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Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. Today, we have the third part of what I think is our first ever three parter on the show.

There may have been three partners by prior hosts that I'm not remembering, but for Holly and me, it's the first sort of trilogy of podcast.

In part one, we talked about Jim Thorpe's early life and his upbringing in boarding schools for Native American children, including his time on the track and football teams at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. And then in part two, we talked about his just incredible performance at the 1912 Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm and then how he was later stripped of the medals that he had earned in those games. And our concluding episode, we're going to talk about his time as a professional athlete and then his life after the end of his career as an athlete, including two seasons of the story that have just tragically continued for a long time after his death.

One aspect of it I find particularly heartbreaking, which we will get to after being stripped of his Olympic medals, Jim Thorpe publicly tried to downplay things, saying he knew that he had earned them. But really, he was heartbroken at the loss of his medals and the fact that he was now barred from being an amateur athlete. He started trying to figure out what he was going to do next. After the Olympics, Thorpe had turned down offers to box and to appear on vaudeville.

After his medals and amateur status were revoked, he started looking for opportunities as a professional baseball player.

In 1913, Thorpe signed with the New York Giants, which was the top ranked team in the league. His contract was for six thousand dollars a year. For three years, he had never been as strong at baseball as he had been in football or track and field. And there were also some rumours that he was being brought on to the team, basically to bring in fans and not to actually play. Running alongside that was the idea that the expense of paying him wasn't going to be worth it as long as his presence on the team sold tickets, one of the reasons that Thorpe had wanted to qualify for the Olympics was that he wanted to prove that he was worthy of marrying evah.

Miller also called Evvie, who was his longtime sweetheart from Carlisle, if his background is a little bit complicated. She had been born in Cherokee Country and her mother was reportedly part Cherokee, but there's no evidence to back that up. Her father seems to have fabricated an indigenous ancestry for her and her siblings so that he could enroll them in a boarding school after their mother died. It is not entirely clear how much or what indigenous ancestry she had, if any, and whether or not Jim knew about any of this.

Jim and I got married after the 1913 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Philadelphia Athletics, four games to one. They got married at the Catholic chapel that they had attended while they were at Carlisle. And their honeymoon was the Giants White Sox world tour, in which the Giants and the White Sox traveled west across the United States and then to Japan with stops all over Asia, Europe and Northern Africa. Jim and I would go on to have four children, Jim, Junior, Gail, Charlotte and Grace.

Back at Carlisle, students were petitioning for an investigation into poor conditions at the school. The results of this investigation were appalling, detailing deprivation, beatings and virtually the entire school being, quote, made subservient to football and athletics. The report also leveled numerous charges against Pop Warner, who had been the coach of the athletics there, and one of the people who really encouraged Jim Thorpe from abusive treatment of players to financial corruption. Warner denied these charges, claiming that they were the work of a vendetta by disgruntled former athletes.

He left Carlisle and took a job with the University of Pittsburgh. The Carlisle school closed in 1918. I think this report is like it's indicative of one of the truths about Carlyle, which is that Jim, as an athlete and other athletes there were shielded from some of the worst things about the school in their position of being athletes. And like this report brought a lot of that to light for people who didn't know about it. On December 15th of 1916, Thorpe got a letter that he was now qualified to be a U.S. citizen.

Enclosed was the deed for his land allotment. As we talked about earlier, there was a whole process where if somebody had been able to maintain a land allotment for a long enough time, they were qualified to become a citizen. That same year, he also started playing and coaching the Canton Bulldogs, which is a professional football team based in Canton, Ohio. So he was playing professional baseball and football at the same time. Their their seasons didn't entirely overlap, but he was going from one professional sport to another and then going back to Oklahoma to support himself and his family, primarily by hunting when neither of those sports was in season.

As all of this was happening, Thorpe was still under contract to the New York Giants, although his baseball career involved being repeatedly sent down to the minor leagues or loaned out to other teams. When the Selective Service Act of 1917 was passed to allow the United States to conscript an army for World War One, many Native American men registered and about 12000 served in the military during the war. Because he was married and supporting his wife and children, Thorpe was exempt.

