine and not to worry about making an error. Fearful of being critical or providing constructive feedback, some parents choose to massage their kid’s self-confidence instead of building character, responsibility and self-respect. Yes these are young children, but when does it end and when do the kids figure out that everything they do is not perfect and they might need to be responsible for their own actions instead of relying on mom and dad to fix it for them. Are these the same parents who demand to know why little Johnny or Susie got a C on their report instead of an A? These are called helicopter parents, ones who hover and swoop in at the slightest sign of distress to make it all better. Somehow, there has to be a middle ground between Mutt Mantle never telling Mickey that he did a good job and parents soothing their child’s fragile egos.
During his stellar 18 year career, Mantle piled up the results and awards. Mantle was noted for his hitting ability, both for average and for power. Mantle once said that he put everything into his swing including his teeth. He remains the last player to win the Major League Triple Crown in 1956, leading both leagues in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in (RBI). He currently is 16th on the all time home run record list with 536. He received three American League (AL) Most Valuable Player (MVP) Awards and played in twenty All-Star games. Mantle appeared in 12 World Series, winning 7 of them. He holds the records for most World Series home runs (18), RBIs (40), runs (42), walks (43), extra-base hits (26), and total bases (123). Mantle is regarded by many to be the greatest switch hitter of all time, and one of the greatest players in baseball history. Mantle was inducted into theNational Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 and was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team in 1999. .
Mickey Mantle and Robert Kennedy, Mickey Mantle day at Yankee Stadium, 1968
I’m Gonna Live Forever
Retired from baseball left Mantle to his own devices, many of them negative, as he struggled with alcohol abuse starting in his playing days and on through the 90s when he checked himself into rehab and started life anew. His drinking caused untold hardships on his wife and kids and his career. But part of his drinking was trying to run from what he thought was an inevitable early death given his family history. Mutt Mantle, the man who had taught Mickey so much about baseball and life and was his best friend, died in 1952 at the age of 39 of Hodgkins Lymphoma. His fraternal grandfather, the one who had helped him learn to switch hit, died when Mantle was 13 of Hodgkins. And he had two uncles who died early deaths of the same cause. Mantle thought it was just hereditary but what he didn’t know at the time was the disease was exacerbated by the zinc dust in the mines that all those men had worked in back in Oklahoma. Upon leaving rehab clean and sober, Mantle was often quoted as saying, “If I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself.”
In 1995, after receiving a liver transplant, necessitated by years of heavy drinking, Mantle decided to address his fans at a press conference. In doing so, he publicly acknowledged the costs of drinking, especially on his family and was willing to expose his faults and frailties to a public he often shunned earlier in life. He decide to take a stand and let people know that he could have done better, not in baseball, but in trying to live a good, decent life. With cameras and microphones rolling, Mantle gave a heartfelt, honest appraisal of what a hero really looks like, “I would like to say to all the kids out there, you talk about a role model: this is a role model. Don’t be like me. God gave me a body and an ability to play baseball and that’s what I wanted to do. And I blew it. I want to give something back, seems like all I ever done was take.” With his dad’s words of ‘you could have done better’ echoing in his mind, he acknowledged his dad was right and admitted it to himself and for all those to hear and take heed in their own lives and families. So, the kid born in the small town of Spavinaw and the kid raised in Commerce, and whose dad demanded an extremely high level of effort, perseverance and mastery, rose from total obscurity and the hard life in a dusty corner of Oklahoma to the highest level of skill and gave boys and girls around the country and world a hero to hold onto. From small things momma, big things one day come. (Below you can listen to The Highwaymen sing Billy Jo Shaver’s Live Forever)
In giving his eulogy at Mantle’s funeral, Bob Costas stated, “The emotional truths about childhood have a power that transcends objective fact. They stay with us through all the years, withstanding the ambivalence that so often accompanies the experience of adults. I just hope God has a place for him where he can run again. Where he can play practical jokes on his teammates and smile that boyish smile. Because God knows, no one’s perfect. And God knows there’s something special about heroes.”
Well, for me, the truth is this: the memories and emotions in childhood of playing baseball and softball with my brothers and father will stay with me through the years and are the same truths that I will pass on to my kids. Everyday all over the world, with the their parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, some kids play sports, some play musical instruments, some go fishing or hiking, some work out in the garage messing around with tools, and so on and so on. As the friends and family we once knew leave over time, the memories and shared experiences are the things that stay with us as we go through life. As time passes, those are the things that sustain us and bring us good health and make us feel young again,if only for a brief time.
