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Nostalgia & History > Thanksgiving Day memories Abilene, KSDate: 11/26/15 09:12 Thanksgiving Day memories Abilene, KS Author: santafe199 I have a great many fond memories of Thanksgiving Day growing up in the 1960s. The dinner extravaganza was always held at my Grandma Needham’s house in Abilene, KS. It was absolute ground zero for this special day. With aunts, uncles & cousins the whole stampeding herd would be in attendance, usually close to 20 head. While much of the side food was prepared ahead of time, the main course would have to be cooked that day. There was always a certain amount of hysteria during this culinary episode. While Grandma would sit in the front room visiting with ‘the grownups’ my mother & her 2 sisters would be jostling around the tiny kitchen. Since two of these three sisters were on the rather ‘portly’ side, they would be constantly bumping & grinding for position. There would be occasional territorial snarls of superiority around the stove & oven, much to the delight of a dozen+ adolescent and giggling cousins who were always underfoot. When the snarls & resultant giggles got too voluminous we would all be shown the front door where we would play tag football in kindly Ruth Mason’s yard on the corner next door*. Or we would produce a basketball and choose up teams to play on the St Andrews Catholic Church cement parking lot/playground directly across the street north in front of Grandma’s house.
I always preferred to play basketball because right across the next street was the Santa Fe depot and possible train action. During the 1968 version of this family holiday I had gotten hold of an old folding camera that Dad had running around the attic. He showed me how to use it and in a great financial departure from the norm, put some honest-to-goodness color film in it. I don’t remember the film size (620?). But I had this camera in my possession all day, thinking I was now some hot-shot photographer. During the family basketball scrimmage I pointed the camera toward the Santa Fe depot. A crew was passing by in a GP-7, just one of about a hunnert-eleventy-zillion GPs & F-units we always saw. I don’t know what prompted me shoot, but technically this color print picture is the very first railfan photo I ever took. It would take 6 years and M.O.W. service employment with the Santa Fe before I would take another “train picture”, also a color print shot. When the great feast was ready, the grownups all got prime seats at Grandma’s dinner table. Us kids would fill every other make-shift seat we could scare up. It was mostly quiet as the whole herd would stampede through the delightful process of Thanksgiving engorgement. Afterwards the bulldozers would come and shove my uncles to their positions directly in front of Grandma’s tiny black & white TV set (complete with a rabbit-eared antenna), where they would all sleep through at least 2 football games. Oh yeah… the bill of fare: Sometimes it was turkey with all the trimmin’s, but it was often baked ham. Home style mashed potatoes with thick, freshly made gravy just teeming with calories & cholesterol. Creamed corn & home grown green beans, right out of Grandma’s garden out back. Homemade stuffing (turkey or not) was always available, as was store-bought (egad!) sweet 'taters & cranberry sauce. Desert choices were the pies already cooked up: Pumpkin (always pumpkin), with apple & cherry also appearing on the scene. Sometimes Grandma would make her world-famous (our world, anyway) fried peach pie. This was a combination peach pie/cobbler that was pan-fried right on the stove, burrito style. My grandma learned to cook from her mother who grew up in rural 1870s Kentucky. Prevailing wisdom back then was you had to cook everything to a nearly-burnt status in order to insure that all disease-bearing contagions would be eliminated. We all knew this, so it didn’t matter that Grandma would occasionally burn her wonderful fried peach pie. It was still fantastic! And to top all of the various pie selections would be the omnipresent, brain-freeze producing, home made ice cream that ALL of us male cousins were made to take turns hand-cranking. The threat was: “you either take your turn cranking, or you don’t’ git none!” There were times I thought my arm would fall off… *Any of you familiar with Abilene, KS: Ruth Mason’s house & yard are now the site of the Greyhound Hall of Fame building on Buckeye Avenue. My Grandparent’s house stood on the lot right behind it to the west. Sweet memories, four & five decades old reside there today. 1. AT&SF 2820 + hapless crew performing some urgent chore on Thanksgiving Day (21st), 1968 in Abilene, KS. May you & yours have a great Thanksgiving! Lance Garrels santafe199 Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/22 03:06 by santafe199. Date: 11/26/15 12:10 Re: Thanksgiving Day memories Abilene, KS Author: 3rdswitch Looks like they might have been "dashing", a term we used when doing only what HAD to be done then heading home early, did that many times in my railroad career, and worked many Thanksgivings as well. Happy Thanksgiving.
JB Date: 11/26/15 12:31 Re: Thanksgiving Day memories Abilene, KS Author: AndyBrown Great story Lance, and I like JB's surmise also.
Andy Date: 11/26/15 13:34 Re: Thanksgiving Day memories Abilene, KS Author: mp51w I had one of those fold up cameras too! I wonder what happened to it?
It was bridge between instamatic and a hand me down rangfinder 35mm from my Grandpa. |