Apparently, the Giants manager, John Jay McGraw, also discouraged Thorpe from volunteering, arguing that as an internationally famous athlete, he could become a target in 1918.

Jim and I have a son. Jim Jr. died of polio and he was only three. Jim was obviously bereft, absolutely. Grief stricken people who knew him said that he was just never the same afterward. But McGraw really did not have a lot of patience for Thorpe's lack of focus on the field in the aftermath of his son's death. He already thought that Thorpe was too prone to goofing around. Thorpe's nickname back at Carlisle had actually been libeling, which meant horsing around.

Jim's relationship with Ivan had already been kind of strained over the issue of alcohol. Jim's drinking was comparable to that of his teammates, but Ivo would have much preferred him to be a teetotaller in the wake of Jim Junior's death, both Jim's relationship with his wife and his performance at work really started to suffer. Then in 1919, Thorpe left the New York Giants. Reportedly, McGraw had called him a dumb Indian after he missed a signal and Thorpe, outraged, had chased him down the field until his teammates intervened.

Thorpe was traded to the Boston Braves and he played with them for one season before going back to the minor leagues.

Thorpe's career in professional football was going somewhat better, though. The American Professional Football Association was formed in 1920 and Thorpe was named its first president. This organization would later become the National Football League or the NFL. And you'll see a lot of times Jim Thorpe was the first president of the NFL in the 1920s.

Thorpe also started to move from playing and coaching in existing teams to starting new ones. In 1922, Thorpe helped Clinton fan and dog breeder Walter Lingoes start the all indigenous Gurang Indians football team. As part of this arrangement, Lingoa paid Thorpe to start and coached the team and to manage his kennel for five hundred dollars a week. This may sound like an out of the blue arrangement, but Thorpe had a lot of years of experience, training and caring for hunting dogs.

In addition to so many other things we've talked about him being good at, he was very good with animals. Carlisle Indian Industrial School had aggressively recruited and then trained many of the best indigenous football players in the United States, had sort of sucked up all of the football talent and then it had closed down for years before all of this happened. So a lot of the players on this team were actually older than Thorpe was. Although the team did not do particularly well in its first season, Lingoa seemed to enjoy it and funded it for a 1923 season as well.

In nineteen twenty three, Jim and I were separated. Their marriage had just never recovered from the death of Jim Junior. They legally divorced in 1925. That same year, Jim remarried to Frieda Kirkpatrick, who was 18 years his junior, and who he'd started getting to know as his marriage to Erva was crumbling. They went on to have four sons Karl, Bill, Richard and John, who was known as Jack Jim's relationships with AIBA and Frieda and with the children that he fathered during those two marriages could be a little complicated, as was the case with either.

Frida did not really approve of Jim's drinking, which was kind of hit or miss. There were times when he gave it up, but there were times that it became heavier as their marriage went on. As a professional athlete playing two different sports, he was also away from home a lot when his children were young. His grandson, Michael DeCola, writing in an article in Educational Digest, wrote that his mother, Charlotte, had sometimes felt like Thorpe didn't even know her name.

At the same time, though, Thorpe's children really seemed devoted to him, although that devotion could take somewhat different forms, which she will get to you in a bit. In nineteen twenty six, Thorpe played his final season with the Canton Bulldogs. In 1927. He played and coached a season with the all indigenous world famous Indians basketball team. By this point, though, his career as a professional athlete was really winding down. He played his last professional football games, which ended his time as a pro athlete.

In nineteen twenty eight.

Thorpe was about 40 at this point, which would be a little older for a pro athlete. Like it's hard on your body, but it also wasn't entirely what he was planning. In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation published a report called American College Athletics, which revealed all kinds of issues. There were payments to players and secret funding and just corruption in college athletics. This report framed college athletics as a threat to education, and the suspicions that it raised trickled over into professional sports as well in the 1929 stock market crash.