The Boys(Hilligoss) of Summer: Robert Lee, Kevin Lee, Ryan Barr and Graham Ronald
Epilogue
Back in Commerce, the house and shed still stand even though they are a little weatherbeaten, the house paint is peeling and falling, and the shed is rusty and leaning to one side. But, they still stand nevertheless. They stand as a testament to the love and devotion and shared time and pleasure between a parent and a child. They stand as a testament to the power of love and to the hopes and dreams that we pass on to those that follow. They stand as a symbol of the hope for a better life, for a good life, for a decent life, for a meaningful life that parents pass to their kids. For those that chose not to have kids, or want to but can’t for various reasons, they stand as a testament to just wanting a better world for all of us to live in and pass on the goods things from their lives to those around them.
Someday that house and shed will fall away to time and nature and will be turned into soil and rust and blown down that ‘old dusty road.’ At some point in time, that house and shed will long be gone. And years from now, people may not know who Mickey Mantle was or what he meant for so many, but the power of the love forged, so long ago, between a little gap-toothed, blond-headed boy and his dad playing catch in the yard will never fade away.
Now when all this steel and these stories/ Drift away to rust
And all our youth and beauty/ Has been given to the dust
When the game has been decided/ And we’re burning down the clock
And all our little victories and glories have turned into parking lots
When your best hopes and desires are scattered to the wind
And hard times come and hard times go
Hard times come and hard times go
Hard times come and hard times go
Yeah just to come again/ Bring on your wrecking ball
C’mon and take your best shot/ Let me see what you got
Bring on your Wrecking Ball
Springsteen
Take your best shot, let me see what you got, bring on your wrecking ball
The Kid from Spavinaw Video, video of Costas interview with Mickey in 1995 and eulogy and more road trip pictures
Robert Hilligoss at Mantle Field, Commerce High School
Below you can hear an exquisite song by the fine songwriter and singer Tom Russell that gets to the heart of the matter of the relationship between father and son.
Store front window in Spavinaw, Oklahoma. The only visible indicator that mantle was born there
Mickey Mantle and Vic Dimaggio listen to Satchel Paige school them on throwing the stinky cheese
In today’s sports world, everyone has a job they specialize in. Sure Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders toyed with baseball and football for a few years, but they were anomalies. Currently if you are a St.Louis Cardinals fan and see Jason Motte coming to the mound, you know it’s the ninth inning and he is there to close out the game with his 100 MPH fastball. If you are watching the Chicago Bears and Robbie Gould jogs onto the field, you know a field goal is on the line. The ageless Jim Thome, still in search of a new team for 2013, has spent the last 15 years serving as a designated hitter. But, no one tries to break away from their strengths and tries to expand their possibilities like many athletes from the past.
In 2000, ABC Sport’s Wide World of Sports picked the top athlete of the 20th Century and the winner might surprise you. If you stopped and thought about it for a minute, I am sure you could come up with a lot of players you would have picked like Tiger Woods or Arnold Palmer in golf, Jackie Robinson or Pete Rose in baseball or Michael Jordan or Bill Russell in basketball. But you wouldn’t even be close to the final winner: Jim Thorpe, athlete extraordinaire and Native American(before it was cool). ABC picked Thorpe because of the depth and prowess of his abilities. During the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe won both the decathlon, 10 separate events, and the pentathlon, 5 events. In winning events ranging from the 1,500 meter race, broad jump, discuss, high jump and pole volt among many others, Thorpe blew away the competition in a manner that caused King Gustav V of Sweden to proclaim, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”
Jim Thorpe, 1912 Olympics, Stockholm, Sweden
On May 22,1887, James Francis Thorpe was born in the Indian Territory near what is today, Prague, Oklahoma. Thorpe’s parents were both of mixed-race ancestry. His father, Hiram Thorpe, had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother. His mother, Charlotte Vieux, had a French father and a Potawatomi mother, a descendant of Chief Louis Vieux. He was raised as a Sac and Fox, and his native name, Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as “path lit by great flash of lightning” or, more simply, “Bright Path”. As was the custom for Sac and Fox, he was named for something occurring around the time of his birth, in this case the light brightening the path to the cabin where he was born. Thorpe’s parents were both Roman Catholic, a faith which Thorpe observed throughout his adult life.
His schooling career included stays at the Sac and Fox boarding school near Stroud, Oklahoma, the Haskell Institute in Kansas, and Carlisle Institute and Indian School in Pennsylvania. According to Virginia Stanford, curator of the Jim Thorpe historical site in Yale, Ok, Thorpe did not like going to school and preferred to stay at home helping on the family farm and fishing and hunting with his family. During a visit there this year by Ryan and Robert Hilligoss, Ms. Standford said, “Jim would run away from school many times and walk the twenty miles back home and would often times beat his father, who had dropped him off, back to the house. Then they would repeat these steps time and time again.”
