1969: Quiet Minority by Grace F. Thorpe

1969 Oct 22 Arizona Republic 

I enjoyed reading your editorial, Oct 18, "Vindicating Jim Thorpe," concerning my father and the resolution that I wrote and personally submitted to the National Congress of American Indians for their adoption.

      My main purpose in helping get Dad's records back on the official 1912 Olympic books is the hope that his athletic achievements may serve as an inspiration for all aspiring athletes, but in particular for our American Indian youth.
      Which reminds me that Phoenix Union High School has been pressured into presenting two special courses for Negroes and Mexican-Americans. Why have they not included a course for the smallest, quietest, most in need of help, minority group - the American Indian?
      Do our Indian teen-agers attending the Phoenix public schools have to resort to violence, also, in order to make their needs known? -- Grace F. Thorpe (Sac and Fox Indian)

1969 Oct 22 Arizona Republic 

Vindicating Jim Thorpe 

1969, Oct 18 Arizona Republic 

      The National Congress of American Indians, which recently concluded its session in Albuquerque, adopted a resolution asking the International Olympic Committee to reinstate the records of famed Indian athlete Jim Thorpe.

      We wholeheartedly support that resolution.

      King Gustaf V of Sweden correctly termed Thorpe "the greatest athlete in the world" during the 1912 Olympics, when the Carlisle Indian School standout became the first person ever to win both the grueling decathlon and pentathlon. 

      Indeed he was, and he may well have been the greatest athlete to have lived at any time.

      But that is not why we support the NCAI resolution. We support it because all the available evidence, then and now, sows that when Thorpe played semi-professional baseball in North Carolina during the summer of 1911, he was unaware of the proscriptions against playing for pay. 

      Indeed, he played under his own name -- proof that he did not intend to deceive. And the few dollars he received for his efforts were far less (and no less principled) that the "subsidies" today's amateur athletes receive. Indeed, athletes of Communist nations are subsidized by the state, often times spending their entire time training instead of working. 

      Yet while their Olympic records remain, Thorpe's gold medals and trophies were taken, and his records were erased from the Olympic books.

      The NCAI resolution said Thorpe "was a true amateur within the meaning of the rules and within the contemporary standards of his time and, in fact, within present standards..."

      So he was. And while it is too late to do anything for that marvelous athlete, who was treated so badly by the nation he served so well, it would be a worthy symbolic gesture - one which righted a grievous wrong -- to restore his records to the Olympic books.  

1969, Oct 18 Arizona Republic