Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Scott Dickensheets:

Sports legend’s Henderson stint a season to forget

Memory dissipates. Especially in a forgettable place like this stretch of Boulder Highway, sliding north through the last sputter of old Henderson before heading toward Las Vegas. The word “nondescript” was coined to describe such placeless places as this. It’s not unpleasant, just unremarkable, in the sense of there being little to remark on.

There are a lot of automotive businesses, a boat shop, some convenience stores, motels. A little farther along, the Skyline casino. The big traffic is a mile or so west, on U.S. 95; you can find yourself on Boulder Highway and be the only driver on your side of the road for a quarter-mile ahead and a half-mile behind.

At 1100 N. Boulder Highway, there squats an ancient, cylindrical Quonset hut, perhaps the one odd, unexpected note in the neighborhood.

This building is mentioned on Page 361 of “Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe” (Knopf, $35), a big new bio of the American Indian Olympic sensation and multisport icon by writer Kate Buford. Decades after winning gold in the decathlon and pentathlon in 1912, after noteworthy careers in pro football and baseball, and not long before his death in 1953, Thorpe showed up here, in the Pittman neighborhood, running a supper club in this curved hut.

Like plenty of celebrities to come, he was running on fumes when he got to the Las Vegas Valley — in 1951, by some accounts. He’d lost his gold medals to an amateurism issue (he’d been paid $25 a week to play baseball, forbidden in those pre-Dream Team days) and was beset with demons internal (alcohol) and external (anti-Indian prejudice). He was still well-known, but his celebrity doesn’t appear to have turned Jim Thorpe’s All-American Supper Club and Casino into one of the valley’s hot spots. “Most days Jim sat silently at one end of the bar with a beer,” Buford writes, “while Patsy (his wife) and the manager served the few customers.”

Not long afterward — late in 1952, according to Buford’s book — Thorpe survived a heart attack and left town for L.A., not the first or last guy who didn’t find what he was looking for here.

Memory dissipates. Who remembers stuff like this? As you look at the Quonset hut — now housing Carson Trailer Depot — you have to wonder: How many living people have firsthand recollections of when arguably the greatest athlete of the 20th century lived here? All these years later, Henderson-era Jim Thorpe of 60 years ago is receding from memory, his Olympic sporting glory spectral and flickering. Hell, not enough of us even remember Burt Lancaster, star of 1951’s “Jim Thorpe — All American.”

In part, that’s because Thorpe’s short tenure here was uneventful. Buford devotes just three paragraphs to it (“Local residents were uncertain why the Thorpes had chosen their town,” she writes), and if you look at old issues of the Henderson paper, the athlete isn’t mentioned much. I’m guessing he didn’t often make the social whirl, such as it was. According to one account, he lived in a battered trailer in Pittman.

And partly that’s just what happens. People forget, knowledge wanes, fewer folks care about the old days. Who recalls that this very highway was once the lifeline to Hoover Dam? That the name Pittman refers to a family that gave Nevada both a long-serving senator and a governor? The difference between old news and the history we recall is very thin, indeed, and once we stop remembering, perhaps it stops mattering.

Yet, thankfully, memory lingers, too. There’s Jim Thorpe Elementary School on Patrick Lane; a page on its website offers students an admiring profile of Thorpe, heavy on the incomparable career, minus the long, sad denouement.

And no less a personage than Sig Rogich told me back in 1994, “I was always amazed that a man whom many considered the world’s greatest athlete was living in Henderson and owned a little bar just over the hill.” In elementary school then, Rogich biked to the bar, hoping to catch a glimpse. “I’m not sure if it’s my imagination that I saw him, but I’m pretty sure that I did. I thought he was going to look like Burt Lancaster.”

Loren Witsoe owns Carson Trailer Depot; he’s been in the Quonset hut since 2001. “I have a Wheaties box I got in ’01,” he told me. Of course, Thorpe is on the cover. “And the family came through here in ’02 or ’03. I tell everyone who comes in here that this place used to be owned by Jim Thorpe.”

Do many of them remember who he is?

“Oh yeah. The greatest athlete of all time? You bet.”

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