by Dave Crehore
“Positive,” Dad replied. “The clincher was when the farmer said
he’d had a lot of dogs, but this was the first one that herded chickens.”
Mom turned on the lights, walked around behind Dad’s chair,
and rubbed his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Dad said. “We all loved that little guy. But you asked me once why he kept running away. Well, maybe he was looking for a farm with two little girls to play with. Anyway, he’s been there two years, so I guess his wandering days are over.”
Mom smiled. “You made the right choice, Dave,” she said. “You
always make the right choice. That’s why you married me!”
“You bet!” Dad exclaimed. He rolled up the screen and I put
away the slides. But I’ve kept the memories handy.
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T he first Thanksgiving I can remember was in 1949, a year before Mom, Dad, and I moved to Wisconsin. It was the Thanksgiving
when we had rabbit and french fries.
The entire Lorain, Ohio, branch of the Crehore family was there.
Grandpa and Grandma, Mom and Dad, three aunts, three uncles,
three cousins, and I gathered at Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betty’s
apartment that day, a grand total of twelve adults and four small boys. Aunt Betty, a home economics teacher, had volunteered to
prepare the entire dinner, and its centerpiece was to be a twenty-pound turkey.
The day started early with a family Thanksgiving tradition—a
mass rabbit hunt on the original Crehore homestead farm, led by
Grandpa, with Dad and my four uncles serving as foot soldiers.
They were supposed to hit the briar patches at 6:00 a.m. and be
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home by 11:00. Then they would clean up and arrive at Charlie and Betty’s around noon, with wives and kids in tow.
The rabbit hunt was a success. The farm was a couple of miles
away on the outskirts of town, and it was hunted only by relatives.
That day, the six men collected a total of twenty cottontails, and they even got home on time.
But then the best-laid plans began to fall apart. First of all, it was harder than Betty had figured to fit twelve adults and four small boys around the table. Uncle George lived just around the corner, so he went home to fetch a card table and some extra chairs. But once that problem was solved, a bigger one surfaced. The bouquet of roasting turkey, which should have filled the apartment by then, was conspic-uously absent. We sat shoulder to shoulder in the living room, and sniffed, and wondered.
Before long the truth came out. Betty opened the kitchen door
about an inch and summoned her husband. “Charlie,” she called, in a high-pitched and slightly quavering voice, “Charlie, would you come here, please?”
Charlie forced a nervous laugh and went into the kitchen, closing the door behind him. We could hear whispers. After about a minute he reappeared, his face as red as his hair. He smiled sheepishly.
“There will be a slight delay,” he said. “The little woman forgot to light the oven.”
It was at this point that I learned something about forbearance, and leadership, too. Grandpa and Grandma were the senior people
present, so everyone turned to them for guidance. Grandma put a
hand over her mouth, but her thin little shoulders were shaking and it was clear she was laughing. So was Grandpa. Finally he assumed a straight face and turned to Grandma.
“Such is life,” he said. “A twenty-pound turkey will take about
five hours, won’t it, Anna?”
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“At least,” Grandma said. She pointed at me and my cousins.
“The little fellas can’t wait that long to eat,” she said. “Why don’t we fry up the rabbits—you said you had twenty of them, didn’t you—
and we could make potatoes, and there’s a big colander of string beans at home, we could cook them up with some bacon. Run home
and get the beans and the big cast-iron skillets and my boning knife and a pound of bacon and the oil.”
“No sooner said than done,” Grandpa said. “Boys, go get your
rabbits.”
We all lived within a mile or two of each other, so within a half hour the kitchen table was covered with cottontails, beans, bacon, and potatoes. Grandma put her arm around Aunt Betty to comfort
her.
“Don’t worry, Betty,” Grandma said. “Everyone makes mistakes.
Remember that root beer I made for the holidays last year, and every single bottle of it exploded on Christmas Eve? Well, that just goes to show you.
“Now,” she continued, “let’s make dinner. Dave and Charlie, fry
up the bacon and boil the beans. Betty, slice the potatoes. George and Jack, take the rabbits outside and dress them. I’ll fry them.
Charlotte, could you make some biscuits?” And within about an
hour and a half we were sitting down to rabbit and potatoes fried crisp in coconut oil, crunchy green beans with bacon, and biscuits full of melted butter.
Before I could stick a fork into my first piece of rabbit, Grandpa cleared his throat and stood up.
“It’s customary to say a word of thanks before Thanksgiving
dinner,” he said, “and I am particularly thankful for two people—my wife and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, may God rest his soul. Amen.”
“Amen!” we all repeated, and started to eat. The turkey, mean-
while, sat in the Frigidaire. Betty roasted it the next day, and the 185
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legend is that Charlie ate turkey sandwiches for seventeen consecutive days.
After we moved to Manitowoc in 1950, our Ohio relatives were
five hundred miles away. That was a two-day drive in those days, so for our first six Manitowoc years, Thanksgiving dinner was shared only by our nuclear family and its two orbiting beagles. The beagles panted impatiently under the table while we ate, but after we finished our pie, we filled their bowls with dark meat and turkey skin.
