Sorrowfully Dissolving
Our Louis Sockalexis
Statue Fund
A Statement
by Ed Rice
5 December 2024
For almost 15 years after first publishing my biography of Louis Sockalexis, BASEBALL’S FIRST INDIAN, in 2003, I dreamed of seeing a statue to him built in my home state of Maine. And then I acted upon it.
Between 2017-2018, as a non-Native American, I put together a wonderful coalition, with three well-respected Native Americans from Maine: John Bear Mitchell, Penobscot storyteller, actor and long-time faculty member for the Native American Studies Program at the University of Maine at Orono; David Slagger, Ph.D. candidate and former Maliseet tribal representative to the Maine State Legislature; and the late Theodore “Wayne” Bear Mitchell, the last Penobscot Nation representative to the Maine State Legislature.
I will forever cherish my work and my friendships with these three great men.
Together, we developed a non-profit organization, we collected donations from a number of well-wishers, and then we commissioned noted Maine sculptor Glenn Hines to take that first step. This occurred when he completed the building of a two-foot model, at a cost of $10,000, from which to execute an eight-foot bronze statue on a granite base, at a total projected cost of $80,000.
We soared on the wings of a beautiful collective vision.
And, thanks to the individual vision of Wayne Mitchell, we ultimately were all agreed where the best place in Maine was for it to be placed: On the grounds of the state Capitol in Augusta. “Ed,” I remember Wayne first asking me: “Do you have any idea how many school groups come through the Capitol almost every day of the school year?” Wayne Mitchell, by the way, was the only one of us who actually lived on the Penobscot reserve. “Those school children would see that statue…and want to learn his history. It’s the perfect place…” Wayne said. And, quite quickly, we all agreed.
Alas, it was not to be.
For, now, we must flash forward to August 15, 2023, when I regretfully wrote Glenn Hines a check for the final sum contained in our Bangor Savings Bank account…and closed it out forever, ending the fund and the campaign itself.
Ultimately, we will have that two-foot model of our proposed statue, and we will donate it to a worthy institution — the most likely candidate would be the Maine State Library & Museum, where, in 2013, I donated all the papers, research clippings, photographs and artifacts from my work spanning more than 40 years to create biographies on both Louis Sockalexis and Andrew Sockalexis. Andrew was Louis’s second cousin who won fame as a great marathon runner, finishing 2nd in the Boston Marathon in 1912 and 1913, and 4th in the Olympic Marathon of 1912. Wherever we determine to donate the model we will hope to see it very prominently displayed…and perhaps a new generation will want to make the attempt — and succeed — in creating the actual statue as a lasting tribute to Louis Sockalexis.
There are a number of factors for this sad outcome, which I believe I should address (if only to inform everyone, including donors, who shared in this dream) and deserve the right to address…However, first, there are a number of individuals, including all our donors, who must be thanked.
Let’s start with those for whom we are so deeply grateful:
- Our two ex-officio board members, who are direct descendants of Andrew Sockalexis, Louis’s second cousin: Steve Padovano (through his marriage to the late Ann Fallon Padovano) and Angelo Quieto, the two sole direct descendants of the Sockalexis cousins. As of this writing, the two elderly gentlemen are retired and both living in Naples, Florida. They are grandchildren of marathon runner Andrew Sockalexis’s younger sister, Alice, who married one of Andrew’s running teammates from the greater Boston’s North Dorchester Athletic Association (NDAA). He was Doc Fallon who raced Andrew in a famous 19-mile race that featured the legendary Boston Marathon champion, Clarence DeMar, still the all-time reigning champion of the race with 7 victories.
- Then, of course, there are Glenn and Diane Hines. Glenn is the noted Maine sculptor our board unanimously settled upon, from several worthy candidates considered, and enlisted to take on the project. We were able to relax when he provided us a contract from the outset declaring our mutual agreement that he would only complete the job and be paid if we were successful in raising the complete total amount of money required to insure its completion. Glenn is celebrated for his work with historical figures, to include: Civil War General Joshua Chamberlain, legendary hero at Gettysburg, and the Underground Railroad tribute, Brewer; Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith, Capitol grounds, Augusta. Glenn checked several boxes for us: he can trace the Hines lineage coming to Virginia in 1632, with documented cases of family intermarriage with the Nottaway tribe; indeed, he had sachems (chiefs) in his family tree from 1683 to 1710. And he brought a love for the game of baseball, proudly noting he was even on the same Little League team in New Jersey with future Major League Baseball pitcher Rawly Eastwick. Glenn was willing to take a long-shot sketch depiction of Sock, imagining an action portrait of him swinging a bat. But, ultimately, we settled on his beautiful rendition of Sock, full-figure in his 1894 Poland Springs, Maine townball uniform, holding a bat, just as he appears on the covers for my hardcover 2003 biography and then my 2019 paperback reissue.
