24 October 2014

Jim Thorpe to remain in Jim Thorpe


The Associated Press has an article about Jim Thorpe:
Jim Thorpe's body will stay in the Pennsylvania town where he was laid to rest six decades ago, after a federal appeals court threw out a ruling that could have resulted in his reburial on Native American land in Oklahoma.
The famed athlete's surviving sons have been fighting to move the body to Sac and Fox land in the state where he was born, saying their father expressed a desire to be buried in Oklahoma. A Federal judge agreed with them, ruling that the town of Jim Thorpe amounted to a museum under a 1990 law intended to rectify the historic plundering of American Indian burial grounds.
But the Philadelphia-based US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said recently that Thorpe's body should remain in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, determining that US District Judge Richard Caputo misapplied the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law requires museums and Federal agencies possessing American Indian remains to return them upon request of the deceased's family or tribe.
"Thorpe's remains are located in their final resting place and have not been disturbed," the appeals court said in its ruling. "We find that applying the repatriation law to Thorpe's burial in the borough is such a clearly absurd result, and so contrary to Congress' intent to protect Native American burial sites that the borough cannot be held to the requirements imposed on a museum under these circumstances."
Thorpe's grandsons had sided with the Poconos town, saying it had done right by their grandfather.
Thorpe (photo) was a football, baseball, and track star who won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. He died without a will in 1953, at the age of 64.
After Oklahoma's governor balked at the cost of a planned monument to the athlete, Thorpe's third wife, Patricia, had Thorpe's body removed in the midst of his funeral service and sent it to northeastern Pennsylvania. She struck a deal with two merging towns— Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk— to build a memorial and name the new town after him. His remains are kept in a roadside mausoleum surrounded by statues and interpretive signage.
"I'm very hopeful that from this decision, the two families can move together in peace and put this unusual chapter behind them," said William G. Schwab, the town's lawyer.
A lawyer for Thorpe's sons did not immediately return a request for comment.
Rico says the guy had a town named after him (not that Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk missed their names), how could you move him to Oklahoma?

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