And the Great Depression also seriously reduced the number of opportunities for pro athletes and coaches. Though regardless of what Thorpe may have wanted to do as an athlete at this point, there just were not many opportunities in professional sports at all for him to try to pursue.

We are going to talk about Jim Thorpe's life after professional sports, after we first pause and have a sponsor break. Welcome to Beyond the Beauty, a podcast from My Heart Radio, I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I've been in the beauty industry for a long time and I've learned a lot. I have watched makeup, skincare and beauty change more than I ever could have imagined. This season on Beyond the Beauty, I'm exploring the beauty industry past and present.

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Now, that is true. Between 1929 and 1945, Jim Thorpe did all kinds of jobs to make ends meet. He worked as a laborer and a movie extra. He eventually started a casting agency to advocate for indigenous actors to be cast as indigenous characters on screen. This, of course, is a little bit of a tangle because a lot of the roles that were available at the time were really heavily stereotyped. But his goal was really to help indigenous actors get a foot in the door in Hollywood, including stuff like helping them find housing, helping make sure they had enough to eat.

He was doing a lot of work to just help especially other indigenous people in Hollywood. By the mid 1930s, Thorpe was mostly supporting himself through speaking engagements and acting as well as odd jobs. He appeared in more than 70 films as an actor or an extra. His busiest year on that front was 1935, when he appeared in 17 films. He also sold the rights to his life story to MGM ahead of the 1932 Olympic Games. He also collaborated with Thomas F.

Collison to write Jim Thorpe's history of the Olympics. And then he followed up the publication of that book with public readings and signings. The 1932 Summer Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles, and that's actually where Thorpe was living at the time. But he couldn't afford a ticket. When his fans heard about this, people offered to buy one for him and then he wound up getting a press pass for the press box during opening ceremonies. Vice President Charles Curtis, member of the coronation and the first person of color to serve as vice president of the United States, read an article about Thorpe being moved to tears from the press box, and he invited Thorpe to sit in the presidential box the next day.

The crowd gave Thorpe a standing ovation as he took his seat. As all of this was going on, the United States federal government was really shifting its policies toward indigenous people. The Wheeler Howard Act also called the Indian Reorganization Act and later nicknamed the Indian New Deal, was passed in 1934. We talk about this a little bit and sort of how it fits into the overall context of a federal Indian law.

In our two parter on the occupation of Alcatraz, this act moved the federal government away from relocating indigenous lands to individual people and trying to assimilate indigenous peoples into white culture. It returned a lot of the so-called surplus lands back to indigenous nations and then also tried to move those nations toward a state of sovereignty rather than indigenous people being managed by the federal government. This act included provisions for funding as well. If an indigenous nation adopted a written constitution, it was eligible for loans to pay for things like new infrastructure and educational programs for people in Jim Thorpe's generation, who had spent most of their lives in schools that systematically tried to strip them of their indigenous identity and force them to assimilate with white culture and being told that their nation's cultures and practices were inferior to white culture.

This shift could be profoundly disorienting. Different tribes also responded really differently to the federal government's encouragement to draft and vote on a new constitution. And there were also differences of opinion within those tribes and nations about how best to move forward there. As we say on the show, a lot. No group is a monolith and not everybody agreed with all of this. For example, there were members of the second Fox Nation who wanted to approve a tribal constitution under the terms of the Wheeler Howard Act.

Then there were others who just totally distrusted this entire idea and saw the requirement for a constitution as just another way for the federal government to try to control indigenous nations. It was this faction that recruited Jim Thorpe to advocate on their behalf.

Ultimately, the SAC and Fox Nation did approve a new constitution, although it has taken decades and a series of court battles for the nation to put many of the terms of that constitution into practice. In the words of Jim's son, Jack, who is principal chief of the second Fox Nation for seven years beginning in 1980, quote, The second Fox went through 11 major lawsuits to exercise our right to control our destiny. We are still in court battles. Jack thought, by the way, died in 2011 at the age of 73.