- Gilbert & Greif, the law firm which handled arranging for us to incorporate as a non-profit entity, with thanks to a personal friend, AJ Greif.
- Len Gamache, Toronto-based, fund-raiser extraordinaire, working principally with Ontario hospitals and non-profits. Once we served together on our wonderful college newspaper, the Northeastern (University, Boston) News…and so many years later Len volunteered his time and expertise to assist me in putting together a mission statement and action plan to approach a variety of types of fund-raising appeals, to both individuals and organizations. Len donated a number of hours and, like our sculptor, would only be paid for his time if we succeeded in building the statue.
- And, of course, everyone who came to us in support as Our Donors: It starts with our single largest contribution, of $10,000, which came from the Cleveland professional baseball franchise, most probably owing to my long-time relationship with team officers Bob DiBiasio and Curtis Danburg; four extraordinarily generous contributions from Ms Frances Robinson Mitchell and personal friends, Peter Millard and Emily Wesson, as well as noted Maine author Tess Gerritsen (personal friend of Wayne Mitchell) and my personal friend, high school classmate Bruce Moore; significant contributions from — Joanne Legere-Vail, Mimi & David Miller, Karen S. Marley, Timothy J. Gardner, Greg DiCenzo, Charles & Bonnie Lane, M. Pickering, Alberta Farthing Owens, Roberta Goodell, Lawrence Sturgeon, Andrea Caldwell, Arline & Richard Caron, Nancy Zugehoer, Medea Steinman…and from personal friends and relatives, Doug Comstock, Peter Rice, OJ Logue, and Larry Rothstein; as well as significant contributions from the following libraries in response to Sockalexis talks I presented — Friends of South Berwick Library, Limerick Library, Guilford Memorial Library, Lincoln Memorial Library, Cushing Library Association, North Gorham Public Library, Town of Alfred.
Why did we fail?
I. Well, we must begin…with me.
Like Icarus, I’m afraid I flew too close to the sun.
I guess I felt empowered because of several earlier matters related to Louis Sockalexis and his legacies where I had been successful, in some cases with the support of the Penobscot tribe.
Here, I believe I deserve the right to elaborate: (1) It started for me in the early 1980s, followed by more than 15 years of researching and writing and another five years of searching for a publisher that led to Tide-mark Press of Connecticut publishing my book in 2003. Here, I believe we find my most important legacy…my most important contribution, making all else mere frosting on the cake. Yes, in the words of one of my songwriting heroes, the late Warren Zevon, when I am “riding that train, called when all is said and done,” this book (especially the reissued paperback in 2019, with all its new material and updated material) should be regarded as my most significant work on Sock’s behalf in my lifetime. Hopefully, it will be the library book it was intended to be from Day One…and carried in libraries long after my name is forgotten.
We move on…
(2) Along the researching and writing way, in 1999, I began an intriguing “friend-enemy” relationship with some of the chief officers of the Cleveland professional baseball team…
These were namely Bob DiBiasio, vice president of public affairs, and Curtis Danburg, director of communications, who allowed me to correct factual errors and dismiss outright myths for their profile of Sockalexis in the team’s annual media guide…at the same time that I was speaking in the greater Cleveland area condemning the team’s use of an inappropriate nickname and insidiously racist logo/mascot, Chief Wahoo. DiBiasio and Danburg allowed me to edit any and all sentences related to Sockalexis around the ballpark, from a painting in the team’s executive offices to a small plaque dedicated to him in the garden honoring the team’s great players along the left field line in Progressive Field.
(3) When I discovered, again in 1999, the existence of something called the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame (created in 1972), ignominiously minus both the names of Louis and Andrew Sockalexis, I worked with Penobscot Nation officials to file official nomination papers for both athletes, specifically pairing with Carole W. Binette, who was both census coordinator and rights protection researcher with the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Trust Responsibilities.
