Sunday, September 13, 2026

Question: A Pennsylvania town changed its name in 1954 to honor an Olympic legend who never set foot there, in exchange for his remains. What’s the town?

Answer: Jim Thorpe, in Carbon County. Struggling after the coal industry collapsed, the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk merged and took Thorpe’s name after his widow, angry that Oklahoma wouldn’t build him a memorial, offered his body to any town that would. The 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon champion rests in a red marble mausoleum there to this day, and his sons spent years in court trying, unsuccessfully, to bring him home.