Overlooking Jim Thorpe

  I took this picture about five years ago, and I believe I was using my old film camera.  I stood on a vista overlooking the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.   Since my mother grew up there, and my father in nearby Lansford, I visited this area frequently as a child to see our relatives.  It was later, sometime in the 80’s, when Jim Thorpe really boomed into a tourist town.   The place I stood to take these pictures is outside a nightclub called Flagstaff, built sometime in the early part of the twentieth century.  I don’t know if it’s the same building that once housed big bands like the Dorsey brothers or if the original building was torn down and replaced.  The vantage point was an obvious draw for the venue, where people could dine and listen to music, while at the same time viewing the town from several hundred feet above.

 For anyone happening to read this that is unfamiliar with the town or the person, I’ll try to give a Wikipedia in a nutshell summary.  Jim Thorpe is named after the famous athlete of the early twentieth century.  He played professional football and baseball, and won several gold medals in the 1912 Olympics.  However, he is also well known for having those medals revoked after it was learned he had been paid to play football and baseball.   That of course meant he was a professional athlete and technically ineligible to participate in any Olympic event at the time.   During his lifetime, he probably never set foot in the town that is now named after him, and I believe the closest he came to Mauch Chunk (the town’s name at the time) was the Allentown and Bethlehem area.  He was raised in Oklahoma as a Native American, and spent the final years of his life as a struggling actor in Los Angeles.  Off the field, his was a troubled life, plagued by alcoholism, financial difficulties, and two failed marriages.  Professional sports were not a multi-billion dollar industry during Jim Thorpe’s time, so being a professional athlete did not bring him fortune.  He was able to get some small roles in Hollywood, but unable to establish a solid acting career. It was a few years after his death in 1953 that Patricia, his third wife and widow, found the town of Mauch Chunk an attractive place to bury her late husband, and one that would build a memorial for him and give him the respect his family believed he deserved.

  In 1955, the issue was left to voters on a referendum as to whether to provide a memorial for Thorpe and rename the town after him.  By a narrow margin, the residents of the two boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, separated by the Lehigh River, voted to merge and rename the town in Thorpe’s honor.  The memorial was built, but went mostly unnoticed for several decades before a tourist railroad helped revive the town.  With the railroad and its natural beauty, Jim Thorpe was reinvented as a tourist town and mountain resort.  During the anthracite boom, Mauch Chunk was a transportation center for coal coming from the nearby towns.  Once it arrived there, it would be shipped by canal alongside the Lehigh, then the Delaware River until it was loaded onto ships in Bristol, Pa.  Later, when railroads took over, Mauch Chunk was the railroad center for loading trains with coal from the nearby towns.  From World War II onward, the area had been dying after oil replaced coal as the home heating fuel of choice.  Some mines were still operating as late as the early 1970’s, but were manned by a skeletal crew. 

  I remember it was in July when I took these pictures, and it was a bit hazy, so it wasn’t a totally clear day.  The Lehigh River divides the old town of Mauch Chunk on the left from the small part of the former East Mauch Chunk visible on the right.  To the left of center is the Asa Packer mansion, and the building with the clock tower is the Carbon County Courthouse.  The train station is toward the bottom center, and is partially obstructed by the trees.  From this height, the town looks almost like a model train display.  The vista where we stood is actually on the west side of the river, as the bend in the river is also obscured by the trees.   

  I haven’t been up there in a while, but I hope to go back soon and get some more pictures from ground level.  I do have some pictures I took over 10 years ago that I may post here sometime, but I actually snapped those pictures on a disposable film camera.  It was later on when I wanted to get more serious about photography.  Photographing Jim Thorpe is one of the things that got me interested, as I wanted to take people there to see the area, but obviously I can’t take everybody.  Since I couldn’t always bring the people to the places, photography provided me with a way to bring these places to the people.