When they were inducted in Year 2000, I saw to it that direct descendants, Steve Padovano (through his marriage to the late Ann Fallon Padovano) and Angelo Quieto, were invited to attend, which both did. And we all joined Penobscot Nation Elder Reuben “Butch” Phillips, the tribe’s official representative, in participating in the celebration in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Steve Padovano and Angelo Quieto accepted the beautiful plaques commemorating their inductions and donated them to the tribe: Today…those plaques hang in the Penobscot Nation Tribal Council chambers. (See, below, the photograph of the five of us, with Betty Shannon, then president of the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame)
(4) In guest columns to Maine newspapers, in the late 1990s and all through the 2000s, I’d begun challenging the Cleveland team openly… as well as Sports Illustrated Magazine, for articles on Sockalexis in 1973 and 1995 riddled with factual errors and absurd myths…and the Baseball Hall of Fame, for its failure to recognize and celebrate Sockalexis and its other pioneer Native American players, especially for the extreme racial prejudice they faced in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Working with Penobscot Nation tribal elder Butch Phillips and then tribal representative to the Maine State Legislature Wayne Mitchell, we produced three resolutions condemning this behavior by Cleveland’s MLB team, Sports Illustrated and the Baseball Hall of Fame…and these were adopted and proclaimed by the Maine State Legislature in 2009. Wayne Mitchell saw that I was acknowledged for my efforts, arranging for me to stand in the balcony above the legislative chambers, and receive a standing ovation from all the legislature’s members.
(5) Starting in 2005, I appeared at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, to speak about Sockalexis and attempt to urge its president and organization to stop ignoring Native American pioneer players…and start celebrating them.
Supported by several members of the hall of fame’s research staff, including head librarian Jim Gates and chief of research Tim Wiles, I even developed some new strategies to make my arguments. Indeed, working with Gates and Wiles, I came to understand Sock should more properly be identified as “the first-known Native American” to play rather than be identified as definitively “the first” with the presence of so many individuals who were of mixed heritages.
(6) After a couple of speaking trips to Cleveland and a few more years of writing columns condemning Cleveland’s MLB franchise, I began to grow frustrated with how little progress I personally was making in getting Cleveland team officials to appreciate how little they were actually doing to properly recognize and celebrate Louis Sockalexis’s legacies and how, quite frankly, the team’s nickname and logo/mascot were flatout insulting and completely disrespectful to actual team history.
It led to a very fateful conversation with John Bear Mitchell, where I registered this frustration. He looked at me and simply responded, “Ed, the circle starts in the middle…not on the outside.”
So, instead of tilting any further at windmills in Cleveland, in 2009, I began researching how many public schools in Maine were using Native American nicknames and mascots.
I found a very useful tool in a national website focused on all 50 states, located at American Indian Sports Teams Mascots, or aistm.org, and at that time it presented a map with all 50 states (many states had offenders numbering in the hundreds; only Hawaii was exempt, having never had any such offenders to begin with) so you could click on any state in which you were interested and find a comprehensive list of offenders in your state, plus its mascot nickname. I found a list for Maine, identifying 35 schools and their nicknames.
I made a project of this, calling each and every school on the list…and made a remarkable, wonderful discovery. All but six schools (6!) on this list…had stopped the practice, many starting in the early 2000s.
I contacted my friend, John Dieffenbacher-Krall, then executive director of the Maine Indian Tribal State Commission (MITSC) and we immediately set to the task of creating a platform where we could bring together, spokespeople from all four Maine tribes, representatives from the six schools still using such nicknames and mascots (only one ultimately attended), and representatives from a few schools who’d elected to end the practice. The symposium was held in early May of 2010 at the Bangor Public Library, and it received statewide media coverage. One by one each of the offending communities ended the practice over the next few years until the last one, Skowhegan, ended the practice in 2019. Maine became the first state in the US to end this scurrilous practice.
So…yes…it seems like I should have built up some good will, stretching over so many years of constructive activism.
Sadly, that has not turned out to be the case; indeed, with any number of Native Americans among Maine’s four tribes (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac) there are limits any well-intentioned “white” person is allowed, especially one who has published biographies on Maine’s two most famous American Indian athletes.
Far too frequently I have had to listen to or read a false social media post that I am merely “profiting from book sales” from stories I have “stolen” from Native peoples. Anyone who appreciates that library books on local-interest historical personages do not wind up on the New York Times best-seller lists appreciates the absurdity of this charge.
