Jim Thorpe Jr. was the celebrity child of an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe who grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Indian Territory what is now the U.S. state of Oklahoma.
And as a youth, he studies at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was a two-time All-American for the school’s football team under coach Pop Warner.
Thorpe joined the Canton Bulldogs American football team, helping them win three professional championships in 1915, and later played for six teams in the National Football League (NFL).
He played part in several all-American Indian teams throughout his career and barnstormed as a professional basketball player with a team composed entirely of American Indians.
What happened to Jim Thorpe’s son Jim Jr.? Cause of death explained
Jim Thorpe, Jr. was 3 years when he died. He died in 1918 from infantile paralysis. Infantile paralysis was the term used for what is now called polio, a viral disease.
Jim Thorpe Jr. was born on May 18, 1915, into a Christian home and was the son of Jim Thorpe and Iva Miller. His mother was the first wife of his father.
He has seven siblings from the three marriages his father had. In 1913, his father got married to his mother, Iva M. Miller, whom he had met at Carlisle.
And together, they bought a house now known as the Jim Thorpe House in Yale, Oklahoma, and lived there until 1923, where they had four children, including Jim Thorpe Jr, Gale, Charlotte, and Grace Frances, an environmentalist and Native rights activist. Miller filed for divorce from Thorpe in 1925, claiming desertion.
His father then met Freeda Verona Kirkpatrick, who was working for the baseball team manager for which he was playing at the time in 1926, and got married.
They had four sons: Phillip, William, Richard, and John Thorpe. Kirkpatrick divorced Thorpe in 1941 after they had been married for 15 years.
Before the death of his father, he was with the last wife he got married to, Patricia Gladys Askew on June 2, 1945. She was with him when he died.
Source: nflfaqs.com