He will come up again and just a bit. Jim Thorpe's position in the middle of all this was that indigenous people should be able to manage their own affairs rather than being perpetual wards of the United States government. And in his mind, this included things like being able to follow their own religions and observe their own cultural practices. But he also generally disagreed with legislation that was targeted specifically at indigenous people, even if that legislation was meant to be. Helpful, he thought that indigenous people experienced lots of hardships, but so did people of other races and ethnicities, so he thought that legislation that set indigenous people apart in some way was really infantilizing and controlling.

In 1937, Burton K. Wheeler, who was one of the legislators who the Wheeler Howard Act had been named for, had actually come to oppose it, and he introduced a bill to try to repeal it. Jim Thorpe actually supported this repeal bill, which ultimately failed in 1941. Jim's wife, Frieda, filed for divorce. As we noted earlier, she had never really approved of Jim's drinking. And while he had given it up at one point, he did still drink from time to time.

And as time went on, when he did choose to drink, he then drank more heavily and he was more likely to get into some kind of altercation while under the influence. Frita also thought that Jim was not careful enough with money, and he also spent long stretches of time away from home. That was something that was normal for him, but it was really a strain on her. Jim did not contest the divorce. Yeah, he there were there are two things here.

One is that even though he had spent so much of his upbringing in boarding schools, he also grew up in a culture where it was normal, especially for men to let go on prolonged hunts away from the family like that. That was just sort of a thing that happened and it was not what Frieda was expecting or about at all. And then the other thing was he gave a lot of money away to people that needed it, especially other indigenous people.

And so he would be broke. We like, why don't you have any money? And it was because he gave it away. And that was like another thing that caused a big rift.

And between them, when passing through Dearborn, Michigan, in the early 1940s, on a speaking tour, Thorpe was offered a job as a security guard at the Ford plant there. He wound up taking it and that while he was living in Dearborn, he had his first heart attack.

Then during World War Two, he was too old to be accepted into the armed forces. So he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. He sailed aboard the USS Southwest victory. And then when people realized who he was, they got him to start doing things like hospital visits and public appearances to try to boost, you know, soldiers and other people's morale, which is a thing that I kind of love. Like that was not what he had gotten on board for.

But as soon as they realized that they had Jim Thorpe on their ship, they were like, well, OK, we got to work out a way for you to make people feel better.

On June 2nd, 1945, Thorpe got married for the third time to Patricia Gladis Askew. She went by Patsy. They got married in Tijuana and apparently Thorpe was inebriated enough not to remember the ceremony when he woke up next to her the next day, Patsy acted as Thorpe's manager, in addition to being his wife, for example, getting him to start charging five hundred dollars for speaking engagements rather than doing most of them for free. She also led an attempt to get his Olympic medals restored in the late 1940s.

But Patsy has also been described as opportunistic, controlling and even cruel, with expensive tastes that burn through the money that she was helping Jim bring in. Their relationship was often stormy.

By this point in his life, Thorpe had become an advocate for athletics programs to try to curb juvenile delinquency, including a plan to develop a Junior Olympics program. He also advocated for the Sack and Fox Nation to be compensated for land that the government had bought in 1814, which later turned out to contain oil fields. It's a whole different topic of like land rights versus the mineral rights that are associated with them. After World War Two was over, he started appearing in exhibition games and also inspired by the all-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

He started a baseball team for girls. In 1949, Warner Brothers announced that a film was in the works about Jim Thorpe's life. This became the first mainstream Hollywood movie about a living indigenous person rather than a Western or a movie about an indigenous historical figure or event. This announcement brought him a new wave of fame, including offers to work as a coach and the early 1950s, Thorpe noticed a sore on his lip that turned out to be cancer.

