Tom Benjey's Weblog

I called Bob Wheeler to let him know about the auction mentioned last week. http://sports.ha.com/common/view_item.php?Sale_No=709&Lot_No=19835&ic=Left-FeaturedItemMain-071107#Photo. Although the lot was out of almost anyone’s price range, it was important that he know about it, particularly the three audiotapes made by Jim Thorpe. Bob is making an audiobook for his definitive biography of Jim Thorpe and having Jim Thorpe’s voice in it would be a great addition. Bob was way ahead of me – decades ahead. He got copies of the tapes long ago and is working them into his audiobook. So, his audiobook will have things the printed version doesn’t have: Jim Thorpe’s voice for one. It will surely include some of Bob’s experiences interviewing all those people over thirty years ago and will surely include snippets of some of their voices. We’ll just have to wait for it as no release date has been set as yet.

As it turns out, these items come from Joel Platt’s collection that was mentioned in this blog some weeks ago. It appears that Platt periodically offers items for sale. It’s not clear if he receives bids high enough to get him to part with anything. It’s my opinion that the Smithsonian should buy Pratt’s entire collection and use it as the nucleus of a national sports museum – unless Mayor Reed of Harrisburg gets there first.

Tags: auction, Joel Platt, memorabilia, Patricia Thorpe, Robert Wheeler

This entry was posted on May 20, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Carlisle Indian School, Football, Jim Thorpe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.