A Turkey story for Thanksgiving - my 3rd cousin once removed (Maryilyn Badger and Donald Sorensen)

 Dad was a Seminary teacher. One year one of his students said that his dad had a turkey for us. All Dad had to do was pick it up at their farm. So, Dad takes our only car at time a rambler station wagon over to pick up the turkey. It took him a long time to pick this turkey up because when he got there, he found that it was a live turkey, Dad didn’t want to hurt the farmers’ feelings so he loaded it up in the rambler and the turkey of course was half flying wildly and running all over in the car. Well, Dad didn’t look to good when he got out of the car in fact he looked like he had been in a fight, which he had been, with the live turkey pecking and flying at him as he drove home.

I won’t tell you what om said when she saw the live turkey, but it wasn’t complimentary to Dad, the farmer, or the turkey! Then Mom’s farm girl kicked in and she said, “Well, if we are having turkey tomorrow, we better get busy.” She asked Dad which he preferred to dispatch and clean the turkey or prepare it for cooking. Now we kids did not know what this entailed but we knew it didn’t bode well for the turkey. We thought that maybe we could make it a pet but Mom and Dad both said NO!

Dad decided he would dispatch and clean the turkey. So, Mom told all of us to use the bath room and stay in the living room until Dad had cleaned the bird, we figured that we had to use the bathroom before so we wouldn’t disturb the turkey at bath time! Then we saw Mom heating up a lot of hot water on the stove and take out the bread pan and pliers. The hot water made sense for the turkey’s bath, but why had Mom suddenly decided to make bread and with pliers (I had never seen her need them for bread before).

So off we went to the living room and right away we saw Dad running around the outside of the house about three or more times, each time the turkey was ahead of him (we didn’t know that the turkey was running for its life). Well after a while, Dad came into the house and Mom took the bread pan and the pliers out the back door and Dad herded us back into the living room. We didn’t know how, but the turkey lost all its feathers and looked just like the turkey’s you find in the butcher shop.

 Now as an adult I understand what it must have taken for both mom and dad to get that accomplished and why they didn’t seem to eat any turkey that year. We are sure glad that both Mom and Dad knew what to do and also glad that they made sure at our young age we didn’t have to see all realities of where and how you get the turkey on the table at Thanksgiving.