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4 unusual facts about Joe Gaetjens


Joe Gaetjens

However, he could not make a living from professional soccer, so he went to New York City in the late 1940s to study accounting at Columbia University on a scholarship from the Haitian government.

His great-grandfather Thomas, a native of Bremen, had been sent to Haiti by Frederick William III, the King of Prussia, as a business emissary.

He was related to Louis Déjoie (his great-grandfather Thomas married Leonie Déjoie), who lost the 1957 Haitian presidential election to François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and although the family also had connections to the new president, Gaetjens's younger brothers became associated with a group of exiles in the Dominican Republic who wanted to stage a coup.

That morning, he was arrested by the nation's notorious Tonton Macoutes secret police and is presumed to have been killed some time that month.



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