Thanksgiving American style: No, President Trump didn’t reverse turkey pardons

I have long admired the work Snopes.com does. In fact, I am reasonably sure if I was to fact-check much of what I read in Facebook posts that come across my newsfeed, about half would turn out to be fake news. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson,  a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Snopes takes it name from the Snopes trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion – written by American novelist William Faulkner between 1940 and 1959 regarding the Snopes family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

You can imagine my relief then when Snopes.com labeled as false a claim by Real News Right Now reported earlier this year that Republican President Donald Trump had reversed multiple Thanksgiving turkey pardons issued by his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, and ordered the execution of five surviving pardoned turkeys. Admittedly, the Real News Right Now story, reported by R. Hobbus J.D., is a delightful read nonetheless and you can find it in its entirety here at http://archive.is/DJ2L1 or catch the drift with the snippet below:

“In another sweeping move aimed at undoing the perceived damage done by the Obama administration, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 24, 2017 directing the Department of Justice to revoke all 16 Thanksgiving Day turkey pardons issued by the former president during his eight years in office.

“After reviewing the decisions made by the previous administration, President Trump has determined that a number of turkey pardons issued by Barack Obama were done so in a manner that was both deceitful and hazardous to the American people,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced on Tuesday. “This morning, the president once again used his executive powers to see to it that justice is served and that the surviving creatures will be destroyed.”

Like all content published by Real News Right Now, the “story was satirical in nature, although the site does not include a disclaimer identifying its material fake news,” Snopes notes at https://www.snopes.com/trump-turkey-pardons-reversed/

However, the site’s “About” page includes several obvious indicators, such as its humorous claims that author R. Hobbus J.D. has received non-existent awards such as the “Oscar Mayer Award for Journalistic Excellence” and the “Stephen Glass Distinction in Journalistic Integrity.” If you know who Stephen Glass is you get it. If you don’t, well maybe not.

In 2014, then president Obama on the day before Thanksgiving pardoned “Cheese,” a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, 2014, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” during an annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief  at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”

Thanksgiving in the United States this year falls later this week on Thursday, Nov. 23. While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well, even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such is the case this year. And such was the case also in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

No word yet who President Trump will pardon in his Wednesday reprieve, but two turkeys arrived Nov. 19 in Washington ahead of the 70th annual turkey pardon. According to the White House, the two turkeys were raised in Western Minnesota, and after the pardon will join turkeys pardoned by Obama at Virginia Tech’s “Gobblers Rest” exhibit. While in Washington, they stay in style at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, as is tradition.

While it’s being billed as the 70th annual turkey pardon, The White House Historical Association, a private, non-profit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the history of “America’s Executive Mansion,” as it calls the White House, explains there’s more on the plate when it comes to turkey pardons than first meets the fork, err … eye:

“The official ‘pardoning’ of White House turkeys is an interesting White House tradition that has captured the imagination of the public in recent years. It is often stated that President Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony.

“Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

“By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a President was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

“With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”

“Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday.. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

“While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm. The 1978 turkey, presented to Rosalynn Carter, met a similar fate when it was sent to Evans Farm Inn to live in a mini zoo.

“After 1981 the practice of sending the presentation turkey to a farm became the norm under Ronald Reagan. The turkey ceremony also became a source of satire and humor for reporters. The formalities of pardoning a turkey gelled by 1989, when George H. W. Bush, with animal rights activists picketing nearby, quipped, “But let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy — he’s granted a Presidential pardon as of right now — and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here.”

The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.

The 2014 duo was “Mac” and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.

“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said at the time, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”

He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”

Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July in 2104, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.”  Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”

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Through the eyes of a hermit: Maine’s North Pond Hermit and the Hermit of Gully Lake in Nova Scotia

Hermits fascinate us. Or maybe it’s just the idea of hermiting that fascinates us, especially after a bad day in civilization. In any event, hermits were back in the news recently with the publication of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, which the Guardian had a March 15 online excerpt from at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/15/stranger-in-the-woods-christopher-knight-hermit-maine

Finkel is an immensely talented writer, and in an odd way perhaps the perfect choice really to write Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit’s story. Finkel’s also been an outsider and a rule-breaker, which might be considered more praiseworthy than condemnatory, if he wasn’t also something of a fabulist. I’m not sure much other than Finkel’s more polished writing skills and a matter of degree of culpability separate him from such other well-known earlier fabulists as Stephen Glass, who was a staff writer at the New Republic in the late 1990s, or contemporaneously with Finkel’s own work, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Perhaps we just need to have faith that time has redeemed Finkel.

In 2002, Finkel was a New York Times Magazine contract writer who wrote the infamous feature story, “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” which chronicled the life and work conditions of a young labourer on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Although Youssouf Malé is real person who indeed exists, Finkel built his feature story for the New York Times Magazine around a composite character, combining the stories of several boys, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified. The real Youssouf Malé spent less than a month at the plantation, not a year as Finkel reported. Youssouf’s return to his home and his parents, of which Finkel wrote, was told to him by another boy. A scene from the article in which a psychologist interviews Youssouf Malé never took place. Finkel wrote about what he had done three years later in 2005 in True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, and has pretty much gone onto successfully resume his freelance journalism career over the last decade.