Then there is the issue that I have not been afraid to “speak truth to power” to the Penobscot tribe about the litany of deceptions made by the late tribal member Michael Ranco and the whole morally-reprehensible behavior of his family heirs in changing their name to “Sockalexis” and making any number of false claims and false historical declarations. More on this…in a moment.
In the final analysis I simply understood this about myself: Attempting to lead a major fund-raising campaign is just something I had neither the abilities nor the temperment to prove successful at doing.
I would have loved to have just been entrusted with the duties of a capable public relations professional, creating press releases and doing public speaking promotional talks. I’m just not the guy to be asking people and institutions for money…large sums of money.
And, in my somewhere over the rainbow world, I somehow got it into my head that just announcing our intentions to honor Sock this way was going to lead to this Hallmark Hall of Fame “feel-good” movie. I saw us at the heart of some grass roots campaign, which poured into our coffers the funds needed, from Little Leaguers donating allowance monies to grannies, listening to late Red Sox games on the West Coast, posting us a few bucks from their pensions. Yes, I know…oh dear God!
So, aside from me, why did the campaign fail?
II. The skyrocketing new price tag for our proposed statue. We did receive a number of $10 and $25 types of donations…BUT we hit a major wall when our sculptor Glenn Hines discovered the following: Because of an extraordinary rise in foundry costs, that occurred coming out of the pandemic, Glenn informed us the new price tag for our eight-foot statue was… a whopping $140,000.
III. The death of Wayne Mitchell in July of 2019. We shared oversight of the fund management and bank account. Our mailing address was in Old Town, Maine, for him to be the regular monitoring individual. For me, he was irreplaceable, both for the credibility of the fund and for his strength in standing in opposition to what became a small-but-vocal, hostile response to us in the Native world.
Later, Passamaquoddy Elder Wayne Newell died — in late December of 2021 — and, again, I felt devastated. Wayne Newell had welcomed me to his school in Indian Township in the early 2000s to speak about my book, and he’d spoken so eloquently at our symposium in Bangor on the issue of Maine public school use of Native nicknames and mascots.
This death had a different kind of very sobering effect upon me. I recognized I was losing my wonderful, older support voices among the tribes while increasingly finding myself discredited and discounted by younger members. Specifically, this owed to the emergence of one — forgive me — morally-corrupt family, the Ranco family, now somehow-magically renamed “Sockalexis.” Indeed, in 2019, when my book was reissued and I was speaking at a number of libraries on Louis Sockalexis again, the librarian at Wayne’s school in Indian Township invited me to speak, and I eagerly agreed — only to have her rescind the invitation a week or so later simply stating the members of one family, and their friends, had protested my announced appearance, and she was left with only the option to cancel my talk on the reserve in its wake.
IV. All leading to one last factor: the acrimony engendered by that false Ranco-renamed- “Sockalexis” family living on the Penobscot reserve…and its absurd acceptance for credibility by the current chief, Kirk Francis, and tribal council; indeed, Chris “Sockalexis” sits on that council.
This is all the doing of the late Michael Ranco and his determination, in 1992, to march himself down to a courthouse and rename all of his heirs “Sockalexis,” basically claiming a direct descendant relationship to the famous athletic Sockalexis cousins through an “Uncle Byron” and a supposed illegitimate offspring of his. Interestingly enough, neither Michael Ranco’s wife, Janet Ranco, nor his brother, Mark Ranco, changed their names.
If one looks through the genealogy for both Louis and Andrew Sockalexis, compiled by Penobscot Nation historian S. Glenn Starbird, Jr., you learn the very last individual authentically born with the name “Sockalexis” died in 1988. And, yes, there is one individual here named Joseph Byron Sockalexis, who died in 1946, never having married, never having produced any legitimate heirs.
And that makes all of the children, and their heirs, of the late Michael Ranco these newly-minted, self-declared “direct desecendants” of Louis and Andrew Sockalexis that current tribal officials take umbrage at when challenged. Yes, the present chief of the tribe and the present tribal council accept these claims as comfortably fitting into the traditional Native American “oral” fashion; so, for them, it’s just…talk. Acceptable talk.
Indeed: For if this “Sockalexis” claim were the least bit legally binding, the family would be entitled to the Sockalexis lineage land on the island, on the site on Oak Hill Road. This is where the house, tragically containing a number of Louis Sockalexis’s artifacts, his scrapbooks and all evidence of him, burned to the ground years and years ago. And a further truth of the matter is that only Steve Padovano and Angelo Quieto have legitimate, legal claims to this land.