During his time at Carlisle, he was mentored by legendary coach Pop Warner who soon found that Thorpe excelled at any sport he attempted, especially football and track. During his career at Carlisle, Thorpe helped the team beat an Army team which included future president Dwight Eisenhower in 1912. In that game, Thorpe’s 92-yard touchdown was nullified by a teammate’s penalty, but on the next play Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown. Future President Dwight Eisenhower, who played against him that season, recalled of Thorpe in a 1961 speech:
“Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”
During the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe travelled to Sweden with his coach Pop Warner and participated in one of the greatest Olympic achievements ever. He won two grueling records, for the pentathlon and decathlon, while also participating in the high jump and long jump. In the pentathlon, he took first in four of the events and third in another.
– 200 Meter Race- 1st place- 22.9 seconds
-1,500 Meter Race- 1st place- 4 minutes, 44.8 seconds
At the awards ceremony, the King of Sweden said to Thorpe, “You sir are the greatest athlete in the world.” To which Thorpe responded, “Thanks King.” Thorpe returned to the United State to much fanfare and acclaim, but six months later, he was stripped of his awards when it became known that he had played semi-pro baseball which disqualified him as an amateur athlete. Sadly, he had only earned about $50 dollars for those baseball games. In 1983, the International Olympic Committee returned copies of his medals to the family and his records were reinstated.
He first played professional football in 1913 as a member of the Indiana-based Pine Village Pros, a team that had a several-season winning streak against local teams during the 1910s. He then signed with the Canton Bulldogs in 1915. They paid him $250 ($5,743 today) a game, a tremendous wage at the time. Before signing him, Canton was averaging 1,200 fans a game, but 8,000 showed up for his debut against the Massillon Tigers. The team won titles in 1916, 1917, and 1919. He reportedly ended the 1919 championship game by kicking a wind-assisted 95-yard punt from his team’s own 5-yard line, effectively putting the game out of reach. In 1920, the Bulldogs were one of 14 teams to form the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which would become the National Football League (NFL) two years later. Thorpe was nominally the APFA’s first president, but spent most of the year playing for Canton and a year later was replaced as president by Joseph Carr. He continued to play for Canton, coaching the team as well. Between 1921 and 1923, he helped organize and played for the LaRue, Ohio, (Marion County, Ohio) Oorang Indians, an all-Native American team. Although the team’s record was 3–6 in 1922, and 1–10 in 1923, he played well and was selected for the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s first All-NFL team in 1923, which would later be formally recognized by the NFL as the league’s official All-NFL team in 1931).Thorpe never played for an NFL championship team. He retired from professional football at age 41, having played 52 NFL games for six teams from 1920 to 1928.
Jim Thorpe as member of NY Giants, 1913
In 1912, Thorpe signed a professional contract to play for the New York Giants under the tough manager John McGraw. McGraw never warmed up to Thorpe and only played him sporadically in the field over three years. After playing in the minor leagues with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1916,he returned to the Giants in 1917 but was sold to the Cincinnati Reds early in the season. In his career, he amassed 91 runs scored, 82 runs batted in and a .252 batting average over 289 games. He continued to play minor league baseball until 1922.
After his retirement from sports, Thorpe held many jobs including minor movie roles, lecturer, and assisting with youth athletics. In 1917, he purchased a home in Yale, Ok and lived there with his wife, Iva, who wanted to be close to her sister who lived next door. Thorpe had four children with Iva and four more with his second wife Freeda. Thorpe died on March 28th, 1953 in Lomita, California and was buried in Mauch Chunck, Pennsylvania, later renamed Jim Thorpe. According to Virgina Stanford, Thorpe’s wife was upset with the Oklahoma state government which was unwilling to erect and memorial to him and began searching for towns willing to offer her money for allowing her husband to be buried in their town. When she heard that the small Pennsylvania towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were desperately seeking to attract business, she made a deal with officials which, according to Thorpe’s son Jack, was done by Patricia for monetary considerations.The towns bought Thorpe’s remains, erected a monument to him, merged, and renamed the newly united town in his honor Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania even though Thorpe had never been there. The monument site contains his tomb, two statues of him in athletic poses, and historical markers describing his life story.
If you would like to read more about Jim Thorpe, his life, and his baseball career in a fun baseball car adventure, read Dan Gutman’s novel, Jim and Me. Gutman has written several books in a series involving young Stosh who has the ability to travel back in time when he touches a baseball card with his hands. Other books include Satch and Me, Ted and Me, Roberto and Me, Honus and Me, and Babe and Me among others. Graham says about the books, “They are great!!!. I enjoy all of them.”
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