As he was undergoing treatment, Passi made a tearful televised plea for help, saying that they were penniless. They definitely were not wealthy. They were not penniless, though. But this allegation led people to do things like send outraged letters to Warner Brothers under the idea that Thorpe had not been compensated for his life story, even though he had sold the rights to the story like way earlier on this film. Jim Thorpe, all-American, came out in 1951 and it starred Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe also worked as an adviser on the film, including teaching Lancaster How to Kick a Football. The movie premiered in Carlisle and Oklahoma City on August 23, 1951. Also in 1951, the Associated Press called on sports reporters to compile lists of the best athletes of the first half of the 20th century. It's like the same thing that happens at the end of every year and then, you know. Jesse Owens was named the best track and field athlete with Jim Thorpe coming in second and then the greatest athlete overall was Jim Thorpe, with 252 of 393 voters placing him in that top spot coming in.

Second was Babe Ruth. Jim Thorpe spent the last couple of years of his life trying to start various projects, but none of them really took off. He died on March 20th, 1953, at the age of about 64, shortly after he had had a third heart attack. In the words of his New York Times obituary, quote, His memory should be kept for what it deserves. That of the greatest all around athlete of our time. There's some more to Jim Thorpe story, though, in part because the Olympic medals that we have talked about a few times, but then also because of a dispute over his body.

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After Jim Thorpe died in 1953, his body lay in state in California and it was viewed by hundreds of mourners, family received condolence letters from public figures, including President Dwight Eisenhower. His body was then taken to Oklahoma, and the plan was for both a Catholic funeral and a second ceremony, followed by a second Fox burial. The Oklahoma legislature had passed a bill allotting funds for a monument that would serve as its final resting place. Thorpe had not left a will, but his sons reported that he told them and others that he wanted to be buried on SAC and Fox land.

However, without really explaining why Governor Johnston Murray vetoed the legislation that set aside funding for a memorial to Jim Thorpe. On April 12th, 1953, the Thunder clan of the Second Fox Nation started a two day funeral ceremony. Patsy Thorpe arrived at the ceremony with police interrupting the proceedings and saying that it was too cold. She had Jim's body loaded into a hearse and taken to a mortuary. A Catholic funeral mass followed at St. Benedict's Roman Catholic Church in Shawnee.

Pailthorpe didn't consult with Jim's children or other family members or the SAC and Fox Nation about what happened next. She started looking for a place that was willing to provide a final resting spot for Jim's remains, one that she thought would be befitting of his life and his legacy. And that turned out to be the towns of Moch Chunk and e-marketing Pennsylvania.

The towns were struggling after the collapse of the mining industry in the area, and town leaders hope that this decision would make them a tourist attraction. The town's merged, renamed themselves Jim Thorpe, and started planning for the construction of a tomb that would house Thorpe's body. As this was happening in 1955, the NFL named its MVP award the Jim Thorpe Trophy. Jim Thorpe's body was entombed in Jim Thorpe, Pa.. In 1957, soil from four locations was placed at the tomb.

This included Thorpe's family farm in Oklahoma, the Carlisle athletic field, New York's polo grounds and the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, Sweden. The memorial was inscribed with King Gustav, the fifth of Sweden. The statement that Thorpe was the greatest athlete in the world and also adorned with medallions that depicted Thorpe's athletic feats. Thorpe's children did not attend the ceremony. This memorial did not, however, become a tourist attraction, as the town had hoped. When Thorpe biographer Bob Wheeler visited as a child years later, no one in the town could even tell him about Jim Thorpe.

And he found the tomb neglected and hidden among overgrown weeds.

Yeah, let's talk that he gave at the Museum of the American Indian. And he talked about like he he was just such a fan of sports in general, and it was on this trip with his parents and by total coincidence, they had driven past Jim Thorpe and he was like, let's stop. And he sort of saw this spot. And he was like, I feel like there's something there we should look at, whatever this is. And it turned out that that was like Jim Thorpe.

It was Jim Thorpe's burial place. Totally overgrown and would not have known it without stopping there to go look for it to fast forward a bit. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGARA, was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. This law was passed, quote, as a way to correct past abuses to and guarantee protection for the human remains and cultural objects of Native American tribal culture. Among the provisions of this law is the right to repatriation of indigenous cultural items, including human remains that are, quote, controlled by museums or federal agencies.