They ate ravenously and competitively, and it was a joy to watch them. Then they would lie distended on the back porch and be sick.
But they didn’t mind, because that gave them a chance to pick
through everything, find the best stuff, and eat it again.
When I got into my teens, the new tradition was interrupted. In
1955, Mom and Dad joined a group of four couples, including a doctor and a dentist and their wives, who dined together about once a month. In the fall of 1957, when I turned fifteen, it was decided that the group would have Thanksgiving dinner at the home of the dentist. His wife would bake the pies and act as hostess, with the other couples bringing the turkey, potatoes, cranberries, and side dishes.
This division of labor was good in theory. The doctor’s wife was a marvelous cook and so was Mom. But it failed in practice, because to protect our teeth the dentist’s wife had baked green apple pies without sugar. They were inedible; even the women who daintily
asked for “just a sliver” could not finish their slivers, and the dentist’s wife was miffed.
But not as miffed as the doctor, who was nothing like the emaci-
ated doctors so common today, doctors who run a marathon before
breakfast. No, this doctor was an old-fashioned family M.D. who
made house calls, and would give you a shot of penicillin right
through the seat of your pajamas if you were shy about disrobing.
This doctor lived for pie and had been saving room for it. He was 186
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known for his perfect frankness and inability to whisper, and when the dentist’s wife overheard him using a medical term to describe the pie—“quinine,” I believe it was—the atmosphere at the dentist’s
got distinctly chilly.
Besides the sour pie, there was another drawback to Thanksgiv-
ing at the dentist’s: the nearness of Mary, who lived just around the corner and down the block.
Mary was the person for whom the term “nice girl” had been
coined, and Mom was interested in getting us together. For weeks she prodded me into asking Mary out on a date Thanksgiving night. “It will be so convenient for both of you,” Mom said, as though that mattered. Finally, one day after school I cornered Mary and summoned the nerve to ask her, and she accepted. It was to be my first unsupervised, unchaperoned date with an actual girl, and in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, I should have felt a pleasant anticipation.
But what I actually felt was dread and anxiety. For a first date, I would have preferred an ordinary girl who wouldn’t expect much.
Instead I had Mary, who was superior to me in every respect. At fifteen, she was good-looking, talented, a straight-A student, and a gifted athlete with an IQ of about 200. In addition to “nice girl,”
other terms that might have been invented to describe Mary were
Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. I had managed to get myself
involved with another princess.
But a deal was a deal, and when Thanksgiving dinner was finally
over, I walked leaden-footed to Mary’s. She was ready and waiting, all smiles and wearing a fetching white duffle coat with a fur-trimmed hood. Standing on the porch with her before we started our long march downtown, I felt relieved about one thing: if nothing else, I stood about a half-inch taller than she, even with the fur trim.
The plan was to walk the three miles to the Mikadow Theater,
take in a movie, go somewhere for a Coke afterward, and walk the 187
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three miles home. It was a few degrees above freezing, but as we walked along I found myself yawning and stumbling over my feet as we shuffled through the fallen leaves. I tried to suppress the yawns so Mary wouldn’t think I was bored, but post-turkey lassitude had me in its thrall. And once I had flopped into a comfortable seat in the dark, overheated Mikadow, I was down for the count. Soon I was
snoring, belching turkey and onion fumes, and, I strongly suspect, breaking wind as well—I can’t say for sure, because I was asleep.
During the first reel, Mary poked me from time to time in an
attempt to quiet me down, but after a while I guess she just gave up and waited for it to be over. We never saw much of each other after that, mostly because I was too embarrassed to face her. I distinctly remember a Friday night later that winter when I saw Mary coming my way down the sidewalk on Eighth Street. I crossed over in mid-block and pretended to look at a wristwatch in Rummele’s window
until she was out of sight.
From time to time I have wondered what might have happened if
I had kept on seeing Mary—assuming, of course, that Mary would
have kept on seeing me. Probably nothing; once you have exposed a nice girl to the full aftereffects of a heavy Thanksgiving dinner, a line has been crossed and things are never the same.
After 1960, I was in college, the navy, and then college again. My only Thanksgiving away from home was spent aboard a ship rolling her guts out in the Pacific. The motion of the ship slopped the yams into the cranberry sauce and sent the peas rolling into the ice cream, creating a mottled stew that we ate only because we were homesick.
Except for those who were seasick—they ate nothing at all.
Thanksgiving started being fun again after I got married. My
family ate sage and onion dressing, rutabagas, and mincemeat,
apple, and pecan pie. My wife’s relatives, on the other hand, were Germans and Norwegians who preferred bland and mild-mannered
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foods. My first Thanksgiving dinner at the in-laws was a shock; I found I had married into a family that stuffed the turkey with apples and raisins, ate dumplings instead of mashed potatoes, and regarded mincemeat pie with grave suspicion. There were compensations,
though: Auntie Ruth’s dumplings turned out to be chubby little
poems, and my mother-in-law’s apple pies weren’t better than Mom’s but in the ballpark.