As for the subject of his new book, Maine’s Christopher Knight, one expects that someone who voluntarily disappears from the world and into a hermit’s life from 1986 to 2013, might have some deep philosophical insights with all that away-time from the distractions of the Modern World. You might expect that, but you’d be wrong. It’s not Knight’s story, at least as Finkel tells it here. Still, it is an absorbing story, a compelling read, but you get no sense of Knight being analogous to fellow New Englander Henry David Thoreau and  Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he goes to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”

Assuming Finkel is a reformed fabulist and not a fabulist of 18th-century English history, aside from Knight’s personal story, I can’t deny being fascinated by the background to the piece, where I learn: “It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.”

Who knew? Not me.

The closest I’ve ever been to a real-life hermit was on the  day of the two H’s in the late fall of 1999. I was assigned by the then Truro bureau chief of the Chronicle Herald to spend a day deep in the woods looking for a hermit near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains of Nova Scotia.

Or in the alternative, he said, I could spend the day up around Londonderry and the Cobequid Toll Plaza on Highway 104, climbing down highway embankments counting lost hubcaps, as he speculated there was an inordinately large number of same to be found. Either way it was going to be an outdoor day. Hermits or hubcaps: I opted to look for the hermit, Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, who didn’t like killing people, he said later, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police, and never came out of the woods.

Well, at least that’s what folks around there said to strangers. When I stopped in at Earltown General Store on Highway 311 up in the Cobequid Mountains between Earltown and Tatamagouche on the North Shore to enquire about MacDonald, I was met with more or less polite silence, although one person allowed it might just be possible the Hermit of Gully Lake just might be known to Canada Post and the occasional piece of mail might arrive for him to be held for general delivery.  And that was the extent of the helpfulness of folks who were protective neighbours solicitous of Mr. MacDonald’s long-held privacy. MacDonald may have been a hermit, but he wasn’t without friends, lest anyone think the two – being a hermit and having friends – were incompatible. Not for all hermits apparently. Reclusiveness is a relative thing.

So  it was then that I spent an unseasonably warm late November day tramping around the sun-dappled woods and sun-reflecting and still unfrozen ponds, squinting and listening, trying to somehow locate the Hermit of Gully Lake. It was a very pleasant gig as daily newspaper assignments went, but I never did find MacDonald. But he may have found me. There were several discretely unsettling moments that afternoon when I had the certain feeling I was being watched from the dense bush and forest by someone. I could feel their eyes on me, although I never saw them. The watcher had become the watched. Little did I know that day near the close of the 20th century and dawn of the new millennium that within a couple of years of my futile late 1999 hunt for MacDonald, the Hermit of Gully Lake would become something of a Nova Scotia folk hero and minor celebrity of sorts during his twilight years.  There were indeed people who knew about his dilapidated, two-metre-by-two-metre shack, where he would sometimes compose music on a homemade guitar.

The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services financed construction of a small cabin for him. He tried it but found it too close to civilization. A forest fire wound up destroying his preferred dilapidated cabin, so he went back to the winterized cabin.

MacDonald, 87, disappeared for good when well-meaning and probably conflicted visitors went to get medical help, against his wishes, after he became ill in late November 2003, almost four years to the day after my one-day quest to find him.

MacDonald had been born in the Bay State, more specifically in Somerville in the Commonwealth of  Massachusetts, on Aug. 13, 1916. Many years later, I, too, would live in Somerville, more specifically West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, between August 1980 and August 1981. It is also known as Powder House Square. Circle, square. Where else but Massachusetts would the two be synonymous? I was 23 and 24 years old at the time. My daily walks often included strolls over the Somerville-Medford-Arlington lines,  passing Tufts University on my walk. Or a bicycle ride over the Cambridge line on my 10-speed CCM Targa up or down nearby Massachusetts Avenue, invariably known locally as “Mass Ave,” the second-most famous Massachusetts Avenue in the United States, trumped only by the street of the same name in Washington, D.C.

But this was our Massachusetts Avenue right in Massachusetts. Harvard Yard in Cambridge in one direction to the southeast and Minute Man National Historical Park at Concord in the other to the northwest. In November 2007, Boston Magazine aptly enough described Mass Ave this way: “Its 16 miles of blacktop run from gritty industrial zones to verdant suburbia, passing gentrified brownstones, college campuses and bustling commercial strips.”

Which makes wonder what Somerville was like in MacDonald’s 1920’s youth? I never got to ask. Willard Kitchener MacDonald’s body was found on June 27, 2004 by more than 100 volunteers searching the Gully Lake area for his remains. Since then, the Truro-based Cobequid Eco-Trails Society has officially named a trail the Willard Kitchener MacDonald Trail. One wonders what MacDonald might think of that.

Pictou County, Nova Scotia songwriter Dave Gunning wrote a song about Willard Kitchener MacDonald in 2004 called “Let Him Be.”

The old cabin’s gone, it burned to the ground
They go looking still to find him but he doesn’t make a sound
60 years of walking down, this long road alone
He’s earned the right to stay and choose how to go

Joan Baxter, a well-respected Nova Scotia author, journalist, development researcher/writer and anthropologist, who now divides her time between Canada and Africa, wrote a biography, The Hermit of Gully Lake: The Life and Times of Willard Kitchener MacDonald, published in 2005. The book was short-listed for the Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 2006 Atlantic Book Awards.

A year later, in September 2007, Toronto-based filmmaker Amy Goldberg’s Willard: The Hermit of Gully Lake, a documentary on the by then famous recluse, debuted at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.

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