The law basically paved the way for indigenous people and nations to have the remains of their ancestors returned to them from museums where they are held. Jim Thorpe's youngest son, John, again known as Jack, filed suit to have his father's remains repatriated to the SAC and Fox Nation under Nagara on June 24th, 2010. He thought that because his father's funeral ceremony had been interrupted and because he had not been buried on SAC and Fox land, that his soul was not at rest.

As we mentioned earlier, Jack Thorpe died in 2011, and after his passing, his surviving brothers, Bill and Richard, were added to the suit, along with the SAC and Fox Nation. In 2013, United States District Court Judge Richard Caputo found in favor of Thorpe's sons. He ruled that Nagara applied to the town of Jim Thorpe. It could be defined as the museum receiving federal funds because the town had gotten money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

But by that point, the town of Jim Thorpe had become more of a tourist attraction, although not specifically because of the Jim Thorpe memorial. The town had started hosting birthday celebrations and other thought memorials, and even though the memorial where he was laid to rest wasn't its key tourist attraction, Jim Thorpe had become a core part of the town's identity. Many residents and at this point some of Thorpe's daughters and grandchildren objected to the repatriation and filed an appeal.

As I understand it by this point in the story. The memorial was a lot better maintained than it had been when his biographer found out as a child.

On October twenty third, 2014, a three judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court's ruling under the Absurdity Doctrine. The basic idea was that a literal reading of the plain text of Naggers provisions here would be, in this context, absurd. The ruling had two key parts. One was that Nagara could not have been intended to overrule the intent of the decedent's legal next of kin. And Patsy Thorpe, as the next of kin of Jim Thorpe, had legally made the decision for where he would be buried.

The other was that upholding the lower court's ruling would allow Nagara to become a tool to settle family disputes among indigenous people. And in this case, the question of whether to repatriate Thorpe's remains was, at its heart, a family dispute and one that was complicated by centuries of indigenous history. Yeah, again, as I understand it, when the court dispute started, Jim Thorpe's children were pretty unified in their their feeling that his remains should be returned back to the second Fox Nation.

But over time, not all of them agreed anymore. And this is where to me, this just becomes so heartbreaking because you see these things play out in families where people start to to disagree about something that important. And like that is where we were at this point. On October 5th of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court elected not to hear this case. Well, the town of Jim Thorpe and some of Thorpe's descendants were satisfied with that outcome. It was heartbreaking for his surviving sons, Richard and Bill, both of whom were in their 80s and had hopes to see their father buried in SAC and Fox land before their own deaths.

It's also heartbreaking for the second Fox Nation as a whole. Bilsthorpe died at the age of 90 in 2019 and Richard Thorpe died in January of this year at the age of 87. The ruling from the Third Court of Appeals has been controversial, though Nag Press still applies when a museum's acquisition of a person's remains was done legally. So the legality of Patsy Thorpe's decision does not really apply. Nagara also includes specific language about mediating disputed claims. It has to since remains burial objects and other items being repatriated are often very old and can be connected to multiple families, tribes or nations.

In the years between Jim Thorpe's death and the court cases related to his burial place. There was a whole other effort going on that was related to his legacy, and that was an attempt to have his amateur status reinstated from the 1912 Olympic Games and his medals returned to his family in 1973. After ongoing advocacy, the Amateur Athletics Union restored Thorpe's status as an amateur athlete for the time covering those games. But the IOC did not take any further action about his medals or his record.

Thorpe biographer Robert Wheeler and his wife, Dr. Florence Raelynn, who founded the Jim Thorpe Foundation in 1982, were a big part of this effort. Ritalin managed to find a copy of the official bylaws of the 1912 Olympic Games, sandwiched between two shelves at the Library of Congress. And one of its provisions was that any review of the game's outcome had to take place within 30 days of the games. The article that widely publicized Thorpe's time in semi-professional baseball came out more than six months after the games were over.