Yet, now, there are Mike Ranco’s children and all their heirs traveling around Maine and elsewhere claiming this privileged “family” status. What’s the harm in this?
Well, people who air media broadcasts or who are writing on the legacies of Louis and Andrew Sockalexis want to speak to a most direct descendant, someone they believe should be the best authority on knowing the history of these two superb athletes and providing honest, quotable knowledgeable material on their legacies.
It’s been an outright disaster: Chris “Sockalexis” was the Penobscot tribal representative to speak on Andrew Sockalexis when the Boston Marathon’s organizers, the BAA, celebrated in 2015 both Native American (Tarzan Brown, winner in 1936 and 1939, and Andrew Sockalexis, 2nd place finisher in both 1912 and 1913) and Canadian indigenous participants (Tom Longboat, 1907 winner) in the great race. At a symposium to discuss these runners held on Friday of the race’s big weekend, and then at the champions breakfast on the following Sunday, Chris told the same ridiculous story, taken from his father’s very poor, error-riddled writings, about how Andrew finished 2nd in the 1912 race to the race’s legendary all-time champion, Clarence DeMar. The problem: DeMar didn’t even race that day…and Mike Ryan, later to be a Colby College track-&-field coach, was the actual winner. Of course, no one challenged him, and I certainly wasn’t going to embarrass him in such huge public settings.
And then I was helping to lead the fight, over a number of years, to discredit the claim that James Madison Toy was a Sioux Indian and deserved to replace Louis Sockalexis as the “first” Native American to play pro baseball. This had been declared in 1963 by then-Baseball Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen, solely based on heresay of a couple of relatives in letters. And, now, Chris “Sockalexis” was asked by a Cleveland media outlet how he felt about this claim: All Chris could offer was a pathetic, “Nope. Never heard of him.”
It seems all these Ranco-turned-“Sockalexis” family members wish to do is just be famous for having…the name.
In the end, our board could not work with Chris (with his assent, we named him to our board; he quickly resigned, citing a conflict of interest) and we could not comfortably work with the tribe and its council. The chief and the council weren’t interested in having us do anything but all the work to raise the money while they made all the significant decisions. For instance, they didn’t care about our rationale for putting the statue on the Capitol grounds; they wanted it on the island. In the end, the chief, Kirk Francis and the tribal council wanted to oversee our efforts and be The Final Word on everything as if we had been created and incorporated solely to do their bidding.
Concluding thoughts
The statue would have been nice…but it will, unfortunately, take a working coalition. This will require, I believe, mutually-agreeable interests between the white and Native worlds in Maine…in addition to a very substantial financial backing, the kind soaring to wherever expense foundry costs next climb. I can only hope, if and when all these factors are present, such a coalition would consider: (a) Glenn Hines’ beautiful Sockalexis depiction… and…(b) the Capitol grounds in Augusta, Maine.
And finally, there is one other possible platform I could have lent something significant, I believe, to the legacy of Louis Sockalexis that, apparently, won’t even get a time at bat: I’m left thinking it would have been nice if just one of the nearly 140 agencies, most of which are found in New York City and Hollywood, California…if just one of them would have been willing to read my screenplay, largely based on my researched biography, and seriously consider its merits.
It’s sickening to those of us aware of this that any would-be screenplay writer needs to “know someone” or have someone of obvious stature in the industry speak on one’s behalf to even get inside their doors. No place for unknowns, here…and…Yes, I know Hollywood traditionally thinks of baseball films as outright losing propositions…and, yes, a “period piece” (here, 1890s America) is a second deadly whammy. But the Louis Sockalexis story deserves to be told. I console myself with the thought that films only rarely survive public interest for the few weeks they are released and promoted. It is doubtful the film would be remembered… even by the limited number of people who actually saw it.
Ultimately I am warmed by the thought that the most important thing I ever did was tirelessly, over many, many years research and write a biography of Louis Sockalexis…and then, over far fewer years, write another one, for Andrew Sockalexis.
My significant legacy are these books, pure and simple. They contain everything I ever learned…and the questions that will never be answered. They are in libraries. In some instances they are in permanent collections in libraries. That’s the only legacy…that matters.
— Ed Rice