The best part was that my wife’s relatives ate Thanksgiving din-
ner at suppertime, while my parents, who had given up the society of the dentist, always served holiday meals at 1:00. So not only had I gained a wife, I had also gained a second Thanksgiving dinner.
Well, that was then. Today, the greatest generation of the Crehores and Lesters and Heckers and Sorensons is no longer with us, and
those of us who were young in the 1950s have combined the family traditions. We have sage dressing and potato dumplings, mincemeat and apple pies, and pretty much eat all day and well into the evening.
Because, let’s be honest. The best part of the whole Thanksgiving ritual is to slip into the kitchen about midnight, slice off some cold turkey, make a sandwich—heavy on the mayonnaise—warm up a
dumpling and some dressing and gravy in the microwave, take a
dollop of cranberry sauce out of the fridge, pour a glass of milk, and eat, preferably in the company of something good to read. If you still have room, a piece of apple pie with a little maple syrup on it will go down nicely.
And then you give thanks for the bounty, and for the people you
love, who are sleeping quietly down the hall.
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Envoi
I drove down to Manitowoc Rapids on a Saturday afternoon last January to have a look at the old schoolhouse. There have been a few changes.
For one thing, the Rapids State Graded building is now an
Amvet post. Schools as small as Rapids used to be no longer exist.
They have been replaced by big, consolidated places a long bus ride from home.
The mellow brick walls of Rapids school are still holding up, but the big windows that flooded our classrooms with sunlight have
been removed and their frames filled in to save heat. A third-grader in Mrs. Eberhardt’s room would find it hard to read The Poky Little Puppy by the light of the few panes of glass that remain. Still, I’m glad someone is using the place and taking care of it.
The sledding hill is paved now, and not as steep as it used to be.
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There was a foot of snow on the ground in Rapids the day I was
there, but there were no sled tracks, no snow forts or even footprints.
No kids were visible anywhere. They were indoors watching television or fiddling with computers, I suppose. Their loss.
Geezers who return to the scenes of their youth always marvel at how small things look to them. But everything around Rapids State Graded looked about the same size to me, except for the lot across the street where we played the softball World Series. If anything, it seemed bigger. It has grown up in trees, some of them two feet in diameter, and the sewie ditch has been filled in, although there are still traces of it if you know where to look. The lot is now officially a park, and a sign states the rules: “Mini Park No Dogs No Baseball.”
No dogs? In the early ’50s, the neighborhood dogs played with us at recess and set their internal clocks by our lunch hour. In good weather we took our lunchboxes outside and the dogs would gather around and wait for scraps while we drank milk from our thermoses and ate our bologna sandwiches. Now there are no kids and no
lunchboxes and nothing to attract a dog in the first place.
Before I left I tried to estimate the length of Doyle’s home run. It was 250 feet, I figured, or maybe more—a prodigious distance for a fourteen-year-old boy to hit a wet softball.
I was hungry for some penny candy, but Felix’s store was gone.
The building was still there, though. It’s a doctor’s office now.
The taverns on the corner have been replaced,
one by a bank and
the other by a convenience store, one of those magical places that can turn a twenty-dollar bill into three gallons of gas and a pack of cigarettes. I pulled in and filled the tank in my truck. Watching the numbers flicker on the pump, I calculated it would take almost
$7.50 worth of gas to make the round-trip from Green Bay to Manitowoc Rapids. In 1950, seven bucks would have bought twenty-six
gallons, enough to drive to Ohio for Christmas.
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I was still hungry for something sweet, so I went into the store and looked around. There were shelves and shelves of candy, forty or fifty varieties, but all of it the same old stuff, sealed in people-proof wrappers that have to be hacked open with a mumblety-peg knife. I saw no candy in big glass jars and, God knows, nothing for a penny.
As I drove home I wondered how to wrap up the ’50s.
What a sweet and sour decade it had been: The Korean War and
McCarthy. Nixon and Checkers and Pat’s “respectable Republican
cloth coat.” A missile gap and “duck and cover” and fallout shelters.
We had cars with tail fins and Firedome engines and a powerful
thirst for gasoline. We had Rosa Parks in the back of the bus and Emmett Till on the bottom of the Tallahatchie River.
But we also had the Milwaukee Braves and Henry Aaron, Elvis
Presley and Miles Davis, James Dean and Ozzie Nelson, Jack Ker-
ouac and Dave Brubeck, and Billy Graham. We had factories that
made televisions and coffee pots and shoes. It seemed like everybody had a good job, and a house with a 4 percent mortgage, and a union card that meant something. We never locked our doors. We had
won the war and we believed in ourselves. We had cold winters and cool summers and good fishing. And every August, the county fair.
Maybe it was the best of times.
Enso?
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Glossary
A&P. Short for the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, A&P was founded in 1859 and was once America’s largest food retailer, with 14,000 stores nationwide in 1930. Today, it has shrunk to 456 stores concentrated on the eastern seaboard. In Manitowoc the A&P was on Washington Street in the vicinity of the Mikadow Theater and a tavern called, quite innocently in those days, the Gay Bar.