No rest, no peace for relatives
The saga of where Jim Thorpe should rest in peace is unusual but not unprecedented. Just ask Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fate of Famous Corpses.
Her 2013 book relates the macabre cases of the famous and infamous whose bodies, or body parts, took unexpected posthumous U-turns. “Some of the most notable lives in history have had surprising postscripts,” she writes in her book’s introduction. Among them: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Ted Williams — and Thorpe.
“It’s not unusual for famous remains to have decades and even centuries of turmoil surrounding them,” Lovejoy writes in an email to USA TODAY Sports. She points out, “The advantage in this case over others in my book is that we actually know where the body is. That’s a start.”
It is in a roadside mausoleum in a Pennsylvania borough named for Thorpe, though his two surviving sons want his remains returned to tribal land in Oklahoma where he was born.
“I don’t know that my opinion here matters, but I have some sympathy for the tribal members and sons who want him back in Oklahoma,” Lovejoy writes. “From what I understand, his wife Patricia was a bit of a problematic character, and the fact that she interrupted his traditional funeral ceremonies seems wrong. There’s such a long history of Native Americans being exploited, and you can argue this falls into that category.
“Jim Thorpe never had any connection to the town named after him, and there’s no particular reason for him to be there. His burial in Pennsylvania was meant to be a moneymaking, tourist-luring scheme, but it never worked out that way, and the town has thrived for other reasons. They don’t need his body. Well, other than the fact that a town named after an absent corpse is pretty weird — but is it weirder than a town named for a corpse in the first place?”