When Jim Thorpe died in a trailer home in 1953, broke and almost forgotten, there wasn't enough money to bury him. So his widow sold his corpse to the towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk in Pennyslavania. They named their newly combined town Jim Thorpe and put up a memorial to him and put themselves on the map.

In death as in life. Part-Irish, part-French part-American Indian, Thorpe won both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the 1912 Olympics but the Olympic movement confiscated his medals, as he had once taken $60 to play baseball. He returned to America, and played professional football and professional baseball to the highest levels. His Olympic medals were restored posthumously in 1983.

Jim Thorpe: had his Olympic gold medals confiscated