Yes, there, regardless of the question about whether semiprofessional baseball professionalized an athlete in a different sport, three years later, the IOC had not followed its own rules. In terms of this, basically the statute of limitations on how much time could pass before something like this could happen. So based on this new information, on January 18th, 1983, the IOC presented Thorpe's descendants with replicas of his medals. It did not, however, alter the adjusted placements of the other finishers to reflect that Thorpe really had won.

Instead, Jim Thorpe and Ferdinand Bye are both listed as gold medalists in the men's pentathlon, with Thorpe score of seven and by a score of twenty one. Jim Thorpe and Hugo Icelander are both listed as winners of the decathlon, with Thorpe score of eight thousand four hundred twelve point nine five five and Vice Linda's score of seven thousand seven hundred twenty four point four nine five six.

They are all listed as sort of Coe gold medalists.

The organization Bright Path Strong started a petition to fully restored Jim Thorpe's Olympic record in July of twenty. Twenty multiple indigenous tribes and organizations are involved, along with Picture Works Entertainment, which is working on a forthcoming biopic.

Yeah, that is all at Bright Path, Strong dotcom, if you would like more information about it. That is Jim Thorpe. What you got in the way of listener mail this time around, I have listener mail from rows and rows wrote in after our recent episode on Stelae Paying Aposhian and Rose says hello. First, I love your podcast. I've been listening since sometime in twenty eighteen while staying up to date on new episodes. I've also been going methodically backward through the archive and I'm currently in December 2009 Chassé.

Soon the episodes are going to get a lot shorter if you're going backwards in that way. Oh right. The ones from 08, some of them are like four minutes. I caught your exasperation about the offhanded suggestion that Cecilia Kapanga passion could take over managing the glass plates collection if she went to work at the Harvard Observatory, that was made because she was female and interested after Googling to make sure, I'd like to point out that the collection is still managed by women and I am not sure if a man has ever been in charge of it.

The fact seems now to be a point of pride for the collection. If you poke around that site, Rose included a link to the plate stacks at Harvard. If you poke around that site a bit, you'll see that there is an effort to digitize the plate that has been going on since 2003 or so which men have been involved in. But the curator of the collection is currently still a woman. I agree with your exasperation from the story, but generally speaking, the management of this collection staying in the hands of women as the fields of archives and library science professionals is actually kind of impressive.

Often women get pushed out of prestigious positions as fields professionalized, and I am not quite sure how that managed to be avoided in this case, especially with the added factor of the collection being scientific in nature. We've talked before about how when we came on as hosts, we got a lot of criticism about what our voices sounded like and the fact that we were ruining the podcast. And so Rose sort of talks about the experience of going backward in the archive in the way of continuing to keep up with new episodes, but then also going back through them and sort of reverse order and the sort of jarring experience of suddenly having different hosts who don't sound the same.

I'm not going to read that whole bit, but thank you so much, Rose, for sending this on. This is a really great point about how, like a lot of fields that were considered to be women's work, women got pushed out of as it became more thought of as a professional field and not like a more clerical one.

So we saw the same kind of things with like computer coding, like women were a lot of the first coders. And then that gradually became a field that was seen as one that was for men. So that is a totally fair point about the fact that the collection of Harvard is still being created by women, even as the field of museum curation and collections curation became more and more professionalized.

In terms of back when Cecilia Payne Gascón came on to Harvard as part of that collection, it was not regarded as like a professional field that required any kind of professional ability or training at all. The very first person to start cataloguing all of those glass plates that Harvard had really been Pickering's housekeeper, who he basically hired because he was like, you seem generally competent. You can probably do this and then just sort of just became like some competent woman could probably do.

This was sort of the attitude. We've also talked in previous episodes before about how Pickering recruited all of these women to work with him and they got derisive nicknames about being his harem, for example. So thank you so much, Rose, for for sending this email. That is a great point. I also enjoyed reading the story about the sort of jarring experience of suddenly getting to the prior episode host's part of the podcast.

Even though I did not read that whole thing on this episode, I hope everyone has enjoyed hearing about Jim Thorpe, enjoyed his maybe not always the best word, because some parts of that history are really difficult. But yeah, I think Jim Thorpe is amazing.

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